One of the most anticipated smartphones of the year has finally arrived – the Samsung Galaxy S5 was revealed yesterday at the Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona. The company’s newest flagship phone measures 142.0 x 72.5 x 8.1 mm and reminds us somewhat of its predecessor, the Galaxy S4, but with a number of improvements in terms of hardware, battery life and design.
The Galaxy S5 is heftier and bigger than its predecessor, but comes with quite a few improvements.
The removable plastic back of the Galaxy S5 has a soft, leathery texture which feels good and provides a solid grip on the phone. There’s no familiar stitching along the edges and the sides have a metallic finish. Samsung is calling this design “Modern Flash” and they say that the back cover will come in multiple colours – black, white, blue and copper.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 has a Super AMOLED 5.1in screen (compared to the 5in one found in the S4) with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and 432ppi pixel density. The front is covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and the screen has a chip that can sense the lighting environment and apply changes to the display (brightness, saturation, contrast) accordingly. Thanks to this option, your screen should always look like it’s supposed to.
On the inside, the Galaxy S5 sports a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, backed by 2GB of RAM and 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage expandable via a microSD slot (you can add up to 128GB). The S5 runs on TouchWiz – Samsung’s UI based on Android 4.4.2 KitKat. The 2,800mAh battery is removable and has a higher capacity than last year’s Galaxy S4 – it should get you up to 390 hours on stand-by and 21 hours of talk time.
We can expect the S5 in April.
Another thing that got improved is the new 16-megapixel camera (no OIS) with the LED flash and autofocus. It can shoot 5312 x 2988 pixel photos and capture 2160p videos. Samsung updated AF speed and exposure by integrating a sensor that has phase-detection AF (plus contrast-based AF) – this means that the camera performs faster and better than the one found in the S4. Samsung has also added real-time HDR and a couple of new interesting modes.
The fingerprint scanner everyone’s been talking about for months works when you turn on your phone and swipe your finger down from the screen to the bottom of the home button. Not quite as good as the one found in the iPhone 5S, but still a lot better than HTC One Max’s. The fingerprint scanner can unlock your phone, help you protect it with a private data locker and Samsung said that it has partnered up with PayPal to create the option of making online payments via the fingerprint scanner.
The heart rate sensor is another new feature which can be found on the back of the S5 and can monitor your pulse (hold your finger to the sensor and let the phone measure your pulse), remember your history and create graphs with relevant info. It also works as a food monitor and pedometre. The S-Health app basically acts like a coach now.
The Galaxy S5 is IP67-certified, which means that it’s both water and dust resistant. In terms of connectivity, the Samsung Galaxy S5 comes with NFC, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, microUSB 3.0, Bluetooth 4.0 BLE/ANT+, Cat 4 LTE (up to 150Mbps down/50Mbps up) and GPRS.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 should start shipping in April (Samsung said April 11th in 150 markets), but the exact pricing and availability are yet to be confirmed.
