Samsung Galaxy S5 review: The once great all-rounder steps down

Latest news: The Samsung Galaxy S5 isn’t widely available any more, but although it’s surpassed by a number of superior smarphones since it first launched (not least the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the more recent Galaxy S7), Samsung has rebranded and relaunched it in the guise of the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. It’s a testament to the quality and performance of the original design that, despite its age, it still makes a viable purchase even today, especially at a price of £235.

In fact, we liked the Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo so much that we gave it a Recommended award when we reviewed it recently. It’s a mid-range budget smartphone that inherits most of the internals of its illustrious forebear, and well worth a look if your budget can’t quite stretch to full-blown flagship prices.

However, the S5 Neo isn’t alone in offering a lot for a little these days. If you don’t mind paying upfront for your smartphones, the OnePlus 2 offers faster performance and a bigger screen than the Samsung Galaxy S5, and it looks a lot nicer. The OnePlus 3 ups the ante even further with a cracking camera, better battery life and even faster performance – plus, it’s still only £309.

Then you have the smaller 5.2in Nexus 5X, which is another brilliant phone, with good performance, a 1080p display and a superb camera. And it will cost you considerably less than £300, with recent deals dropping it, temporarily, below £200.

Then there’s the unbelievably good, but unbelievably cheap 5.5in Moto G4. It doesn’t look as nice as the OnePlus handsets and the camera isn’t as good as the Nexus 5X, but at a price of £170 it will actually save you money over the S5 Neo. It has a great screen and performance that’s just as good as far more expensive smartphones.

Last, but by no means least, is the new Samsung Galaxy A5. The Galaxy A5 looks, to all intents and purposes, exactly like a flagship smartphone. In fact, with Gorilla Glass 4 at the front and the back, and a sculpted aluminium frame, it looks and feels eerily similar to last year’s Samsung Galaxy S6.

It has brilliant battery life, lasting 15hrs 26mins in our video-rundown test; a 5.2in AMOLED display that looks fantastic; a decent camera; and a very reasonable price of £290. The Galaxy A5 has exactly the same processor as the S5 Neo (above), so performance is similar, but the design and build quality are vastly superior. If you’re looking for a smartphone that looks as good as it performs, you won’t go far wrong with the Samsung Galaxy A5.

There’s plenty of choice, then, if you’re after a fast-performing phone for under £300. Although the S5 Neo is good, it’s by no means the only choice.

Samsung Galaxy S5 review

We wondered where the world’s number-one smartphone maker could possibly go with the Samsung Galaxy S5. The Galaxy S4’s 5in screen was already hitting the pocketable limit, and with so much tech already squeezed into that phone there surely wasn’t much room for attention-grabbing extras. We were wrong.

Still, cast a glance over the S5’s key specs and you might come to the same conclusion. Aside from the usual processor boost, from the quad-core 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 of last year’s model to the top-of-the-range, quad-core Snapdragon 801 this year, there’s no whizz-bang upgrade to match the quirky duo-camera of its major rival, the HTC One (M8), nor a radical rethink of design.

There are some key differences. The plastic panel at the rear has changed from gloss to soft touch, there are new colours to choose from – including a dubious-looking gold – and Samsung has bumped up the screen to 5.1in. Visit: the best Android phones of 2014 too.

Below the screen is a physical home button, flanked by two capacitive buttons; one for back and another for accessing the recent apps list. The display remains ringed with a ridged, chrome-effect band, with the power and volume buttons in the same positions on the right and left edges. The rear panel is still removable, giving access to SIM, microSD slots beneath, and a user-replaceable battery.

A closer examination of the specs reveals that the new phone is 15g heavier, and a touch taller and wider. For a more radical comparison you need to sit the S5 next to the HTC One (M8); the S5 is lighter, shorter, slightly wider, and – to our eyes at least – far less attractive.

Tricks and tweaks

Yet Samsung has made a number of changes: mostly small, but which add up to a major upgrade overall. Flip the rear cover off and examine the underside of the thin plastic back, and you’ll see evidence of the S5’s water- and dust-resistant protection: a thin rubber strip sealing in the sensitive components.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is IP67 rated, which indicates the phone is protected against dust ingress, and can be submerged in water up to a metre for 30 minutes. Anyone who has ever dropped their phone in the sink, bath or toilet, or who’s soaked their phone in a heavy rainstorm, will attest to the fact that this is a feature well worth having.

The familiar home button hides another new feature: a fingerprint reader for unlocking the phone, similar to that of the Apple iPhone 5s. It’s less convenient than Apple’s touch-recognition approach, though. Only three fingerprints can be registered, and you need to swipe your finger across the button for it to work. As a result, we found it tricky to unlock the unit one-handed.

Then there’s the heart-rate monitor, located just below the camera on the rear of the phone. This is more sensibly positioned. With the phone cradled in your left or right hand, the sensor falls nicely under the ball of your index finger. However, heart-rate sensors work best when they’re constantly monitoring your pulse during periods of exercise or day-to-day activities. With the S5 you have to make a conscious decision to measure your pulse, which makes it less useful.

Camera

It’s the improvements to the phone’s camera that prove the most compelling. Samsung has upped the resolution to 16 megapixels, added DSLR-style phase-detect autofocus, the ability to shoot video at up to a 4K resolution, and is now using a new 1/2.6in sensor. The latter isn’t only larger than the HTC One (M8)’s 1/3in offering, but also boasts new “ISOCELL” technology aimed at reducing image noise.

The result of these changes is top performance and superlative image quality all round. The autofocus system, true to Samsung’s claims, focuses from near to far subjects in around 0.3 seconds – but that isn’t the full story. It can take as long as a second to analyse the scene before that focusing takes place.

Still, when it does lock on, we found focus to be extremely accurate. The benefits of the new autofocus system are even more noticeable when it comes to video, where focus transitions are quick and sure-footed.

In terms of general quality, we found low-light shots to be cleaner than any other smartphone camera we’ve tested – apart from the superlative Nokia Lumia 1020, that is. Detail levels in good light are spectacular, and the HDR setting works effectively to balance out images shot in extremes of light and shade, in both stills and (remarkably) video.

Display

Elsewhere, the changes are less dramatic but well worth having. The Samsung Galaxy S5’s screen uses the same technology and has the same resolution as the S4 – it’s a 1,920 x 1,080 AMOLED display – yet overall quality is dramatically better.

As always, as it’s AMOLED, it has a more vibrant look to it than most IPS displays. Usually, there are drawbacks, too, such as lower peak brightness and reduced colour accuracy, but here Samsung has improved matter dramatically.

Measured with our in-house X-rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, the brightness (measured on a white screen with the brightness slider adjusted all the way up to the max) is up to 364cd/m2 from the 221cd/m2 of the S4, which makes it far more readable in brightly lit conditions

Its perfect black level is as perfect as ever, and delivers image quality that’s rich and colourful. The brighter iPhone 5S and HTC One (M8) displays are easier to read in the sun’s glare, but indoors, the Samsung Galaxy S5’s display is as good as any you’ll come across.

As always with Samsung’s AMOLED displays, colours are a little oversaturated, and the colour temperature is on the cool side, but these are small gripes. Taken as a whole, the display is as good as you’ll find on any smartphone.

Performance and battery life

The same can be said for performance, which as you’d expect from a Samsung flagship is beyond reproach. The Samsung Galaxy S5 sports a quad-core, 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 with an Adreno 330, 2GB of RAM and 16/32GB of storage. It’s similar to the HTC One (M8)’s offering here, but clocked 0.3GHz faster.

Benchmark scores were a match for the fastest phones we’ve tested. Geekbench 3 single and multicore test results of 957 and 2,960 are very close to the HTC One (M8)’s scores of 984 and 2,849. The same goes for the results of the GFXBench T-Rex HD gaming test, which returned a frame rate of 27.9; the HTC One (M8) gained a negligible advantage of 1.1fps.

The S5’s most impressive result was in the single-threaded SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, where it edged in front of even the iPhone 5s with a time of 391ms.

In practice, all this means that the S5 is quick enough to deal with any conceivable task. Hefty web pages load in a trice and panning and zooming around them is never less than buttery smooth; plus, the latest 3D mobile games run smoothly, with no choppiness or juddering.

Battery life, as we found with the HTC One (M8), is excellent. We regularly found that even while testing out the camera, shooting videos, downloading apps and updates over Wi-Fi and light web browsing over 3G, the S5 comfortably lasted a day, with plenty of capacity left over.

In our more rigorous testing, too, the Galaxy S5 delivered impressive figures: it used 5.2% per hour of its battery capacity while playing back a 720p video file on the Samsung video player app, and 4.9% of its capacity while streaming a 128K audio file over 3G from our SoundCloud account. These figures are better than the HTC One (M8)’s, albeit not by a huge margin.

It’s possible to stretch battery life even further by switching the phone into its Ultra Power saving mode. Like the HTC One (M8)’s Extreme Power Saving Mode, this shuts off mobile data, restricts you to a select number of apps and switches the screen to a more power-efficient greyscale colour scheme. Unlike the HTC, though, the list of apps you can use is customisable.

Alas, we can’t report an accurate figure for the gaming section of the GFXBench, since the S5 drops the frame rate in this test, which gives an artificially positive total runtime of 264 minutes, 86% longer than the HTC One (M8)’s 142 minutes. We’d expect the S5 to be a little better than the M8 due to its larger 2,800mAh battery, but not by this much.

Notwithstanding this, we’d expect, given the performance results and similar internal hardware, that real-world gaming will drain the battery at a similar rate to the HTC One (M8), which is to say fast but not as fast as an iPhone 5s: its GFXBench runtime figure was a paltry 112 minutes.

Software

The software (Android 4.4 KitKat with Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay) is the one area where the S5’s star dims a little, but there are still some interesting and worthy changes.

In the interesting category are My Magazine and Download Booster. Like HTC’s BlinkFeed, the former gives a picture-heavy feed of news items and social network, accessible via a swipe from the left of the main homescreen. We found we ignored it most of the time.

The Download Booster allows you to gang together the phone’s Wi-Fi and 4G connections to deliver ultra-fast speeds for downloads of more than 30MB in size.

In our tests, using the PC Pro ADSL connection and a Three 4G SIM, Download Booster worked perfectly. How much it will boost your download speed will depend on the speed of each link; we saw a doubling of throughput on average. Whether it’s a practical feature for the masses is a matter for debate, since many 4G users will be on a capped contract and will want to save data by switching off 4G whenever possible.

In the more worthy category, we have improvements to the preloaded S Health app, which now encompasses the ability to measure your heart rate using the sensor on the S5 (or any of the accompanying smart watches – the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo or the Gear Fit).

Samsung has also significantly cleaned up TouchWiz’s unnecessarily complicated settings menu. Previously a mess of tabs and long, scrolling menus, now we have one, long vertically scrolling menu, divided into sections, which is much easier to navigate. The addition of a search field to the top of the settings menu is a godsend.

Verdict

Aside from a couple of tiny grumbles, then, there’s an awful lot to like about the Samsung Galaxy S5.

It’s a much bigger upgrade than the S4 was last year, and that makes it the best smartphone on the market right now (even if Google’s Nexus 5 retains its position atop our A List due to its optimum combination of price and all-round ability).

The Galaxy S5 may not have the looks of the HTC One (M8), but it’s tougher, has a far better camera, boasts more useful features, and provides greater flexibility courtesy of that user-replaceable battery.

Details
Contract monthly charge	£33.00
Contract period	24 months
Physical
Dimensions	73 x 8.1 x 142mm (WDH)
Weight	145g
Touchscreen	yes
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	2.00GB
Camera megapixel rating	16.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Display
Screen size	5.1in
Resolution	1080 x 1920
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Software
OS family	Android