April 14, 2014
Feedback submitted!Unable to submit feedback! The Galaxy S5 is my first Samsung phone. I've had peers using Galaxy phones around me for years. I've always scoffed at the shoddy build quality and boasted that there were better phones out there. Yet, here I am. I own one now. I've used numerous Android phones, but I've only ever own Nexus devices up to this point. My previous phone, the Nexus 5, left me wanting something more. It was a great phone but I was still hungry, and when I saw nearly everybody around me embracing the phone and purchasing their own, it immediately lost it's charm. Yes, it was shallow of me, but it ended up pushing me towards the Galaxy S5 and I am not even tempted to look back.The phone handles well, even with the cheap build. TouchWiz is clean and can be really snappy. But at times is lags and struggles to let the 2.5Ghz processor do it's job. In fact, the S5's biggest enemy is it's own maker. Samsung has a weird perspective and feels that they have to revolutionize to stand out. Scrolling through the settings can take forever as you are overloaded with way too many utterly useless "features." The fingerprint sensor leaves a lot to be desired. It works about 70% of the time and you have to develop a certain muscle memory to find consistent success. You can only save 3 finger prints, as opposed to Touch ID's 5, but you get used to it. You can rely on it, but I chose not to. The real star of the updated TouchWiz is S Health. It came as a shock to me. I thought it would be an app that I would think nothing of, but the more I use it, the more it surprises me. Every aspect of the app feels thought of and not some child with daddy issues. The Heartbeat Sensor is nifty, but really only useful for health nuts. The pedometer has had me wanting to walk more, and I have even found myself shaking my leg to rack up more steps. Samsung got a lot right with the S5, and what it got wrong doesn't result in a deal breaker. They refined the most used aspects of the phone but all of their extra effort seems to drag the phone down. Until Samsung realizes that they should be striving for perfection, and not radical innovation, and until they stop force feeding gesture control down your throat, just so they can put a huge list of features on the box we will keep getting phones like the Galaxy S5, and the huddled masses will continue to buy up what they put out.