Why Samsung Galaxy S6 could be the best smartphone of 2015
Over the last year, Samsung's smartphone business has been free falling. Cornered by nimble upstarts like Xiaomi in price-sensitive markets such as China and India and bludgeoned by the world's most revered gadget - the iPhone - Samsung's profits have been falling faster than the fortunes of the Starship Enterprise. But come Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, the South Korean giant has flexed its muscles, showing the world why it is holding onto the title of being the largest smartphone maker in the world since 2011.
After the rather grotesque Galaxy S5 (have you seen the band-aid like rubberised/plastic finish on it?), a major design overhaul was a given for the Galaxy S6. And boy, like a cornered tiger, Samsung has come back with a gorgeous head-turning device that would be envy of any smartphone brand on the planet.
To achieve this, Samsung did the unthinkable. While many expected it to produce a phone made out of premium materials like metal, it pulled all stops by having a unique mirror like finish on the back, and also dumped signature features of the Galaxy S smartphone line, which include a removable battery and memory card expansion.
Now, naysayers will say that there are design influences from Apple's iPhone, but hey, no one else is bringing out phones with curved edges on both sides. The curved screen not only looks cool, but Samsung has fleshed out some interesting use-cases.
At the unveiling, Samsung also dared to take on Apple head-on. It claimed that the metal frame on the Galaxy S6 is 50 per cent stronger than any other phone in the market. It also showed off the camera of the Galaxy S6, where it pitted it against the iPhone 6 Plus. It is worth noting that the iPhone 6 Plus sets the benchmark when it comes down to smartphone photography, but Samsung's image samples were clearer and brighter. Wildly.
Samsung went on to claim that the battery on the Galaxy S6, which is vastly larger than the one on the iPhone could charge in half the amount of time.
Samsung's outlandish confidence in challenging the iPhone 6 head-on is evidence that it might be onto something as normally tech companies avoid such blatant comparisons.
The South Korean firm is so confident with its technology that for the first time since 2011 it has dropped Qualcomm's silicon altogether from its flagship phone. Now, Qualcomm is known to make the best processors used on Android smartphones, however, the Galaxy S6 is using an in-house solution.
Even the impressive Galaxy Note 4 uses a Qualcomm CPU.
The Exynos 7420 chipset has eight cores based on the latest technology from ARM and it supports 4G networks and is manufactured using a state of the art 14nm FinFET technology, which is an industry first. Samsung claims this processor is 20 per cent faster than the Galaxy Note 4, which in its own right was quite the speed demon and is more importantly 35 per cent power efficient.
While previously too, Samsung's Galaxy S models have used its in-house Exynos silicon, the phone-maker has always adopted Qualcomm's silicon for markets like the US. Additionally, the Galaxy S6 is the first phone to use DDR4 RAM, which is significantly faster than DDR3. Its subsidiaries have also come up with a fast memory system that blends elements from SSD and eMMC technologies to come up with a state of the art memory solution for the Galaxy S6.
Apart from Apple, no other mobile phone company in the world has such confidence in its own solutions. Heck, even Apple only designs its technologies, but in many cases the manufacturing is handled by Samsung's subsidiaries for the iPhone.
In fact, for many, the fact that Samsung was not able to bring its various businesses together for its signature product was startling. Samsung is responsible for creating and manufacturing the core technological elements that are found in a smartphone. From the processor, display, battery to the memory that goes in the smartphone - Samsung does it all in-house.
It develops the technology and also manufactures for sale to external parties like Apple. No one else does this as well as Samsung and that is the reason till now Apple is dependent on Samsung for the manufacturing of the processor that goes inside the iPhone.
This year, by the looks of it, Samsung has built the phone that's going challenge the iPhone. Even if it does not manage that, the Galaxy S6 could very well prove to be the best Android phone of the first half of the year.
We are not being hyperbolic about this because Samsung's Galaxy S smartphones in more ways than one have been responsible for the meteoric of Google's Android as Android has been responsible for their popularity.
The Galaxy S6 looks so much better on paper, that even from Delhi one can say the difference between previous Galaxy S models and the S6 is like night and day, or maybe it comes from a different galaxy altogether. Either ways, it is the return of the "king" of all Android phones.