Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge Hands-on

There’s no denying that Samsung considers India as one of the most important market, which is why the Korean company held the Galaxy S6 World Tour (World Tours are basically announcement events for Galaxy devices) in India just few weeks after Samsung announced the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge in Barcelona. Samsung claims the devices are a result of “listening to the customers and learning from success and missteps” and playing briefly with them, I too feel, Samsung has made really good devices.

Samsung finally addressed the biggest complaint of using plastic for their flagship phone with metal and glass. The sides are metal (and admittedly, iPhone-ish) but the back is adorned with the glass and in this case, it is the Gorilla Glass 4. The 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display is also protected by Gorilla Glass 4 that gives some assurance against scratches and drops.

The edge display on the Galaxy S6 edge works to show notifications, clock and other important events like missed calls, messages.

However, few other things that I’m particularly excited about are under the hood, namely the processor, RAM and flash storage. The Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge are world’s first mobile devices to feature a 14nm processor. They possess Exynos 7420 64-bit processor that has two sets of quad-core processors, one running at 2.1GHz and the other at 1.5GHz. The RAM in these phones is 3GB LPDDR4, which again, is state-of-the-art for mobile devices.

The processor and RAM is complemented with UFS 2.0 that makes data transfer up to five times faster compared to a phone with a regular eMMC 5.0 solution.

Though I was unable to run synthetic benchmarks on the device, the phones felt considerably faster even with Samsung’s last year’s Galaxy Note flagship.

Another major improvement is on the camera front, which has a f1.9 lens that is able to take pictures at up to 16 megapixel resolution. The lens ensures better low-light pictures and comes with different camera modes, including some downloadable ones. The camera boots up really fast and can be accessed with two clicks on the home button.

Both phones run Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box and comes with software enhancements like Download Booster, Ultra Power Saving Mode, Smart Manager, S Finder, S Voice and few pre-loaded apps from Microsoft and Facebook.

Both devices also feature a fingerprint sensor, which now works just by placing the finger, heart rate sensor, 2550mAh and 2600mAh battery (Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge respectively).

To wrap things up, both devices look equally powerful but if we go with aesthetics, Galaxy S6 edge clearly has the edge.

The phones will go on sale on April 10 starting from Rs. 49,900.