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Samsung Galaxy S5 Review!

2014-04-16
hey what is up guys on kb HD here and this is the samsung galaxy s5 so right off the bat we can see this phone looks really similar to the galaxy s4 from last year and as upgraded specs inside of course which are virtually identical to the one m8 except for one or two things but it keeps a very similar design to the galaxy s4 though it is a little bit bigger now to fit that 5.1 inch 1080p display and the slightly bigger bezels so awkwardly enough one of the biggest complaints with the new designs about the backing which a lot of people aren't a fan of I mean I called it I call the gold version of this phone the band-aid Edition but basically it has all these little dimples across the back of this soft touch material turns out this is easier to grip and hold in the hand than the slippery metal of the HTC One m8 so while the m8 might be a little bit heavier and made entirely of metal the s5 is easier to hold because it's lighter and the button placement is much better you got the power button on the side now so you don't have to shimmy your hand and it has actual sides to grip even though those sides are made of Samsung's fake metal oh and the back happens to still be removable so you get not only microSD card expansion up to 128 extra gigabytes but you also get access to that twenty eight hundred million power battery and something you might notice while taking that back off is this seal all the way around the inside of the cover of this phone this is to make the internals or the whole phone ip67 certified so ip67 the six means totally protected against dust and the seven means water-resistant for limited periods of time which is useful to some people but you'll notice the seal does not go over the speaker which sounds alright but maxes out pretty low in volume compared to the HTC One but I guess you know everything is quiet compared to the one so the full video comparison between the s5 and the one are coming soon but bottom line is this thing is water-resistant and a lot of people are gonna like that but also to protect the phone from dust and water they needed to add probably my biggest gripe with the design of the entire phone this freaking flap at the bottom that you have to pry off every time you want access to the USB port every time you want to charge that means you can't use any battery cases because you have to pry that thing out the way all the time it just gets in the way when you're plugged in and to top it all off every time you unplug the phone from the wall it reminds you to close the flap every single time bottom line I'm not a fan of the flap although I guess it is necessary to keep that certification but other than that this is really a familiar design for anyone who's used previous Galaxy devices especially the Galaxy s4 and you'll notice they've changed the capacitive buttons up front so now really the only face change besides the bigger bezels is you have that multitasking button and back button so you can hold down the multitasking button to act as a mini button and right between those capacitive buttons is the fingerprint sensor slash home button I'm basically going to cover everything by saying it's not really that great first of all it makes the home button a little bit mushy ER and less clicky than before and second of all much more importantly you have to swipe your finger perfectly vertically along the center of the pad for it to work you don't just put your finger there you have to swipe it perfectly vertically for it to work so yes you can register a bunch of finger prints and secure your phone or your PayPal payments or whatever you want to do and it'll work if you take your time with it but it's difficult to use correctly and it's not always accurate when you don't swipe your finger at just the right speed at the right angle which does by the way require holding the phone with one hand and swiping with the other so you need two fingers to unlock your phone and sometimes I'd actually go to unlock my phone with the fingerprint on and it would work and then I'd unlock it a little bit later and it just wouldn't even work it doesn't even ask just lets me swipe to unlock and get in without my fingerprint and that was it so yeah I turned off the fingerprint recognition stuff before the end of it the first day I used it really was a pain but anyway once you unlock the phone and get in you are greeted with TouchWiz on top of Android 4.4 and it's all right now it's definitely not my cup of tea it's not my favorite but I prefer it to previous versions they definitely made some adjustments and cleaned it up and made changes that I like I know they've shaken that inspired by nature stuff from TouchWiz on the galaxy s3 but they still have these nature sound effects these bloop and noises that I've disabled add to disable them pretty much immediately for my own sanity I wish they would clean up this nouns and actually I think I would have a surprisingly big affect on how you perceive the user interface but other than that thanks to the specs the s5 is pretty quick its responsive there isn't really any lag in most places but when you do find lag like in the gallery for example it's bad like I mean for a high-end flagship phone with monster specs like this the phone really does have the slowest gallery so when you do find lag you'll notice it but TouchWiz is pretty much exactly as you'd expect colourful big bold and constantly pushing Samsung features one of those Samsung features being my magazine which is the pane that sits to the left of your home screens like blinkfeed or Google now it's kind of this news aggregator like blink feed and just talks to Flipboard basically pulls in some cool stories very beautiful imagery and uses the entire 5.1 inch display I mean it does what it's supposed to it's just a matter of whether you want it there or not also it can't be disabled or hidden like blinkfeed ken now another notable thing here is the settings menu actually I thought it was in my galaxy s4 review that I mentioned that Samsung really needs to change the way they organise their settings basically because there were so many and they needed a search box but this is absolutely not what I meant I didn't mean put them all in a grid of 60 something colorful icons that I have to scroll through to find what I want holy crap there are just way too many for that so I maintain Samsung should really find a better way to handle all of the device settings than this there's a grid view there's a list view either way there are just too many uh-huh but yeah I don't know I guess that you touch was just isn't my favorite plenty of people will not have a problem with it at all obviously if you've used the galaxy s3 or you've used the galaxy s4 and you like it this experience here will be very similar and there are other plenty of new useful features the editable quick notification settings are really useful there's also a feature called toolbox that lets you store any five apps in this bubble that you can move around and it gives you quick access from that bubble to those apps anywhere so no matter where you are you just tap it and it brings up your favorite app list it's nifty I actually left that on and use it for a quite a bit so these are the types of things that will get you to like the phone more and even if the things that you like aren't enabled by default you'll probably find something buried in the settings somewhere that you can and making a much more enjoyable user experience now I mentioned at the beginning of the video that the Galaxy s5 has basically identical specs to the One m8 except for a few key areas one of those key areas is sitting on the back here of this phone you'll notice this lens protrudes from the body a bit it's that 16 megapixel camera this camera is excellent and I'll immediately go on record and say it's one of the top 5 smartphone cameras you can get right now it is very very good now maybe it's because I spent too much time with the 4 megapixel camera on the one m8 but basically the shots I'm taking I'm noticing a few key characteristics again here one very very detailed tons of resolution and detail at 16 megapixels and 2 there are very saturated photos and colorful in pretty much any conditions so the camera interface is pretty standard Samsung stuff not you know too overly simple you know Samsung next to give you a ton of options there's lots of effects and things you can play with and change you can take 4k video you have software stabilization you have HDR the whole deal you have something here also called selective focus which again might ring a bell from the One m8 I've done a little bit differently here basically it instructs you to take a photo of something close with an auto focus background and it takes a pair of photos for you one that focuses on the foreground and one that focuses on the background but lets you pick between them using just one button for a near focus or far focus but what I really liked was actually the pan focus button which actually lets you grab everything in focus at the same time which can actually be really useful and let you get a whole shot a whole composition right through some software processing so here we have another version you can see near focus far focus and then pan focus obviously it's not perfect and that's a a pretty artificial effect but the ability to switch this stuff on the fly on your phone with a single button press is pretty neat I think a lot of people like that so basically I found myself taking a lot more pictures with the galaxy s5 just because of how good the camera looks how good the pictures look on the phone so there's an awesome display combined with a 16 megapixel shot and that really lets you grab detail from the smallest things and blow them up the images look really razor sharp now obviously if you zoom in a ton you'll see smaller imperfections and laura's but this stuff you'll have trouble doing on pretty much any other smartphone camera 16 megapixels gives you a lot of room to play with it's not 41 it's not 50 but you guys know I love pixels and it's it's awesome to see this much detail in color in a quick shot like this and the ability to shoot 4k video is a sweet bonus so a nice job on the camera Samsung but hold up a minute what is below the camera what is going on there that is not an extra depth sensor or anything fancy for imaging that is actually a heart rate monitor yeah a special hardware to measure your heart rate obviously s-health is still a thing that Samsung does so they've plugged into that sensor on the back of the phone and essentially if you hold your finger there for a few seconds it'll give you a reading of your heart rate in beats per minute now I don't actually know how accurate this is because I don't have another heart rate sensor to control but it's a neat feature it's a neat demo to bolster the S health portfolio of things it can do it's a pedometer and Harvey monitor whatever its s health so anyway yeah if you're not getting the picture by now basically the galaxy s5 is an improvement in a lot of ways over the Galaxy s4 and a lot of smartphone enthusiasts tend to see that as I guess a bad thing because they really didn't like the galaxy s4 or they were expecting a bigger change but for the many millions of people who will inevitably buy this phone that's actually great the galaxy s4 was a solid phone and this phone improves on it in a lot of important ways so so what if this phone looks like a band-aid in gold get it in black or get it in white get it in blue you know it's great it's a high-end phone with a ton of features its water-resistant it has an excellent battery life that nobody should have any problems with it has a beautiful large colorful bright display easily the best mo LED display in the business on a smart phone right now it's lightweight it's made of some cheap materials sure but you're coming from the s4 so you're probably not gonna notice and really the only real downside I have with TouchWiz is or with the galaxy s5 is TouchWiz and its quirks and I guess the speaker a little bit too but TouchWiz will continue to evolve and right now the galaxy s5 really is the galaxy s4 s that I called it in my first impressions video so don't mind me I'm just sit back over here and quietly cross my fingers waiting for a google play edition of this song because the new google camera came out today and it's great and i like stock Android and I feel like I would really enjoy a Google Play edition galaxy s5 but in the meantime there it is this is the Samsung Galaxy s5 thanks for watching guys and I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace
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