Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo review: The best deals on the S5 Neo are here

The Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo might look relatively up to date, but it’s not a new smartphone at all. In fact, it’s based on a two-year-old recipe: the Samsung Galaxy S5. At first glance, in fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a standard Galaxy S5.

However, because it’s now two years old, there’s a growing number of great deals available for the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo – and at these great prices, it is hard to find on Amazon US (but you can buy a used version outright for $139 on Amazon US), on Amazon UK it’s £159.99. It’d make a great budget smartphone – or even a first handset for the kids. Keep reading to see the best deals for the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo, and our full review after that.

Best Samsung Galazy S5 Neo deals

• 02: £14,50 per month, 100 minutes, unlimited texts, 100mb data, £180 upfront – Get it here
• Vodafone: £16 per month, 250 minutes, unlimited texts, 250mb of data, £75 up front – Get it here
• EE: £16.99 per month, 300 minutes, unlimited texts, 300mb data, £35 up front – Get it here

Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo review

The S5 Neo looks like a lot like the normal S5. It’s the same shape, size and weight, and the plasticky design is all-but identical – only the edges have changed, from a ribbed chrome-effect plastic to a smoother, glossy, coloured plastic strip. Even the specifications and features are largely the same. The Galaxy S5 Neo’s screen, camera, battery, connectivity, RAM, storage and water-proofing have all seemingly been lifted directly from the original.

It’s only when you look closely that you begin to notice the differences. The main departure is the CPU, which instead of the 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801, is now a Samsung Exynos 7580 Octa running at a clock speed of 1.6GHz. The Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo also lacks the S5’s fingerprint reader, its infrared transceiver and its USB 3 port, but it keeps the S5’s heart rate monitor.

Why would Samsung do such a thing? More importantly, why would you want to buy one? Well, it’s been an uncomfortable truth for smartphone manufacturers that, for the most part, people simply don’t need the extra power offered by their most expensive, modern models.

We’d all love to own a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ or an iPhone 6s Plus but, practically speaking, the advances these phones offer over a good phone that may have been built two years ago are pretty small.

So, we have the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo, which not only offers most of the features and a near-identical design of a 2014 flagship, but that also – at £300 SIM-free and around £22/mth on contract – is far cheaper than current flagship smartphones.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo review: Performance

Looking at the all-round performance of the S5 Neo, you might argue that it’s all the smartphone you need. In the benchmarks we run on smartphones, its performance is surprisingly good.

We reviewed the S5 so long ago now that we’ve changed the benchmarks, so I don’t have the usual array of gaming benchmark figures to compare here, but in the test figures I do have, you can see that the Exynos processor in the S5 Neo is significantly quicker than the original, and it isn’t all that far behind its nominally more modern competition:

It’s impressive stuff, and in real world terms all these numbers translate to smooth performance in most apps. My only gripe is that the phone seems to pause for a moment, seemingly catching its breath before launching certain apps. This is not huge issue, but it is nonetheless irritating.

More notable than this, however, is the battery life. In our video rundown test, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo’s 2,800mAh power pack helped it last 16hrs 27mins before running out of juice, which is longer than the superb Galaxy S6 Edge and Motorola Moto X Force. With light use, I found I was able to get it to last well into a third day of use. That’s far, far better than average.

What’s likely to get fans of Samsung smartphones of old foaming at the mouth, though, is the fact that the battery can be replaced. This means you can fix an old, tired battery yourself when it begins to lose capacity, or even replace it with one of the myriad expanded battery pack options such as this 7,500mAh Anker model for multi-day battery life.

You can’t even point the finger of doom at the S5 Neo’s screen. Just like the S5, it’s a Super AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, and just like that screen, it’s crisp, super colourful and everything just pops right out at you. No complaints here at all. Maximum brightness tops out at 388cd/m2, which isn’t as on, say, an iPhone 6s or the latest Samsung phones, which means it won’t be as readable in searing sunlight, but it’s readable in most situations.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo review: Camera

Even the camera technology from the S5 has stood the test of time, and that’s probably because it was well sorted back when the original launched. To recap, the Neo has precisely the same specifications here as its forebear, which means it has a resolution of 16 megapixels, fast and accurate phase detect autofocus, a sensor size of 1/2.6in, an aperture of f/2.2 and a single-LED flash to illuminate dim scenes.

And it’s pretty darned good. On a grey winter’s day, capturing images of London’s skyline, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo compares pretty well with the iPhone 6s. Its shots are bursting with detail and colour. It’s not quite as reliably good as the iPhone – you can see that the shot here is a touch softer than the iPhone 6s’ and has a white balance that’s ever so slightly warmer – but it’s good enough.

It’s a similar story when comparing with the excellent Nexus 6P (I didn’t have a Nexus 5X to hand, but it has the same camera). The shots aren’t as sharp and the colours aren’t quite as realistic, but these differences aren’t huge, and considering the S5 Neo is employing a camera module that’s now nearly two years old, it’s hugely impressive.

Moreover, it isn’t just the hardware that impresses here. Samsung’s camera software is excellent. In recent times, as with its Touchwiz Android skin, Samsung has pared back its complexities and it’s now slick, easy to use and powerful. The Pro camera mode is exceptionally good, placing adjustments such as ISO sensitivity, white balance and exposure compensation at your fingertips.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo vs OnePlus 2 vs Nexus 5x

So, should you buy a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo? To answer that question properly, you have to compare it against the best modern rivals, available at roughly the same price. So, let’s draw up a shortlist and consider the headline pros and cons.

My favourite phone at the moment at around that price is the OnePlus 2. It’s £279, features a larger, 5.5in screen, a faster and more modern processor, plus it has 64GB storage – four times the storage of the S5 Neo – and a more palatable Android skin than Samsung’s Touchwiz. The downsides are that the OnePlus is more bulky than the S5 Neo, you can’t buy it on contract, and it lacks both the S5’s removeable battery and its remarkable stamina.

Then there’s the Nexus 5X, which at £299 is the benchmark mid-range smartphone. At the time of writing, the phone was available from Carphone Warehouse for roughly the same amount of cash as the S5 Neo, both on contract and SIM-free. That phone can’t match the S5 Neo’s flexibility, nor its battery life, but it has a fingerprint reader, a better camera and it runs stock Android, which again offers a cleaner, more responsive experience than Samsung Touchwiz.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo review: Verdict

In the final analysis, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. If you can get on with the design, which isn’t the most attractive in the world, its combination of performance, battery life, camera quality and a reasonable price make it nearly unbeatable.

I say nearly unbeatable because, if I had £300 to spend on a new smartphone, I’d still opt for either the OnePlus 2 or the Nexus 5X for the reasons detailed above. But, if you value battery life above all else, the S5 Neo is hard to top.