Well the Samsung Galaxy S5 was officially announced today and the world has forever changed again. Wait, no it hasn't. But if you've been foaming about the phone for the last few months, it has. I swear Galaxy fanboys have gotten worse than iPhone fanboys... but I digress
Let's see how it stacks up in the most ridiculous (and long) overview ever.
It's less ugly!
Holy crap! I almost like the look of this one. This is the best looking Galaxy S phone I've seen. Not anywhere close the the best looking phone. It's about a 6-6.5/10 Especially after I learned that the dimpled back is actually just textured polycarbonate. It would have been nice if it was some sort of softouch material.
Not going to list anything because I'm lazy, but on paper, of course it looks great. They always do, but that never really translates as you would think into every day performance. Like the S4, the "big numbers" are apt to have some shortcomings.
On the top, we have a 2.5ghz quad core running a 5.1" 1920x1080 display. So it has a worse PPI (432) than the Galaxy S4 (441), which is unacceptable because I often hold my phone against my nose while viewing content.... that was sarcasm, but someone is gonna use that argument. Seriously though, the only downside to this is rather than thinner bezels, you get an overall larger, heavier phone. Ugh.
Water and dust resistant, which means 1) Resistant does not mean proof. No underwater photos, but you can snapchat while taking a leak without much worry (I'm not the only one who does that, right?) and 2) You have a bunch of annoying rubber things you have to jam in all the holes to make it that way.
A 16mp camera capable of shooting 4k (cool?) with a larger sensor than the note or galaxy s4. Maybe this one will be able to have some decent low light performance. I've seen the 4k video from a Note 3 and it's... okay. Not really a huge difference when viewing on a 4k tv because its a frackin phone. Still no OIS, which is will ensure your stunted 4k will also be shaky as all hell.
USB 3.0. Fuck. Yes.
This all leads to the thing people LOOOOVE about the Samsung Galaxy line. MicroSD up to 64gb, which you're going to need because of the worst feature of the phone:
Touchwhiz.
Finally they have cut out the ugly from the Android skin, but they've added so much other useless crap, it now takes almost 8gb of your on-board storage. For a base 16gb model, thats half of your storage. That's disgusting, especially since they're touting it's "streamline design". This is the heaviest, most idiotic skin available today. They've kept a slew of the throwaway features of the last iteration, and added more garbage to the collection. A heart rate monitor under the camera. Anyone with half a brain knows that unless you're using a chest strap, your reading will be terribly inaccurate. Fingerprint scanner because everyone has one now. They've made their own flipboard type thing... I guess they never asked how that worked out for HTC last year... *spoiler alert* it didn't.
Let's wrap this up
Just as I suspected, it's a slightly better version of the S4 on paper. It looks a bit nicer, its bulkier, and touchwhiz has graduated from being a bloated ugly atrocity to being a less ugly, more bloated atrocity. Samsung fanboys will sing songs of praise until the S6 is announced. Don't get me wrong, this is not a terrible phone, but it's looking like a disappointingly small step forward. I don't see this being the "phone of the year", but I do see it outselling everything... even though we will most likely see better offerings from HTC or LG later this year.