The long anticipated Samsung Galaxy S5 finally touched grounds in Amman, Jordan in an event held by Samsung LEVANT to reveal the device, during the presentation of all it's new features I got to spend about 15 minutes with the phone so here is my first impressions of Samsung's latest flagship:
So first of all the new specs including the revamped Exynos 5 Octa 5422 processor (Quad-core 1.9 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7), 2GB of RAM, AC WiFi and the 16 MP shooter... nothing too insane under the hood here but definitely in the top tier, after all this is a high end flagship phone! on the front it's rocking a slightly larger 5.1" 1080p AMOLED display -bigger than the 5.0" Galaxy S4 -, the back of the phone feels a lot like the soft touch on the back of the Note 3 but without the stitches around the edges and they added a dimples-pattern on the back and I'm sure how to feel about this, but anyway the device is going to be available in four colors; the back with the black front, the white which has white bezels, the blue and it has black bezels & finally the gold.
Despite it's removable back and totally expandable storage and swappable 2,800 mAh battery the Galaxy S5 is IP67 certified, the 6 means it's totally dust proof -no matter how small the grain- and the 7 means it's water resistant but not waterproof (Big difference) but what's really impressive about this is that as I said the main components are still removable which only leaves me to worry about the speaker quality but I'll get to that when I get a review unit.
It took me a couple of minutes before I actually noticed that the font buttons layout has changed so now it's Back, Home and Multitasking button (Right to left) no more capacitive mini button, all the mini buttons will be in the software now on the screen. Also Samsung has put a finger print sensor in the home button which you need to swipe to use and once you're setup, you can log into certain secured apps like PayPal or even unlocking the phone itself, I'm not sure if we can use the scanner to log into other apps we use like Facebook, Instagram or even your accounts on Chrome but I'll do more investigation about that also when I get a review unit to abuse in my free time.
The S5 packs a 16 MP sensor and a new dedicated image signal processor which makes this shooter faster than the one you can find on any smartphone currently available at an average of 0.3 seconds to focus and it does show when you snap a couple of pictures, playing with the camera it definitely did feel like a quality high end phone camera and this is no surprise coming from Samsung really, the Galaxy S4 had a great camera and the note 3 had an even better camera and it only makes sense for the one found on the S5 to be a step up from it's predecessors, it takes UHD video as well and it has an awesome HDR processing, selective focus modes and SUPER FAST burst mode that took 30 shots in about three and a half seconds and a whole bunch more features, as we know Samsung likes to throw every feature in the world into their camera, we will be putting the camera under the microscope (once more) when I receive the review unit.
Overall messing around with the the Galaxy S5 I got the feeling that the performance is a little more smoother -as if the S4 wasn't that smooth already- but with 4.4.2 Android KitKat comes a lot of software changes, TouchWiz is now much much flatter and there are a bunch of tweaks here and there, yes it's still filled with Samsung's bloatware -which is not exactly a bad thing- but it's been tuned down a little.
Of course there is much more new stuff from Samsung but all to be covered in-depth in my full review (For the last time I promise) which I will get to when the review unit arrives, What do you think of the Samsung Galaxy S5? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!
Samsung Galaxy S5: First Impressions
Views:
Category:
Samsung
