Gadgetory

well Samsung's always had weird ideas about what we should do with our cell phones and it's been wrong a lot I don't want to wave my hand over the phone to answer a call thank you very much but this time Samsung says it's trying something different to perfect the things that users really care about and leave the rest aside and when it does weird things to at least make them awesome that's how you get this the Galaxy s5 to look at it the s5 is not actually that different from last year's ultra popular galaxy s4 it has a slightly larger 5.1 inch screen and is thus a little bigger but it's pretty much the same look the same layout the same everything but that's okay the 1080p screen is absolutely beautiful the phone is thin and light and it's as usable as any other big 5 inch phone which is to say not very but that's what you sacrifice for a screen like this and the look may not have changed but the phone feels really different it's still made of plastic and it feels like it belongs in a toy aisle when you compare it to the HTC One or the iPhone 5s or even the Moto X but it has this slightly dimpled soft touch back that feels a lot better than the gross slimy shell of the s4 is it great no it's not even good but it's better the one remarkable improvement is that the s5 is waterproof there's an awkward port flap covering up the charger but other than that there's no indication that this phone has been ruggedized at all but it has it doesn't seem like a big deal but it is since the s5 doesn't feel so precious I want to be using it in places I never would otherwise one thing Samsung's always paid attention to is battery life and it holds true here to the s5 lasts through a day even a day and a half without much trouble at all if you do run into problems there's a crazy ultra power saving mode that instantly turns your phone into a super basic but super long-lasting device so no matter what comes you'll probably be okay the last big thing manufacturers have to get right is the camera and Samsung does more or less it has a 16 megapixel camera that is capable of taking really great sharp pictures there's a neat real-time HDR mode which does wonders for shots with bright backgrounds and dark subjects they're also of course many of the same weird dual camera modes and crazy filters as always a second sensor in the camera makes auto focusing really fast and it'll even shoot 4k video if for some insane reason you want your phone video in 4k it has some real trouble in really low light but for most things you'd want to shoot with your phone the s5s camera is solid Samsung got the big mission-critical things right here the display and battery can check the camera mostly check and even though build quality is still pretty rough having a waterproof phone is at least worth something that's all great but as they always seem to the little things kill Samsung little things like the fact that every time the phone vibrates it sounds like an explosion and feels like something is rattling around inside the phone like the speaker which points quiet tinny audio away from your face like the fact that the fingerprint sensor the supposedly great addition that makes it super secure and easy to unlock your phone and pay for stuff is impossible to use unless you hold the phone in two hands and swipe oh so carefully right perfectly down the center of the home button like the multitasking and back buttons that bleed a circle of white light and just look bad Samsung has always over customized Android and its TouchWiz skin here on top of Android 4.4.2 is only a very slight improvement Samsung has cleaned up the TouchWiz look a lot and it's now a lot more consistent and a lot less ugly it still has just as many weird options and ideas they're all just better hidden now Samsung still preloads too many apps recolors just about everything and for some reason that is far beyond me still insists on making the phone bloop and ripple every time you touch it the phone is really fast thanks to a quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor but the software is so over animated that it can still feel laggy in spots magazine UX the Flipboard powered news reader that lives to the left of the home screen isn't as good as HTC blinkfeed TouchWiz just isn't as good as sense in general even if Samsung has made some steps in the right direction when there are 20 options in the notification pull down 61 items in the settings menu and 27 different camera settings Samsung's still doing something wrong here then there are a few good ideas that Samsung had that it just hasn't executed very well as health is a shockingly full-featured app that can do everything from track your steps to tell you how to exercise or eat better but it's really not well implemented you have to explicitly tell it to start tracking your steps and adding food or exercise gets really clunky the s5 even has a heart rate monitor if you're really into tracking yourself but it's really inconsistent and just doesn't make sense here the way it does on the gear fit luckily most of its problems are easy enough to hide or avoid except for the heart rate monitor which creates an ugly divot in the back of the phone and that's the thing about the s5 which cost $199 on contract on just about every carrier out there samsung got virtually all of the important things right and most of the things wrong are a nuisance not a deal-breaker but for all the boxes it takes s5 just isn't an interesting phone or one I want to use it doesn't impress or inspire the way the HTC One or the iPhone does and it doesn't offer something groundbreaking ly cool like the notifications or voice control of the Moto X the s5 is just good good enough even but I wanted better