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Announced slightly ahead of the yearly schedule at MWC, Samsung's latest flagship Android device is now available. The Samsung Galaxy S5 is a top of the range Android handset, but a maturing ecosystem and the impact of Moore's Law means that having the best hardware is no longer enough to compete in the marketplace.
Samsung has traditionally relied on a huge marketing budget and brand awareness to drive sales of their smartphones, and I see no reason to expect anything different with the Galaxy S5. There's certainly nothing in the hardware package that is a 'must have' beyond the basics, and the other Android hardware manufacturers are catching up. without the marketing spend and the brand name, the Galaxy S5 is a competent high-end Android smartphone, but nothing more .
Samsung has continued with an iterative approach to the S5 design. It's clearly a descendant of the S4, and given the South Korean company's rigid following of the style of the bezels, physical buttons, and rounded corners, you could argue that a more accurate name would be the S4.1. Labelling it '5' helps with the marketing message of not just a new device, but also the device family. I'm sure that over the summer and autumn we'll see a fleet of Galaxy S5 Minis, Megas, Zooms, and other variants around the same basic hardware platform that the S5 has put in place.
The design of the Galaxy S5 is tired. The look of Samsung's smartphones has remained steady for a good few years now. Consumers coming from the Galaxy SIII are going to look at the S5 and effectively see the same phone with some bigger numbers on the spec sheet.
At some point Samsung is going to have to bite the bullet and design something new. The longer they leave it, the more painful for them the process will be. Meanwhile their new phones with the old designs will be dragged down by a general feeling of 'been there, done that' and consumers wanting something 'different' when they sign up for another two-year contract.
Design should inspire emotion, it should subtly state why something is desirable, and it should make you want to engage with a device. I look at the Galaxy S5 and I see... an old phone, a tired concept, and nothing that makes me want to explore the handset. That's in stark contrast to devices like the Sony Xperia Z2 or the HTC One M8.
The Galaxy S5 is slightly larger than the Galaxy S4. This is most noticeable around the screen (with increased bezels) and the screen itself, up from 4.99 inches on the diagonal to 5.1 inches. Sporting a 1080p resolution screen, the Galaxy S5 is let down very slightly because Samsung has used their diamond pixel layout, so rather than a full three colour RGB per pixel, with two sub-pixels per full pixel, rather than three. That's balanced out by the brighter and vivid colours that AMOLED can deliver, so the screen feels different to the competition that uses an LCD display.
Personally I prefer the LCD style rather than AMOLED, but that's personal. In terms of general perception the popping colours mixed with Samsung's pastel shades in the theme is probably going to win over consumers in a head to head comparison.
Samsung has also brought in waterproofing to Galaxy S5. I'm surprised it has taken this long for another manufacturer to follow Sony's line on this outside of specific sports or industrial focused smartphones, but it's here now for the high-end consumer. Given the Scottish weather my smartphones have been no strangers to water damage from being left out of a case or jammed into an outer pocket during a rainstorm. The confidence that this gives is immense and should not be discounted. The Galaxy S5 is rated for twenty minutes in 1 meter of water, assuming all the port flaps are closed tightly. That's less than Sony's implementation on the Z2, but it's more than sufficient for regular use and the occasional accident at home or work.
The other visible change on the outside of the Galaxy S5 is the addition of a fingerprint reader and heart-rate monitor. While the fingerprint reader has some potential practical benefits, it requires a touch more patience in use compared to the iPhone 5S. You need to swipe your finger down over the sensor, and you need to do this while holding your finger close to the horizontal plane of the reader. You are guided on this by the on-screen graphics, and when you have everything lined up, the accuracy is there, although you will need to spend some time to get the muscle memory for the correct positioning and swiping.
It's less elegant than Apple's solution, but developers have more access to the sensor. That means that we should see more use of the fingerprint sensor on the Galaxy S5 than on the iPhone 5S over time thanks to Samsung Pass API, ably demonstrated by the introduction of fingerprint scanning in Paypal.
The heart rate monitor, where you hold your finger over the sensor by the camera, makes for a very nice moment in a presentation or on the bullet point list in-store, but it feels very much like a gimmick for marketing rather than something of practical benefit.
I know there is a push towards the quantified self and health monitoring so this fits in with the new trend, but if someone is wanting a solid heart rate monitor and tracker, surely they'll be using a wearable on their wrist for a more accurate reading that doesn't need you to be still and calm for ten seconds for a result that isn't as accurate as taking my pulse the old-fashioned way with a stopwatch and my fingers.
Unsurprisingly, the Galaxy S5 sports some of the highest specifications of an Android device. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 series CPU sports a 2.5 GHz quad-core CPU (two Exynos variants are also available) and the Adreno 330 GPU working alongside 2 GB of memory and support for microSD cards for extra storage on top of the 16 GB of internal storage.
It's the same platform as both Sony and HTC although the Xperia Z2 trades a slower CPU speed for an extra 1 GB of memory.
It makes for a smooth Android experience, and a UI that is lag-free and easy to use, but it does put a lot of strain on the power requirements, and of course the bill of materials and subsequent retail price.
While the battery has been bumped up to 2800 mAh from the Galaxy S4's 2600 mAh, the capacity is not as high as some of the competition. That's mitigated by the back cover and battery both being removable, so you can easily pop in another battery to get you through the day. Samsung has added in a number of power saving utilities which got me through an average day, but if I was doing any heavy lifting, browsing, or media work, the Galaxy S5 fell a little bit short in the evening after a solid day's use as a work smartphone.
Last year's Galaxy S4 felt a safe bet of a device. It continued Samsung's smartphone plans, and the familiarity helped the sales. Iterating the Galaxy S5 was the easy option that would ensure nobody's job was at risk. Like a Ford pick-up truck, this smartphone is a workhorse that gets the job done. That approach trades the impact of a fashionable and cutting edge device, it trades away the idea that you are an innovator and working at the edge of the hardware envelope, and it trades away the 'must have' status for guaranteed sales from people looking to make a 'safe' choice of smartphone.
The Galaxy S4 was clearly a safe device. The Galaxy S5 continues that impression, but one year later I was expecting more from the hardware and the design. Instead the S5 has a few more gimmicks that don't appreciably add any value to the handset.
It's still going to sell like hotcakes, and it's able to do pretty much anything developers and consumers will ask of the handset, but the Galaxy name no longer means cutting edge or definitive in terms of Android devices.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to take a closer look at the Samsung Galaxy S5, including Samsung's implementation of Android through the TouchWiz UI layer and their bespoke applications, the performance of the camera, the use as a media device, and the Galaxy S5 in use.. Any questions or points, get in touch via Twitter (@ewan). Also check out Larry Magid's and Gordon Kelly's Galaxy S5 thoughts here on Forbes.
