For companies that already have a certain foundation, it takes courage to redesign their new generation flagship products from 0. In the face of the poor performance of S5, Samsung's S6 is shouldering an even heavier task. So this time S6 came to the market with new design and the strongest hardware. How many people recognized it?
Main characteristics/specifications:
6.8mm ultra-thin, double-sided Corning gorilla 4 glass body, metal frame;
5.1 inch Super AMOLED screen, resolution 2560 × 1440577ppi;
14nm Exynos 7420 64 bit eight core processor, 4 × [email protected] +4× [email protected] ， Mali-T760MP8 GPU，3GB RAM；
Android 5.0.2 operating system, new TouchWiz UI, support Samsung Pay payment;
16 million pixel optical anti shake main camera, F/1.9 aperture, supporting 4K video recording;
5 megapixel front camera, F/1.9 aperture, supporting 1080p video recording and HDR;
32/64/128GB built-in UFS 2.0 storage;
Press type fingerprint identifier, heart rate sensor, wireless charging technology;
2550 mAh built-in battery.
Appearance and workmanship:
In fact, S6 is not the first Samsung mobile phone to use an integrated body design, but it is the first Samsung mobile phone to use a double-sided glass body design. In order to completely get rid of the sense of cheapness, Samsung does not care about the cost of materials and workmanship in S6. Although the appearance of S6 may not be everyone's dish, S6 is the most sexy flagship phone in S series history, There should not be too many objections.
Two Corning gorilla glasses 4 are sandwiched between the sandblasted metal frames. Samsung's design change is not only to give up the tradition of replaceable batteries, but also to expand the memory capacity in order to give way to the high-end body design. However, we are glad that Samsung has not lost its inherent design language after the comprehensive replacement of materials, S6 can be recognized as Samsung's flagship phone at a glance even if it covers the LOGO.
The 6.8 mm ultra-thin body makes the S6 achieve a fairly good balance between thinness, grip, appearance and battery capacity (although the battery capacity is relatively small). The camera module inevitably protrudes while adding the optical anti shake mirror set and maintaining excellent image quality.
The Galaxy S6 has an excellent grip. The side of the metal middle frame has a flat design. This flat design makes the whole machine feel less slippery when held in the hand than expected. The double-sided glass is naturally infected by fingerprints. S6 may not be the strongest mobile phone on the market, but S6 has really mastered the design of double-sided glass+metal middle frame.
Compared with the Galaxy S5, the S6 has a narrower frame, which makes the S6 more compact. Fingerprint recognition has also been changed to a press type that is easier to use. The USB interface has been downgraded to the traditional 2.0 interface. Fortunately, the addition of fast charging technology will at least make it more practical.
The separate design of the volume key and the power button are all made of metal. The SIM card holder is also made of metal, and the workmanship is excellent.
The top only has an infrared emission port, while the bottom is the location of the connector and speaker.
Screen:
The screen of Galaxy S6 is one of the highlights of this phone. By compressing the 2K resolution to 5.1 inches, S6 has obtained an amazing 577 ppi, which is the highest screen ppi smartphone on the market at present. Although the sub pixels of the screen use the traditional diamond Pentile arrangement, it has no impact on the fineness.
In the default adaptive display mode, S6 has the widest screen gamut, followed by AMOLED photos, and the basic mode has the smallest gamut. However, even the basic mode with the smallest gamut has reached 100% sRGB.
In the color restoration test, S6 performs very well in the basic screen mode, and only the JNCD value of 1.6 reflects very accurate color restoration.
In terms of color temperature, S6's color temperature is 6426K in basic mode, 6450K in AMOLED photo mode, and 7346K in adaptive display mode. The former two are very close to the standard value of 6500K, while the screen is slightly cold in adaptive mode.
S6 When the screen is lit in a small area, the peak brightness of the screen can reach 784nit. Although this value is a level of insanity for the AMOLED screen, it only occurs in the automatic brightness mode, and the screen only lights up a small number of pixels. In the manual mode, the maximum brightness is only 348nit (adaptive display). In the automatic mode, The maximum brightness of full screen white can be 542nit, which is also very excellent.
As for the minimum brightness of the screen, S6 has reached 2nit. To put it simply, S6 will not be "blinded" by the screen even when it is used in a very dim environment, and what is more valuable is that even when it is set to the ultra-low brightness of 2nit, it can also provide 24bit color performance, and the overall image quality does not deteriorate due to the reduction of brightness.
As for the power consumption that many people are concerned about, although the S6 screen has a 2K level of high resolution, the power consumption is lower than that of S5 when the brightness is similar to that of S5.
Battery life:
Many people's doubts about S6 should rest on the battery life. Indeed, the battery capacity at 2550 mAh is even smaller than that of the previous S5, and the screen resolution is nearly doubled compared with that of S5. However, in actual measurement, the screen power consumption of S6 is lower than that of S5 when the brightness is similar, and the 14nm processor of S6 should also be able to reduce the burden of the battery.
After the actual test, the battery life of S6 is better than we expected - at least more than the current average value of smart phones, The 3G call time has reached 17.5. In schools, the web browsing time is nearly 9 hours, and the video playback time is 10.5 hours. Although the comprehensive 64 hour rating is not as good as the comprehensive 83 hour rating of S5, the S6 can still persist for two and a half days under the premise of a low use intensity of one hour each for daily calls, Internet surfing, and video playback.
UI and pre installed APP:
In the S6 generation, Samsung has significantly reduced TouchWiz, reduced many unnecessary apps, and added some new small functions. Some of the Galaxy S6 functions will be pushed to the Galaxy S5 with the update of Android 5.0, but after all, S6 still has exclusive functions, which is understandable.
The lock screen interface of Galaxy S6 is basically the same as that of Samsung mobile phones that have already pushed Android 5.0. By default, two notifications can be displayed, and more messages will be hidden. Only the corresponding APP icons will be displayed, and all notifications can be directly expanded by pulling up and down the notifications.
The lock screen interface provides shortcuts to the dialing keyboard and camera, but the user can directly open the camera by double clicking the HOME button in the black screen state.
S6 still provides a privacy mode using fingerprint encryption. After proper settings are made, users can press and hold the fingerprint identifier for half a second to enable it. The ease of use of the push fingerprint identifier is also much higher than that of the previous slide fingerprint identifier. After the privacy mode is enabled, users can encrypt the selected APP, pictures and other content, The corresponding content will be hidden after the privacy mode is turned off.
S6 also has an intelligent locking function. The user can set a trusted Bluetooth device or a "security zone", so that after the preset Bluetooth device is connected to the phone or the phone is located in the "security zone" through GPS, it can skip the screen to unlock and enter the system. Unfortunately, the "security zone" only supports setting through GPS, It cannot be set as a Wi Fi network.
S6 also has perfect theme functions that S5 does not have. S6 has preset three themes from the factory, and supports downloading through the app store, which also includes multiple themes (after all, Samsung is the sponsor of the movie). After changing the theme, the UI of wallpaper, icons, notification area and some original APPs (dials, contacts, SMS) will change.
In addition to the visual changes, the theme will also change the ring tones, notification tones, alarm bells, and so on.
S6 theme of Avenger Alliance.
On the main interface, S6 has the same operation and overall layout settings as S5, but you can set the layout of desktop icons to 4 × 4, 4 × 5, or 5 × 5. In addition, S6 wallpaper adds a bit of parallax angle dynamic effect, which is slightly similar to that on the iPhone.
Open the app drawer and you can see that the APP built in S6 has been greatly simplified. Although there are folders, the one-and-a-half pages of apps still look fresh. In addition to Google APP, S6 has also joined Microsoft's apps. It seems that the news of the two cooperation has happened before.
In the multitask interface, the user can directly open the multi window display mode through the button in the upper right corner of the APP.
Then, the setting interface adds some shortcuts to functions that are commonly used (at least in Samsung's opinion).
S6 also has a special smart butler, which is basically a fool like mobile phone maintenance tool. The whole function is divided into four parts. The current power, estimated endurance and estimated charging time are displayed in the battery project, and the user will be notified when abnormal power consumption occurs. The switches for power saving mode and super power saving mode are also here.
The storage management interface can scan unnecessary files in the system to free memory space, and the RAM management interface will display the currently enabled APP - although for a mobile phone with 3GB RAM, the memory usage does not seem to be too worrying.
The fourth part is about device security. KNOX function will establish an independent work area in which users can store data and APP. By default, it is closed. If users need it, they need to manually open it here. After the encryption mode is turned on, it has an impact on the running speed of the system, and it will slow down about a second when the phone is turned on, because the phone will monitor the system kernel in real time and provide protection to prevent tampering. In addition, S6 also pre installs anti-virus software supported by McAfee.
The slimmed TouchWiz on S6 runs as smooth as silk, without any stuttering or frame dropping. TouchWiz, once complained of being too fat, has brought unprecedented comfortable experience in Samsung mobile phones after being slimmed down vigorously, plus the exquisite effect of Android 5.0.
Performance:
S6 and S6 Edge completely abandoned Qualcomm's processors this time. All versions used the Exynos 7420 processor developed and manufactured by Samsung itself. The 7420 is the first mobile phone processor that uses 14nm. Compared with the 20nm of the competing Snapdragon 810, the 7420 theoretically consumes less power, generates less heat, and has better performance.
What is interesting this time is that Samsung's Exynos processor exceeded Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor in the maximum main frequency for the first time in the same period. The maximum main frequency of the A57 core of the 7420 can reach 2.1GHz, slightly higher than the 2.0GHz of the 810 processor. With 3GB RAM and Mali-T760 MP8 GPU, the performance of S6 looks quite abundant.
In addition, S6 natively uses the Android 5.0.2 system, which means that S6 has fully acquired 64 bit computing capability, and is also compatible with 32-bit apps. Among the scores of the 64 bit version of the rabbit evaluation, S6 can be described as a peerless, comprehensively crushing all smartphones using Snapdragon 805 and 810 on the market.
In the Basemark OS 2.0 test, S6 also performed at the top level, but slightly lagged behind LG G Flex with 810 processors by about 25%.
In addition, the 7420 achieved extremely excellent results in the CPU test of GeekBench 3. The gap between the 7420 and the second place G Flex 2 is far from the 0.1GHz main frequency gap.
Currently, only LG G Flex 2 is officially launched as a mobile phone with Snapdragon 810 processor. This mobile phone only uses a 1080p screen, The total number of pixels of the 1080p screen is only about half of that of the 2K screen, so the advantages brought by low resolution cannot be ignored in terms of the graphics performance on the open screen. The objective difference between the 7420 processor and 810 processor in terms of graphics performance is mainly reflected in the off screen performance.
In the closing run, the Mali-T760 MP8 of the 7420 successfully defeated the Adreno 430 of the 810 and the GX6450 of the A8 processor on the Apple iPhone 6/6 Plus. However, in the actual experience, S6 may not have much advantage over the 1080p competitor and the lower resolution iPhone 6 because of its higher screen resolution.
In terms of web browsing performance, Samsung's own browser's black technology has played a role again. S6 has won the crown of JavaScript performance test with slight advantages, but it has not left behind Nexus 6, which uses Snapdragon 805 processor.
As for the comprehensive evaluation of BrowserMark 2.1, S6, despite its ultra-high resolution screen, is still in a draw with the iPhone 6, which has always performed well. The screen resolution of the latter is slightly higher than 720p, and the total number of pixels is far lower than S6.
So from the above performance scores, it is not difficult to see that the Galaxy S6 (or S6 Edge with the same processor and the same screen resolution) is the most powerful smartphone that has been released. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor is far behind the powerful Exynos 7420 in this generation of competition. Before the release of Galaxy Note 5, The Galaxy S6 should be the first smart phone capable of stabilizing its performance.
Camera imaging:
The sensor used in Galaxy S6 this time is the IMX240 sensor from Sony, which has 16 million pixels and a native horizontal to vertical ratio of 16:9. S6 has also added an optical anti shake mirror group compared with S5, and its aperture has also been increased to F/1.9. With more excellent photography algorithms, Samsung has also focused on promoting S6 cameras this time. It seems that Samsung is confident about this series of improvements.
Among the camera functions of S6, what we most appreciate is the quick start ability. In any case, you can directly double-click the HOME button to open the camera for shooting in 1 second, and the camera's new UI is very simple. Most commonly used options can be easily found in the viewfinder, It also supports camera APP download - although currently only one camera APP is available for sports photography.
In terms of functionality, the "Pro" mode added by S6 is full of gimmicks, in which focusing, exposure compensation, white balance and ISO are open for users to freely adjust, and users can save the current settings as presets, so that they can quickly adjust when encountering similar scenes next time. The built-in color adjustment also has quite a wealth of options, Users can manually increase the brightness of the dark part of the picture while retaining the details of the bright part of the picture. Other adjustments such as contrast saturation, color temperature and color offset are also available, and they can also add a photo filter similar to Instagram.
For users who do not like to adjust parameters manually, the automatic mode of S6 is good enough. Especially when the automatic HDR function is turned on, the overall photographing operation is left to view and press the shutter.
S6 also has an interesting 3D photo function. The user looks for an object, points at it with his mobile phone, walks around the object, and S6 will automatically generate a 3D photo. When playing back, he can also directly use the motion sensor to adjust the perspective.
Other S6 features tracking and focusing ability, which is quite useful when shooting moving objects.
As for the quality of live photos, S6 has improved the image processing algorithm on the basis of Note 4. The S6 sample has abundant image sharpness, excellent noise control, no trace of noise reduction in the later stage of the image, excellent details, and moderate software sharpness, continuing Samsung's excellent tradition.
In addition, the automatic white balance of S6 is very accurate. Compared with the Galaxy series mobile phones in 2014, the color saturation is slightly reduced, and it is more inclined to faithfully restore the shooting environment. For the environment with large contrast, you can use the manual mode to obtain the best results, but even in the automatic mode, S6 can still take into account all parts of the picture and take an excellent picture.
HDR closing proof sheet:
HDR opening sample sheet:
The dynamic range of S6 sensor is quite large, and the addition of automatic HDR function does not slow down the imaging speed, but the HDR effect may not be obvious in some cases.
The resolution of S6 panoramic photos is extremely high. The vertical resolution can reach 3200 pixels when shooting vertically (1800 pixels when shooting horizontally). The powerful processor makes photo processing very fast. What the actual user needs to do is hold the phone and slowly turn in one direction.
Pre ordinary sample sheet:
Front HDR sample sheet:
Sample of wide-angle self timer mode:
On the whole, the front camera of S6 also performs quite well, with rich details, excellent noise control, slightly lighter color rendering than the rear camera, and also supports HDR photos. There is no obvious joint trace in the wide-angle self shooting mode. I like it.
Summary:
We have long been accustomed to Samsung upgrading its hardware specifications and adding software functions as usual every year. However, on S6, Samsung has made many subtractions, which naturally include abandoning replaceable batteries, storage expansion, and the waterproof and dust-proof capabilities on S5. It's a pity. Whether the high-end materials and excellent workmanship are worth it depends on the buyer.
In MWC 2015, Samsung S6 has earned enough attention. The competitor HTC ONE M9 has not made any breakthrough in the appearance design. LG G4 and Sony Xperia Z4 are both absent. At the same time, the significance of S6 is not only new design and new materials, The full line use of Samsung's own Exynos 7420 processor is more seen as a challenge from Samsung in the field of mobile phone processors to Qualcomm, which occupies a monopoly position in the market. More advanced manufacturing processes and better design bring super strong performance, which may really shake Qualcomm's current dominance in high-end processors, This time, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, which is comparable to the 7420, is still far from the market.
Of course, except for a strong processor, Samsung has not made any compromises on what it can use this time - S6 uses a new generation of faster 3GB LPDDR4 RAM, S6 is also the first mobile phone in the world to use the ultra-high speed UFS 2.0 memory chip. Of course, wireless charging and fast charging are also included in the S6's body. Some people may say that S6 cannot expand its memory, but the built-in storage of S6 starts from 32GB, which is enough for ordinary users. It is not enough. It is also good to add 64GB, although the price is a little expensive, But it is UFS 2.0 storage after all.
Complaints about S6 may still exist on the battery. Compared with S5, S6 has lost the ability to replace batteries, which Samsung has long used to ridicule Apple - although few S6 competitors have the ability to replace batteries, as for the cancellation of the three prevention capability, it should also make way for the upcoming S6 Active, provided that this machine is available.
advantage:
The machine body is of excellent workmanship, high-grade materials, excellent hand feel, and still small enough to be easily stuffed into the pocket;
At present, the strongest AMOLED screen on the market has the highest pixel density, contrast and glare visibility;
TouchWiz slim down successfully, runs smoothly, and has theme function;
The current performance is the strongest;
Excellent camera performance, excellent detail retention noise control and sharpness optimization;
The audio playback quality is excellent.
Disadvantages:
The battery life is not as good as S5;
The speaker volume is slightly lower than S5.
Original text/pictures from
Screen test results from
