Samsung’s S6 Edge was launched to bring back the innovation quotient to the Korean company. The phone, which had drawn significant amount of research and development from Bengaluru, was introduced in March at a starting price of Rs.58,900. Here is the IANS review of the S6 Edge:
Design: Called Project Zero at the beginning of its life cycle, the Edge takes innovation to the next level by introducing interactive screens (extension of the same display) at the edge of a smartphone. The body is a mix of Corning Gorilla Glass 4 (back and front panel) and AI 6013 (a aluminium alloy use in aerospace industry).Other notable change is the nano-SIM tray which is at the top, an integrated fingerprint reader at the home button and a heart rate sensor right beneath the flash on the rear. The phone doesn’t have a removable battery and there is no room for a microSD card slot.
Display: The Edge ships with a 5.1inch Quad HD(2560×1440 resolution) Super AMOLED display with a pixel density of 577. Images are super sharp, bright and differentiates at least 16.7 million colours perfectly.
Camera: The smartphone has top class camera to say the least. The combo of a premium wide-angle 16MP shooter and a front wide-angle 5MP camera makes it a must-have device if the user is a photography or selfie lover. Low light photography is excellent along with sharper colour contrasts. But the X-factor of the camera is the effects, filters and a post-shoot editing software. There are options of selective focus, virtual shot, Pro mode, slow motion, fast motion, panoroma and other modes which can be downloaded from the Galaxy app store.
Hardware and Performance: The Edge sports a Samsung’s in-house Exynos 7420 SoC that has four 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A53 processor cores and four 2.1GHz ARM Cortex A-57 cores along with integrated Mali-T760MP8 graphics. The Edge is backed by a 3GB DDR4 RAM and runs the latest Lollipop update.
Coming to the performance, the Edge processor beats them all even the latest 810 Snapdragon processor according to GeekBench scores. The GPU is 400 percent more energy efficient than its predecessors and will allow the user to enjoy a premium gaming experience combined with the quadHD display.
Operating System and user interface: Samsung has been very wary of the software it wanted to use in the S6 series. It has done away with most of the clutter that consumers complained about.Interestingly, Samsung has added a Microsoft apps suite.
Storage, connectivity and battery: This is where Samsung has changed its game. There are no micro-SD slots and the phone comes with 32/64/128 GB internal memory options. The device uses a nano-SIM. There are options for NFC, Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi, GPS and infrared. The Edge comes with a 2,600mAH battery which can pull off one day on a single charge.
Verdict: The latest Samsung smartphone certainly has an edge. From our side if one can afford it, its’s buy call.
(13.06.2015. Anirban Ghoshal can be reached at anirban.g@ians.in)