Gadgetory

hello I'm the West awaken CNET's we're here with the Samsung Galaxy s5 we're going to take a look at some of the new software features and some of the new camera tricks Samsung describes the new interface for the s5 as very clean and that all begins with the lockscreen which gets a cool new bubbly animation once you unlock it you'll see that things are looking a little bit neater a little bit flatter and a little bit square as well one thing that's new is this new settings menu so if I open the Settings app here you can see that everything is a lot more pleasingly laid out it feels a little bit less dense than this menu used to something else I want to mention is what Samsung calls the OneTouch toolbox that is this movable little dot down here and whenever you tap that it brings up a series of shortcuts if you don't like it though you can turn it off entirely as well as a slightly new look for the icons of all the regular default apps there's a new notification panel that again looks a lot cleaner you get these rounded icons along the top if you're thinking of giving this phone to children you might want to turn on kids mode this basically puts the phone into a version that's safe for kids and it has all these kid-friendly versions of apps so if I tap this little monster with the camera here you get this kid-friendly camera software so there are some nice aesthetic changes but what about this phone is going to make your life more easy on a practical level well fire up the settings menu you might be interested to check out this power saving mode and if you turn that on it turns the phone's display monochrome it dims the whole display and it restricts the Galaxy s5 to just a handful of basic apps including the phone and messages samsung says this mode will get you 24 hours of standby time with the phone's last 10 percent of battery finally I just want to mention a little bit about the camera this is a 16 megapixel camera samsung says it's got a sensor that's even bigger than the s4 and it's got a couple of tricks up its sleeve one of those is a very fast autofocus samsung says this phone focuses in naught point 3 seconds and that's the fastest ever autofocus on a smartphone testing it out here in quite dim tradeshow conditions it definitely seems to be finding its point to focus very swiftly so like other Samsung Galaxy phones this thing has so many camera modes it will be impossible to cover them all right now but one thing I do want to focus on focus get it is this the selective focus mode now what this does is it lets you select your subject and then when you take the picture it automatically blurs out everything else keeping it out of focus and the idea is that you get a more professional photo once the photos processed you can then choose what part of the photo you want to be in focus we found that when we were trying it in here it didn't work particularly well all the time but we did manage to get a couple of nice snaps so maybe what it demands is a bit of trial and error Samsung's also added a new HDR feature and what that means is that when you turn it on you can see how your HDR photo will look you don't have to wait until you've actually taken the photo what do you think of the galaxy s5 are you tempted to buy re feeling a little underwhelmed let me know and check out cnet.com for much more from Mobile World Congress