Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ review: This phone is seriously good

Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+: Display quality and Edge screen

I’ll get one thing out of the way straight away, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+’s 5.7in Super AMOLED display is sumptuous. Switch it on and, whichever of Samsung’s four colour modes you opt for (more of which later), the impression it makes on your eyes is immediate. Its Quad HD display is sharp (with an ultra-high pixel density of 518ppi), colourful, and its luminous images are displayed on the screen as if the picture is laid on top of the glass.

It’s the best display I’ve seen on any smartphone (alongside the S6 and S6 Edge, of course), and even if you don’t get along with the slightly neon character of the colours, you can switch from the default Adaptive mode to the Basic, Cinema or Photo profiles, which all knock the colours back to a greater or lesser extent.

Samsung’s Basic mode is the one that is designed to adhere to the sRGB colour space standards, and that’s the one I used in my tests. And boy did it do well when put under the microscope. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it’s the perfect screen, covering 100% of the sRGB colour gamut and reaching a maximum brightness of 521cd/m² in Automatic mode, which is enough to make it readable in pretty much all but the most extremely bright of conditions.

But you don’t want to read about that, do you? No. You want to read about how the curved Edge display changes the game in the smartphone screen space, how it changed my life and will change yours when you lay your hands on one.

I’m afraid, however, that I’m going to have to disappoint you on that front. Allow me to let you down gently, though. First, Samsung has given the Edge screen a boost on the practicality front. As well as being able to assign shortcuts to your favourite five contacts to the Edge display, so you can quickly message or call them, it’s now possible to send “pokes” and emoticons to those people directly from their shortcuts. Note, though, that this feature only works for those who have Samsung phones.

Swipe across the Edge once you’ve brought it into view (that takes a swipe in from either the top-right or top-left corners) and you’ll reach the Edge+’s secret weapon: the Apps Edge. Here you can add shortcuts to your favourite apps, so they can be accessed with a quick swipe and tap. It’s also possible to add further Edge screens, including a Yahoo-driven newsfeed, but there’s no sign of the tools and context controls I saw in the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge last year.

This is all, no doubt, ingenious, but is it useful? Absolutely not. By all means, admire the S6 Edge+’s curves for the physical allure they bring to the handset, but be in absolutely no doubt at all over their usefulness. Perhaps this will change over time, but I can count the number of times I used the Edge screen’s functions on the fingers of one hand.