The Galaxy S6 was a great phone in its day, but has since been buried beneath several iterations from Samsung – the latest being the Galaxy S9. It now looks like the handset’s days are truly numbered, as the Korean manufacturer has removed it from its list of models that receive regular security updates.
The S6 Edge+ remains on that list for now, but its S6 and S6 Edge siblings have been cut. You can still buy the smartphones from Samsung, but the death knells have begun to sound for the three-year-old devices.
Jonathan Bray’s original Samsung Galaxy S6 review is below. If you’re interested in the Galaxy S9, we have a review for that. Alternatively, check out our list of 2018’s very best smartphones.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Review
Samsung is no stranger to manufacturing smartphones jam-packed with the very latest in technology, and the Samsung Galaxy S6 is just that. One thing had eluded the Korean giant prior to the launch of its latest handset, however: the ability to design a phone that’s as gorgeous as it is functional.
The arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S6 sees the company finally break free of those shackles; and even halfway through 2016, the Samsung Galaxy S6 remains among the best smartphones you can buy anywhere, at any price, even if it has been eclipsed by the Samsung Galaxy S7
Samsung Galaxy S6: Design
No two ways about it, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is a stunner, framed in cool-to-the-touch aluminium, and with a coloured Gorilla Glass 4 rear and front, it’s a beautiful phone to behold. It’s clad in Gorilla Glass 4 front and back, and the way it gleams and glistens in the light is quite entrancing. The S6 is available in “White Pearl”, “Gold Platinum” and “Blue Topaz”, but we think it looks best in “Black Sapphire”, which you see pictured here.
As you’d expect from a modern smartphone, the S6 is extremely slim (6.8mm) and light (138g), and it feels surprisingly compact in the hand, especially considering there’s a 5.1in display up front.
In our view, the S6 delivers the perfect compromise between screen size and one-handed comfort – in fact, it’s slightly smaller overall than the Samsung Galaxy S5 – and it combines that with impressive build quality and attention to detail. Even the volume, power and home buttons feel like they’ve been upgraded: everything about this phone feels perfectly on point.
There are some downsides to the design, however. First, in order to produce such a gorgeous work of art, the removable rear panel, replaceable battery and microSD slot for storage expansion have been consigned to the dustbin.
Second, neither the S6 nor the S6 Edge has an IP rating, so they’re not not water and dust resistant like last year’s Samsung Galaxy S5 was.
And third, the glass rear of the phones picks up fingerprints like they’re going out of fashion. It’s easy to clean, but if you own one of these phones, you’re going to be spending a lot of your time wiping it on your jeans or the hem of your T-shirt to keep it spotless.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Display
Both the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge have a 5.1in Quad HD Super AMOLED display, with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,560 and a phenomenal pixel density of 576ppi, but while we’re still not convinced this sort of resolution is necessary on a screen so small (it’s only useful if you make extensive use of a Samsung Gear VR headset), there’s absolutely no doubt that it delivers an incredibly sharp image.
Colour accuracy, brightness and contrast, however, are more important than sheer pixel count, and on this front, the S6 delivers a knockout blow. In manual brightness mode, the screen ramps up to only 347cd/m2, which is what we’d expect of an AMOLED display. Typically, this sort of panel is a lot less bright than its IPS rivals, which measure at anything between 450cd/m2 and 600cd/m2.
Unlike other manufacturers’ AMOLED screens, however, Samsung’s does go up a little higher than this. It’s a hidden trick that you only get to see if you enable the phone’s auto-brightness mode and take the phone out it bright sunlight. I simulated this by shining a torch at the light sensor above the screen, and saw the maximum brightness reading soar to 560cd/m2. That’s an improvement on the Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge, which reached just below 500cd/m2 in the same test, and should mean the screen is a lot more readable when the sun is out.
Turn down the brightness slider to minimum and white tones on the screen will dim to 1.92cd/m2. That’s much lower than the 5.84cd/m2 the iPhone 6 is capable of, and means the S6 won’t blind you when you’re using it in the dark. Contrast is perfect, which helps movies, TV programmes and photos really pop out of the screen.
What’s most impressive about the S6’s screen, though, is its outstanding colour reproduction. In Basic (sRGB) mode it reproduces 98.5% of the sRGB colour gamut. And it’s highly colour-accurate, too, with an average Delta E of 1.47 and a maximum of 4.13. In AMOLED Photo mode (equivalent to a professional monitor’s Adobe RGB mode), it covers 98.7% of the colour gamut, and gained average colour-accuracy scores of 1.57 and a maximum of 4.29.
These are the sorts of scores we’re more used to seeing on professional monitors than a smartphone – it’s a truly stunning display.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Specs and performance
In terms of the performance-critical elements, Samsung is really pushing the boat out. Both the S6 and the S6 Edge employ its octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC, which comprises twin quad-core CPUs (one running at a frequency of 2.1GHz and one at 1.5GHz) and a Mali-T760 GPU. There’s 3GB of RAM to accompany this, and storage runs to 32GB, 64Gb or 128GB on the S6 and 64GB or 128GB on the S6 Edge.
It’s a lineup that makes for a very snappy-feeling phone. Nothing we threw at it caused it to slow down significantly, from hefty web pages to browsing Google Maps – everything feels supremely responsive, and even under load it doesn’t get too warm.
It outperforms most of its rivals in the benchmarks, too, still going strong nearly a year since its original launch, outstripping many more newly released models. Single- and multi-core results in Geekbench 3 of 1,427 and 4,501 remain among the best we’ve seen, only falling behind the Apple iPhone 6s in the single-core test.
It beats the iPhone 6s in the multi-core part of that test, however, and it’s only in the native resolution GFXBench gaming benchmark that it lags behind Apple’s current flagships with an average frame rate of 38fps in the onscreen test and 23fps in the offscreen test, which is run at a lower resolution of 1,080 x 1,920.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is clearly a fast phone, but the Exynos 7420 is about more than sheer speed. Just like Intel’s new Broadwell generation of CPUs, it’s a 14nm part, which should mean greater efficiency and better battery life. And with Samsung reducing the size of the battery by 200mAh to 2,600mAh, it needs to deliver.
In testing it did just that. Playing a 720p video in flight mode with the screen set to a brightness of 120cd/m2, we saw capacity fall at a rate of 6% – a figure bested only by the iPhone 6 Plus. With the screen off, the S6 used up its battery capacity at 2.8% – less impressive, but that still places it among the most frugal smartphones we’ve tested.
As with most high-end smartphones, the S6 struggles to keep up this performance when playing games, with capacity diving at a much faster rate. After running the GFXBench battery test, which loops a 3D scene at half brightness for around half an hour, then extrapolates to provide a total projected runtime, the S6 hit 134 minutes. While not great, this result is fairly typical of most high-powered smartphones we see.
Even then, though, we found that on a normal day – using the phone intensively on our morning and evening commute and more lightly during the day – the S6 would normally have capacity to spare at bedtime.
As if to compensate for the lack of microSD expansion, the S6 also comes with a “new type of flash storage”. According to Samsung’s marketing materials, this is a fusion of the eMMC used in smartphones and tablets and the SSDs deployed in laptops.
Dubbed UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 2, the new storage technology employs a serial interface instead of the 8-bit parallel interface used by the eMMC storage typically used in rival smartphones, and this boosts performance dramatically. According to Samsung, UFS 2 can carry out 19,000 IOPS (input/ouput operations per second) for random reads, which is “2.7 times faster” than eMMC 5.
It’s certainly very quick. Testing with the Androbench app, we saw sequential read and write speeds of 319MB/sec and 142MB/sec and 4K read and write speeds of 71MB/sec and 19MB/sec – impressive, and much faster than the HTC One M9’s performance in these tests.
Other specifications are a touch more humdrum, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Cat6 4G, NFC and Bluetooth 4 all present and correct. At close range, a large file copied to the S6’s internal storage at around 12MB/sec, which is about the same speed as we saw with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
The phone also retains most of the core features of the Galaxy S5, with a barometer, and heart rate monitor on the rear of the device, plus wireless charging and ANT+ compatibility. What’s new is support for both the WPC (Qi) and PMA wireless charging standards.
And Samsung has even found time to upgrade the fingerprint sensor. You no longer need to swipe your finger over the button, which we’ve found to be quite awkward with previous Galaxy S handsets. Instead, it’s now possible to simply rest a digit on the sensor, just as with Apple’s iPhone 6, 6 Plus, iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Camera, audio and call quality
The Samsung Galaxy S6’s camera isn’t a massive upgrade. It has the same 16-megapixel resolution as the S5 and retains that super-quick phase-detect autofocus, but this year adds a wider aperture and optical image stabilisation.
These sound like small changes, but in practice they make a dramatic difference to the S6’s photo- and video-capture capabilities, and despite nine months of new smartphone releases, including the highly capable Google Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, it remains among the best cameras in a smartphone anywhere. In all but the darkest of environments, the S6 is capable of capturing stunning images and smooth, stable video. Noise is still visible when capturing murky objects in low light, but even then you’ll get usable results in most circumstances.
It isn’t vastly superior to the iPhone 6’s camera or the iPhone 6s, but it’s as quick and a better all-rounder in tricky light; we particularly love the live HDR feature, which displays on the screen, in real-time, what your processed photo will eventually look like. And it has a deft touch, balancing areas of bright and dark in a scene well without making the resulting photograph look unnatural.
The camera also boasts some new features on the software front. There’s a new quick-launch feature, which allows you to double-click the home button to launch the camera app – in 0.7 seconds says Samsung. The camera software has been simplified, making it easier to access all the various settings. Samsung has made snapping selfies easier, too: you can now tap the heart-rate sensor on the rear to capture a self-portrait.
The front-facing camera provides 5-megapixel images and, with an aperture of f/1.9, selfies look impressively sharp even in poor light.
Impressively, video capture now benefits from object-tracking autofocus, a feature normally associated with dedicated camcorders. This worked pretty well in testing, but there’s a catch: you can’t use both object tracking and optical image stabilisation simultaneously; it’s either or.
Audio is almost as impressive, both in-call and from the single speaker on the phone’s bottom edge. The earpiece speaker goes superbly loud and doesn’t distort at maximum volume, and speaker output is very good, matching the HTC One M9 for volume, if not body. The microphone is decent, too, picking up vocals at close and long range with admirable clarity.
Android Lollipop and new TouchWiz features
As with any high-end smartphone worth its salt, the Samsung Galaxy S6 runs with Android 5 Lollipop on board, and as usual it’s heavily modified, by courtesy of Samsung’s TouchWiz launcher software.
This year, however, we see a significant change in direction by Samsung, with the company cutting out the clutter and slimming down what had become a hugely bloated and complex mobile UI. We’re still not too keen on the Briefing newsfeed that appears by default to the left of the main homescreen, but it’s gratifying to see that Samsung no longer litters the rest of Android’s homescreens with a hotchpotch of large, ugly widgets.
Aside from the usual dock at the bottom of the main homescreen, all you get with the S6 is the clock and weather widget at the top, the Google search box below this, and space for up to eight standard app below and above the search box. There’s no longer any need to spend your first half-hour with the phone deleting widgets and tidying up the homescreens.
Samsung has also added in the ability to wake the phone using a key phrase, just as you can with Google Now on the Nexus 6 and Motorola Moto X (2014). And as we’ve mentioned, the camera app is much, much tidier than before.
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge vs Samsung Galaxy S6
The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge is even more eye-catching than the standard S6. It has the same coloured glass and metal frame, but the screen curves away at the sides, giving it a unique and very appealing look.
It’s available in a slighlty different selection of colours to the S6: there’s the same white, black and gold, but instead of “Blue Topaz” it comes in “Green Emerald”.
Physically, the S6 Edge is ever-so-slightly fatter than the S6 at 7mm – not that we noticed any difference when we held the two side by side. It’s also fractionally shorter and narrower, but we’re talking tiny differences here. The S6 Edge is 6g lighter than the standard S6.
And there’s a difference in storage configurations and price as well: the S6 Edge is also available only in 64GB and 128GB variants, and the 64GB model is significantly more expensive than the 32GB S6, with the cheapest model costing an eye-watering £760.
In terms of the rest of the specifications, the only major change is that the S6 Edge has a larger battery, at 2,600mAh compared with the S6’s 2,550mAh battery. Everything else – the size and resolution of the screen, the cameras, processor, RAM and storage options – is identical.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Verdict
While the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge catches the eye with its unusual looks, though, we suspect it’s the standard, slightly more affordable S6 that most consumers will opt for. And why not? The design is simply superb. The build is excellent. It’s fast, slick, and its camera captures great pictures and superlative video.
You could criticise it for lacking a microSD slot and removable battery, and we’re sure those omissions will put plenty of people off. But in every other respect, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is a superlative smartphone, and significantly better than the HTC One M9. If only the best will do, look no further. The Samsung Galaxy S6 is the best smartphone on the market.
Samsung Galaxy S6 vs iPhone 6
While the Galaxy S6 and the iPhone 6 run on completely different operating systems, it’s safe to say that Samsung’s flagship phone is the iPhone 6’s biggest competitor.
It’s a trend that ran through Samsung’s press conference, and it’s also one mimicked somewhat in the S6’s unibody design of metal and glass. You would have thought that after an expensive court case Samsung would have shied away from some of Apple’s design ethos, but it appears not, as by just looking at the bottom of an S6 you can see striking resemblances to Apple’s iPhone 6.
When it comes to performance, the S6 beats the iPhone 6 on some counts and lags behind in others. The raw performance of its 14nm octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC is superior to the iPhone’s dual-core A8; in games, the high pixel count of the S6’s display holds it back.
In terms of display, the S6 has 0.4in on the iPhone 6, and its Super AMOLED 1,440 x 2,560 display delivers a higher-resolution image. It’s the colour performance that really impresses, though, with a brightness to rival the iPhone 6’s and colour performance that outstrips it.
In terms of battery life, it’s a mixed picture, with the iPhone 6 delivering slightly better standby performance, while the S6 is better with the screen on. The iPhone 6 has nothing, however, to match the S6’s Ultra Power Saving mode, which turns off background processes and switches the screen to black and white to eke out extra time when the gauge runs low.
Samsung Galaxy S6 vs HTC One M9
Comparing the Galaxy S6 with the HTC One M9, the Galaxy comes out on top. We prefer the look of the S6: with its coloured glass front and rear, and metal frame, it looks more modern.
The One M9 is still a wonderfully designed smartphone, though, with same unibody milled aluminium case that the M8 had, and a real feel of quality.
However, the Samsung Galaxy S6 soon strides ahead. Although its octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor is quick, it can’t match the S6’s 14nm octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC.
Battery life is better on the S6, despite a smaller battery, the screen is vastly superior and the camera is in a completely different class. On most fronts, the HTC One M9 simply can’t compete.
There are a couple of areas where the HTC One M9 is better. With its microSD slot, it provides flexibility in memory management that Samsung’s device cannot match, and the front-facing BoonSound stereo speakers are fantastic for speakerphone conversations and watching YouTube clips
Despite this, the winner of the contest between HTC and Samsung’s flagship phones in 2015 is clear. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S6 all the way.
Samsung Galaxy S6 vs Sony Xperia Z3
The forgotten man in all the furore over the S6, the HTC One M9 and iPhone 6 is Sony’s Xperia Z3, which has to be one of the most underrated handsets around at the moment. It’s been around for a bit longer, but that doesn’t make it any less attractive.
The main problem is that it doesn’t have a processor that’s anywhere near as fast as the S6’s. The Z3’s Snapdragon 801 is still far from sluggish. The camera isn’t as good, either, but the 20.7-megapixel snapper produces detailed shots and can shoot 4K video.
Elsewhere, there aren’t many weaknesses, and in some areas it beats the S6, with sealed flaps covering the ports all around the edges making the phone water- and dust-resistant. It has a microSD slot for storage expansion as well, which the S6 misses out on. And battery life is consistently excellent; this is a phone that will reliably last you a day and a half – longer if you’re careful and use one of Sony’s power save modes.
The best thing about the Z3, though, is that it’s considerably cheaper than the S6, and that makes it definitively one to consider if you can’t stretch to the pricier Samsung.
Read our full review of the Sony Xperia Z3 here.
Samsung Galaxy S6 specifications |
Samsung Galaxy S6 edge specifications |
vs HTC One M9 specifications |
|
| Processor | Octacore (quad 2.1GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Samsung Exynos SoC | Octacore (quad 2.1GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Samsung Exynos SoC | Octacore (quad 2GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC |
| RAM | 3GB LPDDR4 | 3GB LPDDR4 | 3GB |
| Screen size | 5.1in | 5.1in | 5in |
| Screen resolution | 1,440 x 2560, 576ppi (Gorilla Glass 4) | 1,440 x 2560, 576ppi (Gorilla Glass 4) | 1,080 x 1,920, 441ppi (Gorilla Glass 4) |
| Screen type | Super AMOLED | Super AMOLED | Super LCD3 (IPS) |
| Front camera | 5MP | 5MP | 4MP |
| Rear camera | 16MP (f/1.9, phase detect autofocus, OIS) | 16MP (f/1.9, phase detect autofocus, OIS) | 20.7MP (f/2.2) |
| Flash | Dual LED | Dual LED | Dual LED |
| GPS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Compass | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Storage | 64/128GB (UFS 2 flash) | 32/64/128GB (UFS 2 flash) | 32GB |
| Memory card slot (supplied) | No | No | MicroSD |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11ac (2x2 MIMO) | 802.11ac (2x2 MIMO) | 802.11ac |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.1 LE, A2DP, apt-X, ANT+ | Bluetooth 4.1 LE, A2DP, apt-X, ANT+ | Bluetooth 4.1, A2DP, apt-X |
| NFC | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Wireless data | 4G, Cat6 (300Mbits/sec download, 50Mbits/sec upload) | 4G, Cat6 (300Mbits/sec download, 50Mbits/sec upload) | 4G |
| Size (WDH) | 71 x 6.8 x 143mm | 70 x 7 x 142mm | 70 x 9.6 x 145mm |
| Weight | 138g | 132g | 157g |
| Operating system | Android 5 Lollipop | Android 5 Lollipop with Sense 7 | |
| Battery size | 2,550mAh | 2,600mAh | 2,840mAh |
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