The Galaxy S6 is Samsung’s flagship product, at present, but is it any more revolutionary than its predecessors? And more importantly, does it justify the hefty price tag?
To be honest, I do not like the nomenclature some of the mobile companies use while launching a new product. The numbers keep going up, and after a point, you forget if it was version 4.1.123 or 4.1.321 which had promised clarity like never before. If Samsung wanted to forget the criticism its Galaxy S5 garnered for not offering anything new, it had a lot to invest in the S6 – both faith and money. A few other brands from neighbouring countries have been doing really well in the Indian market, so Samsung had to make sure that there is no way the new product is a dud.
Let’s get on with the look and feel of the product first. Most of Samsung’s phones have looked pretty similar to each other, and the Korean giant wanted to break the myth with the Galaxy S6. The new flagship model comes in full aluminium trim, but it also looks as if Samsung missed yet another opportunity to make this product stand out. The phone, despite having a protruding camera lens at the back, looks like a cheap knock-off of Samsung, Apple, Nokia and HTC.
The phone lacks some basic features like a removable battery and a microSD slot, something, which has become a norm with new age smartphones. The phone is powered by a Exynos 7420 processor which has four 1.5GHz ARM Cortex A53 cores and four 2.1GHz Cortex A57 cores which allows the phone to find a perfect balance between performance and power consumption. Like most of the flagship phones out there, it also has 3GB of RAM. Despite not having an extra memory card slot, the company compensates by providing different memory options, and the base variant comes with a non-expandable memory of 32GB. The 5.1-inch Gorilla Glass 4 screen has a QHD display and 1440×2560 pixel size.
The home button of the Samsung S6 has a fingerprint sensor, so you just need to touch it with your thumb and the screen will come alive. You can run two apps simultaneously in a split-screen mode, which makes it very handy at times. Some of the Microsoft’s apps are preloaded and work perfectly in sync with the Google’s platform.
Moving to the camera – which is something Samsung proudly boasts of – it is a 16MP lens with f1.9 aperture which absorbs 34% extra light in dark situations than the S5. Apart from the HDR mode, it also has a stability mode where the automatic tracking mode follows faces and other moving objects without needing to refocus. The front camera is a 5MP one, which also has an HDR mode and brilliant low light performance. With mobile phone batteries now closing in at the 3,000mAh mark, Samsung S6’s 2,550mAh battery is not very impressive and doesn’t last long with a substantial time spent using social media and other apps on a regular basis. Everything said and done, this is a phone that doesn’t justify a price tag of RS. 49,900 for the 32GB variant. Not to us for sure.
