Gadgetory

what's going on guys lawn here from Android Authority and for many years Samsung was highly criticized for their build quality and heavy use of plastic and each and every year we eagerly waited and hoped that that would all change well with the Galaxy s6 edge that change is now but it didn't just happen overnight over the last several months there was an evolution it all started with the Galaxy alpha one of Samsung's first Android smartphones to feature the use of metal but it was only along the frame a few months later came the Galaxy Note 4 and Note edge which were essentially blown-up Galaxy alphas with beefier specs and an S Pen more recently Samsung released their a series which were a bunch of low to mid range phones but they were the first crop of smartphones from Samsung to not feature a sliver of plastic and that leads us to today this is the Samsung Galaxy s6 edge the evolution is complete and it may have taken longer than we anticipated but you note they say some of the best things in life are worth waiting for while Samsung may have taken some inspiration from existing products there's no denying that the s6 edge is Samsung's most beautiful phone yet Samsung has finally given us a phone that is fitting of the flagship title and the high price tag that comes with it the s6 edge features a metal frame with chamfered edges that sandwich between two pieces of Gorilla Glass 4 and in the hand it feels solid the front and back glass features a translucent effect that gives the phone a very unique look and when the light hits it just right it can be very eye-catching although this is a new direction for Samsung there are still many design cues that tell you this is a Samsung device through and through the power button is in its typical location on the right with the volume buttons on the opposing side both of which are very meaty and tactile the home button flanked by capacitive recent apps and back button can be found along the front along with the usual sensors front-facing camera and a very bright notification LED light above the display the IR blaster and nano SIM slot can be found up top and the usual 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and single speaker have been shifted to the bottom with the micro usb-port sitting squarely in between the heart rate monitor also makes a return on the rear next to the camera speaking of the camera it does protrude quite a bit from the body of the phone but this isn't anything new we've seen plenty of other phones out there with protruding camera lenses and they've seemed to hold up just fine and so far the s6 edge seems to be doing the same the big elephant in the room with this year's design is the lack of expandable storage a removable battery and IP certification which means it's no longer dust and water resistant like it was on the s5 and some may view this as a step backwards some may not even care and to be honest some may not even really notice and Samsung has typically always been about function over form and some may argue that they've leaned really heavily on the function side of things over the last several years especially with all the hardware and software features that they piled onto the devices like the heart rate monitor air gestures and whatever else you can think of and this year they decided to go with form over function and it's really going to be up to you to decide whether that premium design is worth those sacrifices because as of right now Samsung seems to think so the star of the show on the s6 edge is really the display it's a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED screen with quad HD resolution and at a whopping 577 PPI this is Samsung's sharpest screen yet say what you will about quad HD but there's no denying that the screen is gorgeous obviously since it's Super AMOLED you get all the great characteristics that you come to expect like deep blacks high contrast ratios and saturated colors the color calibration can still be adjusted further in the settings if the default settings don't quite suit your tastes at 6 iron it's worth of brightness the screen is extremely vivid and easy to see in broad daylight and everything from web browsing games and video look absolutely fantastic on it what sets the s6 edge apart though and the reason for its name is the way the glass spills over onto the sides and disappears into the metal frame this time around it's on both sides of the display meaning you don't have to flip it upside down if you're left-handed like on the note edge and no longer are the edges a separate piece either and instead it is now one single display these edges bring about neat software tricks specific to the s6 edge itself which we will get into a little later on but what I really love about the curved edges is the swiping experience it's extremely smooth and seamless and plays very well with all these slide-out elements found all over Android 5.0 also when you're sliding elements in and out from the edges there's a certain illusion that is created it appears as if the UI is rolling in from underneath the glass as you swipe inwards and disappearing nicely as you push back outwards at 5.1 inches the s6 edge will still be within the realm of one-handed use for most people but what I think a lot of people are going to be really curious about is how the s6 edge feels in the hand is it awkward is it more difficult to hold and the answer to those questions is no it's not any more difficult to hold than a foam with a normal flat display and even though the edges run all the way down into the metal the actual display portion doesn't and what you're actually holding in the hand is metal and bezel so the screen is any more prone to accidental taps or presses than a phone with a regular flat screen and with the way that Samsung has implemented the features that take advantage of the edge design they're actually really difficult to trigger unless you're intentionally trying to do so it's been a while since we've seen an X and O's powered smartphone from samsung here in the States but this year Samsung opted to not go with Qualcomm for whatever reasons that maybe is discussion for another day but globally the s6 edge is being powered by Samsung's latest Exynos 7420 and 3 gigabytes of RAM with specs like these and the software optimizations that Samsung has made this year the s6 edge is just blazing fast Samsung has really taken their criticism to heart and the sluggishness that is typically associated with samsung devices is not present here the s6 edge flies through everything from navigating through the UI jumping in and out of applications multitasking gaming you name it the s6 edge does it all without skipping a beat the animations throughout the UI have also been cleaned up to make the phone feel just as fast as it should to show off this new processor even more Samsung has implemented a double tap on the home button that launches the camera and only 0.7 seconds now all isn't perfect here there is one glaring hiccup that I noticed that had to do with the my magazine homescreen swiping over into my magazine is now faster than ever as Samsung got rid of the slow animation but when swiping back out of it you'll have to pause for a second before you can swipe again it feels as if the my magazine home screen is not fully integrated into the touchwiz launcher like how Google now is with the Google now launcher or blinkfeed is on sense thus causing the delay this only occurs if you have my magazine enabled but if you don't you'll never notice it and since it's software related Samsung will surely fix it you should never let one bad apple spoil the bunch and that's exactly what this is and judging by the raw power and performance at the Exynos 7420 delivers there's no reason for Samsung not to stick to their guns with expandable storage and removable battery gone from the equation Samsung has done a few things to augment the hardware situation the galaxy s6 edge now starts off with 32 gigabytes of storage with 64 and a 128 gigabyte options also available wireless charging is now natively built-in and Samsung is utilizing a dual charging technology that allows the s6 edge to work with both WPC and PMA standards what that means in English is the s6 edge will work on pretty much any wireless charger you can find giving you a variety of charging options the heart rate monitor makes a return but is now in a vertical orientation and it seems to work more effectively because of it the fingerprint scanner on the home button has also been improved it's now a touch and hold type versus the cumbersome swipe method that was used previously and it's so much faster and easier to use than ever before as far as speaker quality is concerned the newly mounted bottom speaker is surprisingly loud for a single speaker and can easily be heard even in loud environments but it suffers from the same issue that all bottom mounted speakers suffer from the audio fire sideways and is easily muffled by the hand when in landscape regardless this is still one of the better sounding single firing speakers that Samsung has used as of late Samsung has also decided to ditch their ISO cell camera technology in favour of what might be considered a more traditional sensor but this change is really for the better it's a 16 megapixel sensor with OAS which just wasn't possible with ISO cell and it features a very wide aperture at F 1.9 the camera UI has been cleaned up and simplified and many users should find a lot quicker and easier to navigate you have basic camera settings like filters and HDR mode which now features an auto mode that takes the guesswork out of when you should use HDR camera modes are easily accessible by swiping to the right or tapping the mode button in the bottom right corner the camera modes have also been slimmed down to just a few like panorama selective focus and a pro mode for full manual controls with the option to download more a new one called virtual shot has been added allowing to take a full 360 degree view of an object and it looks really cool on the viewfinder but it's not something that can easily be shown on social media the picture quality is the most important and the camera absolutely delivers pictures are super sharp colorful and full of detail and the shutter speed is extremely quick and more often than not I got exactly the image I wanted on the first try the tracking autofocus is a nice touch especially for moving objects like cars or pets and the F 1.9 aperture gives off a natural bokeh effect that just can't be beaten by fancy software tricks that some cameras out there are trying to compensate with HDR also works well on this camera to bring out some extra detail it's not overly aggressive like some other cameras but sometimes you'll be hard-pressed to see much of a difference between the standard shot and the HDR shot 4k video recording is also possible and even though video stabilization is disabled in this mode the built-in OAS prevents the video from becoming overly shaky the camera is also pretty phenomenal in low-light and what I've realized is you can't always trust what you see in the viewfinder the viewfinder may show a grainy and colorless image but once you take the photo it's a completely different result and that's a testament to how well Samsung's camera software handles post-processing the low-light images may appear slightly muddy in the darker spots of the photos but the post-processing does a great job of cleaning up the excess noise providing for an overall sharp looking image especially at the point of focus Samsung cameras have always historically been pretty good but Samsung has definitely raised the bar here and it's going to be up to other Android manufacturers to keep up battery life has been a major area of concern since the announcement of this current generation Galaxy S line as the battery capacity will be deemed small at 2600 milliamp hours especially when you take the quad HD display into account one thing to be aware of though is the Exynos 7420 features a 14 nanometer process that is much more energy efficient but the battery life merely just catches up to phones with lower resolution displays that's not to say that the battery life on the s6 edge is bad because this is exactly the type of improvements that we need in order to improve battery life versus just slapping a larger battery into a phone the s6 edge will definitely get through a full day of use and if you're used to charging your phone every night this won't be an issue but you shouldn't expect the screen on time to go very far beyond the 4 hour mark among the many improvements to the hardware also comes many improvements to the software the s6 edge is running on Android 5.0 lollipop with a completely revamped version of TouchWiz it's lighter it's cleaner and most importantly it's fast Samsung finally got rid of all these slow animations like the folders for example the settings menu is no longer the convoluted mess it once was and all the blip and blue nature sounds that haven't made any sense for the longest time have all been replaced with more simplified click sounds the color scheme is still pretty much the same as before but it's more pastel like an appearance so it's not quite as in your face and the beauty of TouchWiz now is that you can theme it the built-in theme engine allows for a complete UI change from the icons wallpapers sounds native applications and UI elements like the notification shade the options right now are pretty bare but as time goes on you can expect more themes to be available Samsung didn't stop there though there's 40 percent less blow over previous versions of TouchWiz but some staple apps like s health and s voice are still present but s voice is no longer tied to the home button and a lot of these apps can easily be disabled or uninstalled a lot of the gimmicky features like air gestures and toolbox are also gone but the more useful staple features like multi window smart stay and palm swipe to capture have been kept in tact one of the software features that many probably won't talk about is the keyboard Samsung's keyboard has been completely redone from the ground up it's extremely accurate and easy to type on and it's one of the first keyboards that I've used in a long time that I didn't feel compelled to replace right away with the Google keyboard in a lot of ways it's very comparable to the Google keyboard in terms of its accuracy and word prediction and that really says a lot about how much time Samsung has spent on revitalizing their software now we can't talk about software without mentioning the features that take advantage of the s6 edges curved glass these can be set to be either on the left or right side of the edge depending on if your left or right handed but the four features that Samsung has implemented are edge lighting people edge information stream and night clock with edge lighting the edge of the screen will light up when you receive calls or notifications and can be dismissed by simply placing your finger on the heart rate monitor also if the people edge is enabled the colors will light up accordingly to what has been assigned to each individual contact speaking of the people edge this feature allows you to add up to 5 of your favorite contacts that are easily accessible from a swipe on the top portion of the display from here you can call or text them and if you have a missed call or text message from any of your contacts it'll place additional tabs on the edge of the display so you can easily respond with information streams this will allow you to view various different streams like Twitter Yahoo News and sports scores for example tapping on a stream will take you into its respective app if you want to see more and you can also download additional streams if you'd like the implementation however is a little bit clunky as you have to swipe quickly back and forth across the edge to activate it and it just doesn't feel intuitive the final feature is called night clock and this is pretty self-explanatory the edge can be used as a night clock and you can set the hours at night for it to automatically come on so that it's on when you go to bed and off when you wake up in the morning some may view these features as gimmicky and personally I think people edge and night clock are going to be the ones that people use the most because what they display like this I don't think very many people are going to want to set their phones facedown in order to take advantage of the edge lighting and like I said the implementation of the information stream is just a little bit clunky and not very intuitive and I think it would have been better to maybe see a DoubleTap to activate the information stream versus the awkward swipe gesture that they have going on right now but like most Samsung features these can easily be ignored or completely disabled if you don't want them but if you really think about it not utilizing any of these features sort of defeats the purpose of the edge design in regards to price you can expect the galaxy s6 edge to be priced at a premium of the s6 so far only t-mobile and 18t have come forward with pricing with t-mobile coming in just shy of seven hundred and eighty dollars for the 32 gigabyte model and it only goes up accordingly based on storage the 18 t version will be available at is starting cost of 815 dollars and we can expect the remaining carriers to be priced similarly as you may have already seen the s6 edge will be available in four different colors which may vary depending on carrier but with all the different storage options and colors available users will have plenty of choices to pick from the edge has grown up and is no longer the experiment that it was on the note edge and we'll be seeing the s6 edge being marketed just as heavily as the regular s6 if not more so the edge is now one of many parts of Samsung's new identity going forward and I can't help but think that the s6 was more or less a safety net for Samsung just in case the edge doesn't sell so who knows maybe next year we'll be back to one phone and the edge will be a default feature as for this year you'll have to ask yourself the question to edge or not to edge as for me I'm going with the edge as always guys thanks so much for watching this video if you did enjoy it please give it a thumbs up down below we definitely appreciate it and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already and if you want to see more make sure to check out the links over here on the side and make sure to stay tuned here too and your authority because there's definitely a lot more coverage coming of all the latest flagships the s6 edge the s6 the m9 anything you can think of will be covering it all and don't forget to check out the website as well for more in-depth coverage because we are your source for all things Android