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8/10
Wired
You can't beat these displays, or these cameras. Samsung's learned how to make beautiful hardware. Big phones are best phones.
Tired
Bloatware is still hanging around. These things are fingerprint magnets. Beauty don't come cheap.
Phablets are dead. Long live huge phones.
There are a few stragglers left, clutching their iPhone 5s and claiming that life was better when everyone was squinting at tiny screens. But most people have come around. Good thing, too: Big phones are great. People who have big phones use them more, more efficiently, for more things. Calling phones like the new Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+ “phablets” pretends that they’re a mix of phones and tablets, which they’re not. They’re just phones. Big, powerful, excellent phones.
In most ways, they’re the same phone. Same processor, same camera, same software, same bad ideas about how many built-in apps people want. In fact, they’re overwhelmingly similar to the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge as well. It’s confusing, but luckily it doesn’t really matter, because you can’t pick wrong.
There is one that stands out above the rest, though. For my money, it’s the best Android phone on the market right now: the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+. (Terrible name, excellent phone.) It was clearly created in response to the surprising demand for the S6 Edge, which came out in March. The Edge+ is that phone, only bigger. It has a 5.7-inch, 1440×2560 display that is straight-up the best display you’ll find on a phone anywhere. It’s crystal clear, super accurate, and even relatively viewable in direct sunlight.
The Edge gets its name from the doubly-curved display, which drips off to the left and right as you hold the phone vertically. This does a few things, in addition to being just generally impressive. It makes the screen look bigger than it actually is, like one of those billboards that bursts out of its frame. It hides the bezel, giving the display a never-ending kind of effect. It also distorts things on the edges a bit, which is frustrating every once in a while as you watch a movie. But I can’t say it ever really bothered me.
Having the screen curve toward the back also let Samsung make the phone thinner. The Note 5 is hardly unwieldy, at 7.6mm thick and a hair over six ounces, but the Edge+, at 6.9mm and 5.3 ounces, feels much lighter. I can’t think of another phone this big, or even close, that’s felt so comfortable to use. Its glass and metal body still feels sturdy, and it’s beautifully simple.
Josh Valcarcel/WIREDThere is a tinge of form over function, admittedly. The camera bumps out of the back in such a way that the phone wobbles every time I touch it while it’s resting on a flat surface, and the glassy back feels pretty slippery. It also took about two minutes for its back to be absolutely covered in fingerprints. Luckily, my dark blue Edge+ doesn’t show them so much, but my gold Note 5 constantly needs to be cleaned.Before I get to all the identical things about the Note 5 and Edge+, there’s one more difference. The Note 5 has a stylus, called an S Pen, lodged in a sheath in the bottom-right corner of the phone. For a certain kind of user, the pen is terrific. It’s fast and accurate, and launches a helpful menu every time you take it out. (It even has a nice clicky thing at the top, which does exactly nothing except satiate my constant need to fiddle.) The best feature is a new one: If your screen is off and you pop the pen out, a chalkboard-like notepad pops up for you to doodle on. It’s flat-out the fastest way to take a note on a phone, and it works really well.At least it did, until I stupidly tried to corroborate an issue some people were having by sticking my S Pen in backward. It’s now stuck in the slot, probably forever. It was stupid, and if you’re not stupid, you’ll be fine. But be warned: If you buy a Note, always look when you put the S Pen back. Otherwise you’ll have a stylus nib poking you in the leg every time you put your phone in your pocket.To summarize: The Edge+ is a better-looking phone. It’s thinner, lighter, and just cooler. The Note 5 has a great pen. Got it? Good. Moving on.Everything else about these two phones is identical. They both run Samsung’s latest Exynos processor, which is absurdly fast. They both run Android 5.1, along with Samsung’s TouchWiz skin. I’ve grown less angry at TouchWiz, as Samsung has scaled back its aesthetic horrors, but there are still spots where the phone will stutter or lag. That’s not Android, and it’s not the processor or the 4GB of RAM. That’s TouchWiz. These are minor grievances, of course, and for the most part the phone runs splendidly. But Samsung’s definitely not finished here.The other thing that comes with TouchWiz is a lot of bloatware. Some is useful stuff—Microsoft’s Office apps, for instance—that I’d still rather just install myself. Mostly, though, it’s Samsung’s apps that are just knockoffs of better Google apps. Internet is my favorite—it’s just a bad browser, which you should never use because Chrome is literally right there. That’s just on my unlocked, international device, too—U.S. carrier versions will be much worse. You can either hide or uninstall most of the apps and then tweak the look with the theme store, and you should. Samsung’s gotten spectacularly good at building devices, but software is still a rough spot. Josh Valcarcel/WIREDThe camera, on the other hand, is unadulterated good news. The 16-megapixel sensor and f/1.9 lens produce images that are as good as, if not better than, any other smartphone on the planet. They’re bright, dynamic, accurate, and sharp, a quartet you won’t find often. They shoot in gorgeous 4K, and can even livestream directly to YouTube right from the camera app. You can shoot in RAW, use image stabilization in video…the list goes on and on. Oh, and not for nothing, double-clicking on the home button is the best way ever to open the camera app and every other phone should copy Samsung immediately.You can argue over little things, like whether you prefer Apple’s religious color accuracy to Samsung’s tendency to slightly over-brighten dark backgrounds, but the argument between Samsung’s best phones and any others will ultimately boil down only to personal preference. All four of Samsung’s flagship phones, including the Note 5 and Edge+, have phenomenal cameras. Full stop.Despite their relative size differences, both phones have the same 3,000mAh battery. No, it’s not removable, because Samsung has given up on its most demanding users to focus instead on being totally mainstream. In both cases, I’ve had no trouble getting a day or even a day and a half of normal use before the battery croaks. Even more exciting is the phones’ crazy-fast charging, which means you can top off in the time it takes to drink your coffee. Someday, we’ll have week-long batteries; until then, this is about the best we can expect.It comes down to this: The Note 5 and Edge+ are great phones. With about 10 minutes of customization—downloading the right theme and hiding the right apps—they’re exceptional phones. They’re expensive phones, certainly, on par with the iPhone 6 Plus and costlier than even their slightly-smaller counterparts. At AT&T, for instance, the base model, 32GB Edge+ costs $814.99 outright, or $27.17 monthly, and the Note 5 starts at $739.99 or $24.67. You can get the smaller models for less, and get a lot of the same benefit.If money’s no object, though, get the big phones. Yeah, they’re just bigger. That’s the whole point. And big phones are awesome—just don’t call them phablets.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.
Read more http://www.wired.com/2015/08/review-samsung-galaxy-s6-edge-note-5/
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