Samsung Galaxy S6 (T-Mobile)

Samsung Galaxy S6 (T-Mobile) Review

Excellent (4.5)

Bottom Line

US Street Price$579.99
  • Pros

    • Gorgeous new design.
    • Fastest processor and highest-quality display you can get on an Android phone.
  • Cons

    • No expandable memory.




Physical Design

Samsung's design hit a nadir with the Galaxy S5 . I have no problem with plastic phones; the Moto X ($249.00 at Amazon) , the Google Nexus 5 ( at Amazon) , and Nokia's lineup, for instance, all show how embracing polycarbonate can lead to bold, beautiful devices. But Samsung acted like it was ashamed of the S5's plastic, and made it play pretend in a bunch of embarrassing ways: The fake chrome trim and "sheepskin-soft" back all worked hard to hide, rather than celebrate, the phone's materials. If you're going to be something, be it.

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The Galaxy S6 is actually happy to be made of its materials. The phone has a cold, solid glass front and back with a smooth metal surround. The battery, micro USB port, headphone jack, and speaker are all on the bottom; there's an IR blaster on the top. The usual physical Home button is bracketed by two capacitive buttons below the 5.1-inch screen. The only removable part is the nano SIM card slot on the right-hand side. It's a little slippery but not too bad, and the white model we tested was surprisingly fingerprint-resistant. The phone comes in black, white, and gold; the blue and green models we saw previously don't seem to be available in the U.S.

Slimming down from 2.85 inches to 2.78 inches, the Galaxy S6 is noticeably narrower than the S5. While that's still wider than the iPhone 6's 2.64 inches, it restores Samsung's flagship to comfortable one-handed status. The phone industry has spent a few years settling around 2.8-inches wide as the maximum comfortable one-handed size, and I'm glad to see the S6 reining in the physical bloat. If you want a bigger device, of course, there's the much larger Galaxy Note 4 ($226.79 at Amazon) .

The 5.1-inch, 2,560-by-1,440-pixel AMOLED screen is the finest available on any smartphone today. Samsung and LG, both of which make displays, have outstripped all other smartphone makers in terms of screen quality for a while now. The Galaxy S5 had amazingly rich colors, and then it was topped by the LG G3 ($119.00 at Amazon) 's quad-HD screen (which, unfortunately, was not backed up with quite enough GPU power for good performance.)

The Galaxy S6 raises the bar again with a ridiculous 576 ppi screen. You'd think that's too sharp to be of any use, but Samsung's already been thinking of tricks that can't be done with any other phone. For instance, the super-high-res screen means it will work with Samsung's Gear VR headset for virtual-reality experiences. I was happy to see that the screen is also gorgeously sunlight-visible, although you'll want to turn off automatic brightness if you're looking for the best viewability outdoors.

I didn't test the S6's shatter resistance, but I'm hoping the prominent camera bump will actually help cushion the phone if it lands on its back. The bump didn't bother me at all; it's very smooth, so it never got caught in my pocket. The S6 also had to ditch the S5's water resistance. If that's an issue, hang out for a while—there is almost certainly a waterproof Galaxy S6 Active variant coming down the transom. 

Battery and Memory Issues

There's a certain subset of Samsung owners who are incensed that the Galaxy S6 doesn't have a removable battery or expandable microSD memory. I have no sympathy for the battery argument, considering that it isn't easy to charge a naked, spare battery, and there are dozens of easy-to-use external battery solutions. Carrying a second internal battery was always a kludge.

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In our testing, battery life is very good, at 7 hours, 48 minutes of video streaming with the 2,550mAh cell over LTE with the screen set to maximum brightness. That's longer than both the iPhone 6 (which has a much smaller 1,810mAh battery and lasted only 4 hours, 33 minutes on the same test) and the Galaxy S5 (at 7 hours). That should ease your mind about the non-replaceable battery. Charging options abound, too. Unlike the HTC One M9 ($164.98 at Amazon) , the S6 is packed with a quick-charging adapter that brought my phone from zero to 25 percent battery in about 20 minutes, and to 100 percent in two hours.

The phone also integrates wireless charging. You'll need a wireless charging pad comptible with the Qi system, but if you poke around you may be able to find deals where they throw one in for free (like at Best Buy, for instance.) Wireless charging is about 50 percent slower than wired charging, taking about three hours to charge the S6. You also can't run heavy foreground apps like benchmarks or games, and wirelessly charge the phone at the same time, which isn't a problem with wired charging. The One M9 and iPhone 6 don't have wireless charging at all.

The memory argument is a little more potent. Samsung has stripped down its bloatware to 6.83GB, and the Galaxy S6 comes with 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage. But ultimately, the price difference between the 32GB and 64GB S6 models is $100, while a 32GB microSD card costs under $30. Yes, Samsung discovered what Apple has known for a while now: There's a lot of profit in storage. But to make that a deal breaker is to cut off your nose to spite your face.

If it helps, Samsung's internal memory is much faster than an external microSD card would be. Our Editors' Choice, the SanDisk Extreme MicroSD card, had a 32MBps write speed in a Galaxy Note Edge phone. The S6's internal memory showed 152MBps. The microSD card's read speed was 69MBps; the S6 showed 329MBps. That will make for faster performance overall.

Call Quality and Networking
We received the T-Mobile version of the Galaxy S6. That has all of T-Mobile's frequency bands, including the new Band 12 for additional rural coverage. It will also work for LTE on AT&T and foreign networks. In a folder of T-Mobile bloatware, there's even an "unlocking tool" which can unlock your phone if you meet the carrier's requirements.

Call quality is good, if not great. The earpiece and speakerphone aren't a problem at all: they're both loud and quite clear. But transmissions through the microphone could use a little help. Wind noise is an issue in the microphone, although street noise and rumbling gets cancelled out; the speakerphone transmits a little echoey. It's fine, though—it's just not up to, say, BlackBerry Passport  standards. For voice commands, you can choose between Google Now and Samsung's S Voice. Choose Google Now. The phone supports both T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling and Voice-Over-LTE, both of which are optional.

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Signal strength is very good. Both the S6 and the Edge could capture T-Mobile signals and make calls in low-signal areas where the HTC One M9 couldn't. The phones also tend to intelligently decide whether Wi-Fi or LTE signal is stronger, dropping Wi-Fi like a hot potato at the edge of coverage.

Of course the S6 has all of the latest networking technologies like 802.11ac Wi-Fi, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.1 LE. It also has an IR blaster that works with the included Peel Remote app to become a remote control for your home electronics. But the real standout networking technology was nowhere to be found on our review unit: Samsung Pay, which supposedly lets you tap-and-pay using your credit card at any store that accepts standard magnetic swipe cards. That could be huge, except that it isn't coming until summer and there's no sign of it yet. I don't recommend buying products based on future features, because, well, anything could happen.

Processor and Performance
The Galaxy S6 is the first U.S. phone to use a modern Samsung processor. The Exynos 7420 is an octo-core processor, using ARM's A57, A53, and Mali cores. It beats the latest offerings from Qualcomm and Intel on both per-core and multi-core performance, and its flood of cores overcomes Apple's slight advantage on single-core speed.

Geekbench, the most useful cross-platform processor benchmark, tells the tale. No one else comes anywhere near Samsung's multi-core score of 5,100-5,300; the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, in an HTC One M9, only scores 3,527, and the dual-core Apple iPhone 6 scores 2,660. But Apple's single-core score slightly beats Samsung's, at 1,611 to 1,491. The S6 also handily beats all the Android-powered competition on the PCMark benchmark, which looks at more real-world applications like scrolling and photo manipulation.

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GFXBench graphics benchmark performance is very similar to Snapdragon 805 or 810 devices like the Galaxy Note Edge  and LG G Flex 2 . While the S6's extremely high screen resolution means on-screen frame rates drop below the iPhone 6, there's more raw processing power in this GPU than in Apple's chip.

The S6's lead over other Android-powered devices is really significant, and I see this as a potential problem for Qualcomm and its customers. The Snapdragon 810 is looking like a real stopgap of a chip: made from off-the-shelf plans and designed so that manufacturers have to pay a lot of attention to heat, it looks like a good choice as long as Qualcomm doesn't have any real high-end competition. Well, the competition is here, it's wicked, and it has absolutely no problems with overheating.

Android and TouchWiz
The Galaxy S6 runs Android Lollipop 5.0.2 with Samsung's extensions on top of it. The extensions, this time, don't seem to be dragging down performance, but that may just be because the processor here is so powerful.

Samsung said it reduced the heaviness of TouchWiz, but there are still a thousand little proprietary settings hidden here, many of which are useful, most of which are difficult to find. For example: You can use the high-res screen to show a 5x5 grid of icons and widgets as opposed to the 4x4 on most Android phones. Or, you can use Download Booster to combine Wi-Fi with your unlimited LTE T-Mobile plan and speed up downloads. There are two levels of power saving modes that turn off different things to save juice. There's an Easy mode, a Kids' mode, and a Private mode. Swipe left from the main home screen and you're unexpectedly in Flipboard, a news app. None of these are terribly obvious unless you had a Galaxy S5.

Samsung provides all of its own core applications, but as this is Android, you can replace almost all of them with Google or third-party alternatives if you want. Samsung's browser is considerably faster than Google's Chrome on benchmarks, though.

It's true that none of Samsung's designs or themes have the taste or whimsy of HTC's software designs. Flipboard is a little clunkier than BlinkFeed. I can't put my finger on why HTC's themes are nicer than Samsung's, but they are. But Samsung's stuff works perfectly fine. If you prefer functionality to aesthetics, you've probably been a Samsung customer for a while.

Also, if bloatware outrages you, you'll find enough to be outraged about here. Our T-Mobile model had 20 apparently Samsung-preloaded apps and six T-Mobile apps, all "disableable" (which you may need to do with Lookout Mobile Security and T-Mobile's My Account app, because they're battery hogs), but not delete-able. These include Skype, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, the Amazon shopping app, and Samsung's "Smart Manager" memory cleaner. It's frustrating that Samsung doesn't trust you to judge what apps you actually want, but as I said above, at least the bloatware is taking up less space than it did on the S5.

Camera and Multimedia
The Galaxy S6 has the second best phone camera on the market. The best one is still the iPhone 6, but that's by a nose. The Galaxy S6 is better than the iPhone 6 on some measures, while the iPhone 6 is better on others.

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Spec-wise, the Galaxy S6 has a 16-megapixel main camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. But you know what? Megapixels don't really matter all that much. The HTC One M9 has a 20-megapixel main camera, but consistently delivered softer, less distinct images. The iPhone 6 only has 8 megapixels, but it really makes every pixel count.

The Galaxy S6's camera launches faster than the S5's or the HTC One's. You can launch the camera by swiping up on the lock screen, double-tapping the Home button, or hitting the Camera icon. The camera took about two seconds to launch by swiping, and 1.2 seconds by tapping. (In a demo of the international unit, it took 0.7 seconds by tapping; I can't account for the difference except to say that the U.S. and international models may be different.) By comparison, the iPhone 6 took one second in both scenarios, while the HTC One M9 took three seconds by swiping, and two seconds by tapping.

The camera app is dramatically simplified, and I really like the auto-HDR function. You can easily kick over to a "Pro" mode with manual focus, white balance, and exposure. There are a few other camera modes, but nothing like the menagerie on the S5 (or, God forbid, the S4). The only one I miss is picture-in-picture. You can take shots instantly, but as on many phones, that means you can take shots a little before the focus locks. The S6 has a relatively fast (if variable) focus lock, coming second in speed only to the iPhone 6. If you don't zoom all the way in, and especially if you're going to use photos on the Web, shots here are just as good-looking as shots from the iPhone.

Low-light performance is also very good. It's about on par with the Galaxy Note 4, superior to the Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M9, and just plain different from the iPhone 6. The iPhone's aggressive image processing brings out details in low-light photos that none of the other phones do, but at the cost of a lot of speckly color noise. The One M9 dumps a lot of nasty artifacts into the picture, which the S6 avoids.

For video, the S6 can record smooth video at up to 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, indoors and out, or do 60-fps 1080p video recording, or 1080p at 30 fps with image stabilization. In all cases, I didn't see a loss of frame rate in indoor lighting. Well done.

The bottom-ported speaker is quite loud—louder even than HTC's "BoomSound" speaker, which is a real trick. But it's a mono, bottom-ported speaker, so it doesn't have the stereo separation that HTC brings to the table, and it's way too easy to muffle the speaker with your finger. I guess that's a struggle iPhone owners have had no problem getting past. Sound through headphones didn't have quite the level of rich bass that you get on HTC's BoomSound devices, but it was clear, even, and distortion-free.

Samsung has done a dangerous thing here: Knowing that it had been lapped by Apple, HTC, and even Motorola on design after the utterly uninspiring Galaxy S5, it decided that it needed to balance out its well-known functionality with a little more design flair.

I think the risk paid off. The Galaxy S6 is easily the most compelling Galaxy since the S III. The body materials make most other phones look cheap, it feels great to use, is genuinely easy to use single handed, and the screen is amazingly sharp. Because Google seems to have given up on normal-size Nexus phones, this the ultimate Android experience, crushing all the other high-end Android players, at least until we actually see the LG G4.

The Galaxy S6 is a super-phone for mainstream users. If you're driven to utter rage by the lack of a removable battery and microSD card slot, there's still the Galaxy Note 4, which is an excellent phablet with many of the same features. And if you're a hacker who wants to highly customize the software on your phone, you should turn to the Google Nexus 6 ($219.00 at Amazon)  or the OnePlus One ( at Amazon) .

The S6 Edge, meanwhile, is beautiful. It stands out in a crowd. But its functionality is extremely limited and, at this writing, buggy. I came to the S6 Edge hoping that it would be like the Note Edge, where the edge is actually useful. But at the moment, it isn't even a decent alarm clock. I personally can't recommend spending $120 purely for the curved glass.

If you have a previous Galaxy S device and are basically happy with Samsung, get this phone. It is a major upgrade, and the S7 will probably not be a huge jump forward. It should hold well for two to three years.

If you're deciding between The Galaxy S6 and an iPhone, your decision should be based on software and services, not the hardware. Both devices are top notch, but the ecosystem difference matters far more than Samsung's sharper screen or Apple's slightly faster-to-launch camera. You need to decide whether you're an S6 user who's all about Gmail, Google Play apps, Hangouts, widgets, Google Now, and (probably) Windows PCs; or an Apple user into iTunes, iTunes-exclusive games, iMessage, Siri, and (probably) Mac OS. You'll probably choose based on what your friends and family are using, so you can download the same apps and help each other. Whether you get a Galaxy S6 or an iPhone 6—two obvious Editors' Choice phones—you'll be a winner.

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About Sascha Segan