The Samsung Galaxy S line-up needs no introduction, as it is the insignia flagship of Android. While it thrived in glory a few years ago, though, it has now become a dying light of what was once one of the best handset offerings you could get. The Galaxy S3 was a landmark in phone history, and even last year it remained the most popular Samsung phone in the U.S. But the S4 took that formula and simply failed to innovate while its design also remained largely unchanged other than some needed bezel trimming. While that device went on to sell over 40 million, in the eyes of Samsung it was still a disappointment, as their expectations were set much higher. Then S5 came, and while it was a great phone, it failed to lure in those who were already sick of the glossy plastic, the outdated design, the fat bezels… and TouchWiz.
When your profits plunge as hard as Samsung’s, you ought to take notice and shake things up. With their upcoming Galaxy S6, Samsung is looking to change things around and they’ve been promising a better experience in every aspect. Whether we can or should believe them is a hard question, given that they too have been teasing revolutions in the past – only to deliver iterative same-old clones of their previous phone, with new sensors and gimmicks. Some of their latest phones, namely those that came after this remarkable loss in profits, have been surprisingly great. The Note 4, for example, won the hearts of many with its new materials; and the Galaxy Alpha proved that Samsung can do performance when it wants to. So with Samsung we are tied between the tidal forces of their stagnant past and its fervent promises of its future; which should we believe?
Let’s take a look at what we know of the Galaxy S6 to figure out what to expect.
Software
Samsung’s TouchWiz was certainly not the fastest or prettiest ROM in the world. What it lacked in those two it made up in features, but even then some were undeniably gimmicky. The ones that did shine, like the Multi-Window, were useful years ago and have been tinkered with to perfection in later iterations. The latest update to Lollipop, as we reported, showed that Samsung can optimize when it wants to with very surprising results. From personal experience, using the latest TouchWiz with its performance boost and all the amazing features makes for a lovable Android experience (once you slap a theme on it, though).
Please die.
With this in mind, it’s safe to say that negative preconceptions of Samsung’s software can be set aside, or at least diminished. Samsung’s TouchWiz was known to be bloated and in some instances, laggy because of it. With the carrier crapware on top, then you were looking at quite some weight. Luckily, we had interesting news reporting that Samsung was willing to sacrifice much of that for seamless performance, and we’ve heard that the optimization levels they were aiming for had their aim set on the Nexus line. More over, earlier this year we reported on the news that Samsung was looking to cut bloat and trim the experience to further enhance their performance and keep it simple and fast. Many of the removed applications will become optional downloads from online app stores, so if for whatever reason you are one of the loony people who like ChatOn, I guess you can continue to use it. These changes seem to corroborate earlier 2014 reports of Samsung scaling back on its UI customization pressured by Google, which would have been a slow process to undertake. Hopefully we see the fruits of such a deal being harvested in the S6.
Design
If there is something Samsung must inexcusably
change if they want to grab the masses’ attention again, it is the design. I am one of those that think that devices like the Note 4 and Galaxy Alpha look really good on their own, but nevertheless the market craves some change. Plastic won’t cut it anymore, that’s for sure. As far as we know, they seem to have taken that clue to heart because they have been teasing us with glass and metal in their ads. The metal will make it into the frame of the phone as we’ve seen on some of their devices already, but when it comes to the glass (which is also touted to be non-reflective) we still don’t know if they meant the possibly curved display (which import documents point towards being 5 inches in diameter) or the back. Oh, did we say curved? The S6 is getting the Edge treatment too, perhaps in another variant.
Samsung’s
new material adoption was foreshadowed before as well, as a supposedly innovative design for 2015. However, strictly as far as “innovative” goes, the case is quite debatable. There’s been numerous leaks of what is supposed to be the S6, many of them from case manufacturers like Spigen. These alleged designs don’t show much in the way of change, as pictured on the right. If this would be the design, we’d be pretty disappointed. However, case manufacturers do not necessarily know the details, and they often use renders that merely adjust to the dimensions of the phone. The software shown in the picture also looked like a bad render, as the battery icon and lockscreen theme are almost fully isomorphic to iOS 8 found on the iPhone 6, excluding the camera icon.
The dimensions of the S6 are still not super clear, but there has been schematic leaks that give us a pretty good idea of what we could expect. However, the source of the schematics is not very notable at all, so like most leaks one must remain skeptic. The design here is similar to what we saw in Spigen’s leak, especially with the protruding camera and its format. The bezels are also very comparable, but the power button and the sensors do not match up at all. This leak suggests a thickness of 6.91mm, which means that we could be looking at a phone that’s almost a whole millimeter thinner than the S4, and we can definitely expect a thin phone given the market trend of late. The device would also be taller than the S5 by 1.3mm, but narrower by 1.69mm – a good trade-off.
PhoneArena was tipped with alleged prototypes of the S6 that once again surfaced with the same back camera placement format, as well as the touted metal edge and a new back. As far as I can tell, the sensor placement of this one is more similar to the one found in the schematics, but the bezels do not resemble any of the previous leaks. All in all, none of these leaks are entirely consistent with each other so it is really hard to establish a credible estimate. So while the internet is going crazy about each leak that surfaces, I think we really ought to sit back and wait a week because none of these seem definitive or cohesive. What is almost guaranteed, though, is the camera placement informed by the reveals. The rest is rather unpredictable, so I’d advise you to remain skeptic until March.
Samsung has been endlessly teasing us with what is guaranteed to be an Edge variant of the Galaxy S6. It is still not quite absolutely clear whether this will be the only option, but knowing Samsung I don’t think they’ll gamble it that way. A leak from CNET Korea shows yet another design featuring said variant, but this one looks a tad more professional than everything before it (and if I dare say, much more attractive too). This phone also sports quite the thinness which we are expecting out of the phone (and because of market trends, not schematics). But I can’t go without mentioning that this too is inconsistent with other recent leaks where… you guessed it, the sensors don’t match up again.
Finally, a recent picture of the S6 Edge surfaced today thanks to whistleblower Spigen, who seemingly can’t keep away from releasing images of the S6. This picture shows the curved display of the Edge, but most surprisingly I find that the iOS-like iconography of the previous render is present here too, and extended to the edge as well. The theme looks decent, but I can’t help but think it is not too original. Nevertheless, with all the contradictions and floatiness of it all we can’t really say for sure that’s the kind of theme Samsung will adopt. If it is, kiss Material Design bye-bye on your Galaxy.
EDIT: XDA Senior Member
Hardware
Leaving all the fashionable hearsay aside, the hardware details are much less diffuse. Let’s get this bit out of the way: Samsung has always had top-notch hardware in their flagships, usually opting for the highest-end configurations. In this regard, it’s probably not going to disappoint. The only case I can recall of being dissatisfied with a Samsung spec sheet was the S5’s 2GB of RAM (after the Note 3 raised the bar to 3GB). What we hear about this phone is nothing short of spectacular as far as processing goes, and Samsung could surprise us in the memory department too.
T
he processor in the S6 is pointed out to be an Exynos in-house chipset, and not a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 like everyone had expected early on (at least not for the majority of the release process). Now, I know there’s a lot of controversy surrounding Exynos docs on XDA, but as we’ve recapitulated earlier the Exynos family has really come of age in the past few years. The performance bump in what’s supposed to be inside the S6 is remarkable, and while we have yet to see any indication of real-world performance, synthetic benchmarks tell the theoretical story in a quite impressive manner. The Snapdragon 810 in the G Flex 2 was compared to the Exynos 7420 in Geekbench 3.0 and it simply blows it out of the water in every category by wide margins. The only thing that would be bottlenecking this G Flex 2 would be memory, as the benched devices have a 1GB differential in the Exynos’ favor. As a side note, according to virtually every review, the G Flex 2 is seeing awful UI performance with all sorts of stutters (mainly due to trigger-happy DFVS-like throttling); this is not to say that the Snapdragon 810 will be universally bad, though, as recent LG phones are known to be subject to heavy throttling due to some thermal issues.
The choice to go for their Exynos chipset might either be a powerplay to take dominance from Qualcomm, or simply a decision due to the Snapdragon 810’s early reports of thermal and performance issues. These same issues did show up in the G Flex 2, albeit it is impossible to narrow it down to a chipset problem and not a G Flex 2 venting problem with current information. But it is still worth noting that the Exynos broke the highest AnTuTu score by surpassing the 60,000 barrier (just recently dethroned by the Tegra X1, which you will certainly not see on phones anytime soon), while the G Flex 2 seems to be settling anywhere from 54,000 to as low as 37,000 on 32-bit (variations like this seem very common in G Flex 2 reviews, many noting that subsequent tests are so throttled they lose up to 20% of scores – also, there’s two models with different amounts of RAM).
As far as memory goes, Samsung could adopt the ePoP (embedded package-on-package) memory modules that they started mass-producing earlier this year. These are thinner modules that pack all the memory components together to stack directly on top of the processor for saving space. The 3GB LPDDR3 DRAM inside the ePoP would operate at a data transfer of 1,866Mb/s with 64-bit bandwidth. The speed alone would make it an efficient decision by itself, but the real strength comes from the amount of space such module would save – and with the reports of a much thinner phone, this would be a divine gift. The decrease in area can reach 40% for the whole package (SoC, DRAM, and eMMC all put together); it would make sense if this made it into a thin S6 or S6 Edge (which would probably need better space optimization as well), but we haven’t heard many announcements about this yet; given that ePop was produced for wearables last year, it is worth mentioning regardless because it could be very good news. After all, we don’t want any throttling like in the G Flex 2, and optimizations in architecture would surely help thermal design.
Samsung’s newest eMMC 5.1 flash storage chips could also make it into the S6, as they will begin to ship to other OEMs soon and we know Samsung loves putting their latest hardware bits in their flagships before anyone else gets them (like their excellent AMOLED technology which OEMs, like Motorola, usually adopt much later). The new command queuing function in this chip would allow for multiple commands to be filed in advanced for a more seamless task-switching (on an abstract level), which would consequentially lead to an improvement in task-switching (on an interface level) among other multitasking enhancements. This technology is also significantly faster than previous iterations, and after the bottlenecking of the Nexus 6 we should pay more attention to these components as well, as they can significantly deter from a good experience.
On a less technical but just as important note, the battery size is said to be 2600mAh according to manufacturing leaks. Now I want to note that there’s been false speculation as to the Wh (watt-hours) of this battery due to a misinterpretation of the blurry image. This battery does in fact have the same voltage as the S5 and it is visible in the zoomed image. This means that the theoretical capacity really is less mAh than what was seen on the S5 (by 200mAh), and this battery’s format hints that it is also not removable. The rear camera is reported to be able to take pictures of up to 20MP, while the front-facing camera is that of the Galaxy A series at 5MP. The 20MP number gains credibility when you consider it was also featured in earlier benchmark leaks, but keep in mind the format is 4:3 with pictures of 4464×3348. The camera software will offer a pro-mode and it may include RAW image support as well.
Round-up
The S6 is looking to be an exciting device. This release has followed the same trends of every year: software promises, design rumors, hardware speculation. The process is undoubtedly exciting, and with each iteration the hype grows. While the past two releases have been arguably disappointing, a lot of new goodies point that we might be pleasantly surprised for a change. The all-new hardware possibilities, the software revamp and a secret new design could all create a great synergy to deliver the S line phone we’ve been waiting for a couple of years now. Considering the tech inside alone, it is possible for Samsung to pull out a good device with no big compromises. And with competition like Xiaomi looking to outpace them, they must put out the best they can muster. Let’s hope it becomes the possible best of a Next Galaxy.
We will cover the S6 announcement at Mobile World Congress 2015 in early March. Stay tuned for more exciting details!
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