A review of a Galaxy S6 and O2 (service and signal)

Disclaimer:

I'm not associated with either of the two companies. I have used the phone for a week (7 days) as my primary device. I'm not a power user, I simply do a bit of web browsing, music streaming on spotify and video watching on YouTube before I go to bed.

Build quality:

The device feels very nice to hold, if you can keep hold of it. The aluminium construction feels, in my opinion, very premium, however it adds a significant amount of slipperiness to the phone that otherwise wouldn't be there. The glass back certainly doesn't help either when you have it resting on your jeans. It slides off very quickly. I very rarely drop my phones, but I've dropped this a lot. When I was originally considering the device, I didn't think it'd bother me too much, however I've had to buy a case for it. I much prefer the Note 4 approach, being totally honest.

Software & Performance:

Quicker they said it was. Less bloated they said it was. Once I finished disabling bloat, I had half of the amount of apps! It's slow, it's clunky, it looks, in my opinion, horrible. Everything you expect to happen, doesn't. For example, in the dialer, you would expect to slide left and right to get to contacts and the call logs. This doesn't happen. Instead, I always end up sending a message. All of the added features are gimmicks - they're not helpful and they're all disabled. Even when I have all of the apps closed, there's only usually 600mb of free memory left. That's a third of what I have left on my OnePlus One. This results in a choppy experience. It's sluggish, I get crashes, apps are constantly reloading, web pages take a while to load on the same wifi. In all, it's significantly slower than my OPO. The camera app, for example, may launch in 0.6 seconds, however it's not always on straight away. Some times, I can wait a couple of seconds before I see an image on screen.

The fingerprint sensor is terrible. There's nothing more to say. It reads my finger 3/10 tries. I no longer use it.

Camera:

Definitely the best part of this phone. There's plenty of detail, dynamic range and exposure is top notch. It has great point and shoot capabilities, and if you go manual, you get even better control. I thought the one on the OnePlus One was good - the one on the S6 blows it out of the water. Here are a few examples of what you can expect from it (they're completely untouched)

http://s11.postimg.org/d081xs3kj/20150915_153850.jpg

http://s11.postimg.org/in4ev9637/20150915_160115.jpg

http://s11.postimg.org/7m99q8dub/20150915_160136_1.jpg


Screen:

It looks amazing. Great colours, superb detail. But no better than a good 1080P screen. I simply cannot tell the difference, and I have 20/20 vision. I'd have preferred better battery life. I don't use my OnePlus and think damn, this simply doesn't look as good.

Battery life:

One word: horrendous. I get about 5 hours of screen on time with my OnePlus. With the S6, I'm struggling to get 3. Fast charging simply doesn't make up for it. If I do anything intensive like navigation or simple games, I can kill it in a couple of hours. Lowest screen on time I've had is 1 hour and 37 minutes (10% battery left). That was using it to navigate around Cardiff and spotify while doing so.

O2 reception:

I thought Three was bad. I barely get 3G (4G is a joke), and when I do, it's terribly slow. Most of the time it's 2G and GPRS. Obviously, it depends where you live, but I've found O2 to be behind the competition wherever I go.

Overall, I wouldn't rate the S6 at all. There are much better phones out there. I now realise how much better stock android is. All these great specs, and it's still slower than an iPhone 6 and a OPO. Quite funny really... I recommend trying the phone before you commit, like I have (14 days no quibbles on O2 contract).

Any questions, feel free to ask :)