Review: Samsung Galaxy S6

Click-click. Tap.

The very best thing about the Samsung Galaxy S6 isn't the new design or the gorgeous high-res screen. (Those are nice, though.) It's the fact that no matter what you're doing, no matter where you are on the phone, all you have to do is click twice on the Home button and you're immediately launched into the camera. There's no journey to the home screen, no swiping through a control panel menu; you just click-click, and tap to shoot.

The S6 is, as you could probably guess, the sixth in Samsung's massively popular, industry-shaping Galaxy S lineup. Yes, it keeps some of the hallmark features of doesn't-quite-get-it Samsung software, and sure, it looks a lot like the iPhone. Samsung apparently decided the best way to compete with the iPhone is to borrow from Apple. So what? Borrowing—from Xerox Parc, from those dozens of hideous MP3 players—is part of what made Apple great in the first place.

Besides, the S6 still feels new. And its design, performance, and most of all its interface suggest that after five years of not quite getting it, Samsung finally understands what a great phone entails. For the first time, Samsung doesn't demand that you adapt to the way it works, or push you toward apps prefaced with S. It didn't pretend that "fast" and "good" are the same thing. It just made the best damn phone it knew how. This new Galaxy flagship is beautiful, it's powerful, it's really easy to use. It's the best Android phone you can buy.

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The quality asserts itself from the moment you first pick it up. The S6 is (finally) not made of dimpled plastic, it's (finally) not cheap and unpleasant to hold. It's now truly elegant, all Gorilla Glass and metal, a simple rounded rectangle that fits comfortably in my hand. There are no seams, no sharp edges, no awkward angles—it's one of only a few phones I've ever used that feels like it just appeared, fully-formed, on the Earth.

That’s not to say the S6 is perfect; there are still a couple of bad habits here. Three gigantic, distracting logos adorn the device, and it still has a bit of that filmy sheen to its back, which makes your fingers always feel slick and oily. My white review unit can also catch light in a couple of really ugly ways. Other colors I've seen look better—just don't buy this thing in white.

It's 6.8mm thick, and weighs a little less than five ounces; it feels a little bigger than, say, the iPhone 6, but it's still perfectly pocket-sized. The iPhone 6 similarities really come into sharp relief at the bottom of the device; it’s the spitting image, complete with machined speaker holes, a charging port, and a headphone jack. Again, I don't care that the S6 looks in spots like the iPhone, and neither should you. Similar just means they're both good. Good is good.

And for all its newfound design chops, the S6 is still functionally very much a Galaxy S. That means it still has a that clicky home button, which also houses a fingerprint reader that works perfectly and gives me great hope for Samsung Pay's rollout later this year. (As much hope as you can have in the impossibly redundant and cluttered world of mobile payments, anyway.) There's also an IR blaster, a heart-rate monitor on the back that can also double as a shutter button for selfies, and a bunch of crazy ideas about multitasking that aren't terribly useful or easy to understand, but work fine and mostly leave you alone.

The Galaxy S name also means that every single line on the S6's spec sheet is as high-end as it gets. Like the screen: it's 5.1 inches, 2560 x 1440 resolution. That's 577 pixels per inch. That's bonkers. The iPhone 6 is 401 ppi, for example, and the HTC One M9 is 441, and those are really excellent screens. Samsung has so improved its AMOLED technology, too, that the S6's screen is accurate and dynamic, with none of the eye-popping oranges and reds that used to make all your photos look like pop art. It's honestly hard to imagine how smartphone screens get better from here. We sure don't need more pixels.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

We evidently needed more megapixels, though, so Samsung put a 16-megapixel camera onto the back of the S6. (Give anyone at Samsung two numbers, and they'll pick the bigger one every time.) Forget the specs, though, because here's the best part: the Galaxy S6 takes fantastic pictures. In good lighting photos and crisp and accurate, and in bad light they're bright and clear. It's not as good as the iPhone—it exposes a little too dark sometimes, focusing can take a bit too long, and it tends to turn whites to yellows in bad lighting—but it's only worse by the slimmest of margins. It's the absolute best Android camera I've ever used.

Meanwhile, Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge pushes display boundaries on an entirely different front—or side, rather. If you go back through this piece and add "Edge" after every "S6," it's all still true: it's the tiniest bit thicker, the tiniest bit lighter, and lighter, and has the tiniest bit more battery, but it's the same damn phone. Except! Except the screen curves on both sides, sloping down into the bezel. It's an amazing feat of engineering, a seriously cool-looking phone, and a wholly original idea. Thing is, the Edge is more expensive than the regular S6—which is awfully nice-looking anyway—and it offers exactly no new features. It even makes a couple of things, like photo editing and watching movies, a little trickier. Get it if you want it, it's a great phone and cocktail party conversation fodder, but don't expect something new and different. It just slopes.

The S6 (from now on, assume I mean both models when I say that) has a new eight-core processor and 3GB of RAM. It's extremely, remarkably fast. The software that Samsung adds to stock Android used to cause its phones to stutter and lag, but either its designers have figured out how Android works, or there's just so much raw horsepower that it doesn't matter anymore. I suspect it's a little of both. You can get between 32 and 128GB of internal storage—there's no way to add more memory with a microSD card anymore, so you should spring for the upgrade if you can. That's one of a couple of things I'm sorry to see go from the S5; it was also waterproof, and had a removable battery. The S6 forgoes both.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

It does still offer a few niceties over the iPhone, though, like compatibility with two different wireless charging standards and super-fast charging. Wireless charging is crazy convenient and crazy slow, whereas plugging your phone into the wall and getting a half-charge in only a few minutes feels like the right kind of future. The quick-charge has already saved me a couple of times, too, because the S6 battery is a little hit-and-miss. I'd get a day and a half, fill ‘er up again, and then sputter out at 10 hours. It always lasts the whole day, but I wouldn't count on anything more before it kicks into the grayscale, super-limited Ultra Power Saving Mode.

Both models run Android 5.0 Lollipop, with Samsung's TouchWiz skin slathered all over it. TouchWiz isn't the dirty word it used to be, mostly because it doesn’t feel as present and pervasive as it once did. Most TouchWiz touches are simpler and cleaner than ever, and get this: there are no more bloops when you tap on things! Still, “better” is different than “good,” and TouchWiz remains a plague on Android, which is now so beautiful and simple to use that it needs no help.

Samsung does add a few useful features and apps, like the activity-tracking S Health, but it also adds another browser for no reason, re-skins the settings menus and notification windows in a way that makes everything harder to find, and generally dumbs down the beautifully colorful new aesthetic of Android Lollipop.

The nice thing, though, is that you can undo basically all of it. Every app on the phone, including all of Samsung's, can be hidden and disabled. You can change themes, which gives your phone new icons, new wallpapers, new everything. With ten minutes of work, you can make your phone look however you want.

The feature list is long, the spec sheet boggles the mind. But I keep coming back to that click-click tap shortcut to the camera. It's not a complicated feature, or mind-blowing but pointless—looking at you, Wave Over The Phone To Mute Calls. It's not even unique to Samsung; Motorola's shake-shake accomplishes the same thing. It's just simple, thoughtful, and useful. Those are new adjectives for Samsung. It's always made the most powerful phones, but if it can pair that with a genuine desire to make the best phone—and learn to see the difference—Samsung's going to be unstoppable. The S6 isn't perfect, but it's close. It's the best Android phone I've ever used.

The knock against the Galaxy lineup has always been that Samsung's marketing team must be better than its engineering team, because they manage to sell incredible numbers of mediocre smartphones. This time, the job's easy: Samsung just went out and made a flat-out phenomenal phone. That'll sell itself.