Receiving Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge Plus for review was something of a mixed bag for me. I have never used any Samsung phone before because I always thought of the User Interface (UI) to be a tad backward. Every time I glanced into the screen of someone using a Samsung phone, I would wish that the look and feel of the elements on the screen were as amazing as its hardware and camera are known to be.
But that preconceived notion was put to rest within the first few hours of my using this phone. By the end of the day I was already beginning to appreciate Samsung’s design philosophy. It felt a lot better when using it yourself as compared to seeing it in someone else’s hand.
And a month later when returning the product to Samsung I was actually a tad upset for having to let go of it. Here’s why:
Product Design
This is by far the most gorgeous looking phone out there in the market today in my opinion. It takes the S6 Edge’s design and enlarges it, but yet it looks less gimmicky and more like something a statesman would carry. It is quite large with a 5.7” screen, but it does not feel awkward to hold like an iPhone 6s Plus would.
It attracts just about enough attention to get people to ask you what phone it is. And the only problem you will face is answering them.
That’s right. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus is a really long name for a phone and that is one of only two flaws I could find with this product. The second being that the you cannot use the phone with a single hand all the time. That said, this is a problem that plagues all phones that have screens larger than 5.2 inches. And if you are insistent on using it single-handedly, just triple click the home button and the screen resizes to less than 4.7 inches for single-handed use and you can then move it to the bottom left or right corner.
Even though the screen is 0.2” larger than the iPhone 6s Plus, the phone is physically smaller. Yes, it is nearly 4 mm shorter, over 2mm slimmer and is only 6.9mm thick thanks to an amazing design that provides a 75.6% screen to body ratio.
Hold it in your hand and the glass back along with what can only be termed as one of the world’s most breath-taking screens at 518ppi will leave you smiling.
This phone is very similar to the Note 5 except that this has a better design and that one has a stylus. For me personally, S6 Edge+ makes more sense both aesthetically and practically.
The phone is also well-built with no creaks whatsoever. While traveling through an airport, one of the security guards manged to drop this phone from the baggage screening belt and there wasn’t even a dent.
Hardware
Buying this phone guarantees one thing. You will be hard-pressed to find a phone that would be worth upgrading to anytime soon in the coming year. You think the previous statement is a bit of a stretch? Let me give you a few specs to mentally chew on.
The phone sports up to LTE Cat9 which allows you to download at a speed to 450 Mbps and upload at a speed of 50 Mbps. Some telecom carriers are still mulling about implementing hardware to support such speeds. Also, most new flagship phones these days offer only Cat6 which is 300Mbps download speed.
4GB Ram comes in-built, which is today offered in no more than 6-8 models, many of which do not even stand in the same category as the S6 Edge+.
Think of a possible sensor and you will find it in-built – fingerprint, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, heart rate, SpO2.
I could go on but you get the drift. Dual video call. Check. Wireless charging. Check. No heating issues. Check. Gorilla Glass 4. Check. In simple terms, if you like to compare phone specs with peers and want to show that your phone is better than theirs, the S6 Edge+ will leave you looking like a superstar.
Software
When I began using this phone as my daily driver, I had already spent a month using Android Marshmallow. Surprisingly, the Android Lollypop with Samsung’s theme on it did not make me miss the Marshmallow even for a second.
The software was nearly as snappy as the vanilla Android which I’ve always preferred. The software did not at any time feel bloated. On the contrary, there were bits and pieces provided by Android that made the vanilla Marshmallow feel incomplete.
The software was robust, customisable to my needs and gave me all the tools I needed to run my social and business needs online.
Be it their voice recorder (so simple to use I wanted to fling my AED 450 Dictaphone against the wall) or their fitness app, the simplified tools were simply amazing.
The one that blew me away was the video highlights feature. What this does is that, if you spend a day in one location clicking a lot of images and videos, you wake next morning to see a small video put together by the phone. The first one I received was so good (it had images zooming in and fading out, a background score, short bits selected from inside my videos and all edited into a brand new video), I can promise you it felt like a professional video editor had created the 1-minute edit.
Fortunately for video editors and unfortunately for me, in the following days, none of the video highlights were even half as good as the first one. Had it been, I’m sure video editors around the would be scrambling to find a new career path. Given the pace of technological progress, who knows, that day may not be far away.
Battery Life
Exceptional. I used the phone as a regular user for personal and business needs and never did I find the need to charge it during the day. Also the fast charge option and the wireless charging option made charging a simple painless task. And for those who do a lot of wireless charging and hate the phone-related heat issues, this was the first phone I found that did not heat easily.
Camera
Everyone knows that the S6 range of phones (S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and Note 5) capture exceptional images. The camera is so good, not once did I have to stop and say, “damn, I missed it”. I got almost every image I went for (and I am a poor photographer) and I even successfully captured a few images of my daughter who avoids being photographed.
Whether it is bright sunlight or low light photography, the phone delivers and how!
Conclusion
If you are in the market for a gorgeous, high-end phone that sports a large screen, has top-of-the-line next-gen specs, captures amazing images and videos, is priced more economically than an iPhone and yet does everything the iPhone 6s Plus can do but much better, and most importantly, it is not commonly found, then don’t even bother looking around. Just buy the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus. Just be prepared to repeat the really long name of the phone every time someone walks up to you and asks you about it.
