A Critical Analysis of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6

Where to start? I suppose I’ll start with who I am and what I value in a phone.

I am a Computer Science student, who has a huge passion in the tech industry (surprising right?) and I am also employed with one of the Big 3 telecommunication providers in Canada. This means I have access to the latest and greatest superphones in the industry. To me my phone is an extension of myself, and as cliche as that sounds — its true. I would like my phone to know what I want to do, and for it to be predictable. Predictability, in my opinion, is the most important part of the phone. This is much more important than battery life, screen resolution, storage size, and processor speed. If my phone had best specs in the market, but every time I wanted to open the messaging app I was met with a different experience I would be greatly turned off by the phone. Let’s get into the specifics, enough about theoretic.

So, today I want to compare the Apple iPhone 6 to the Samsung Galaxy S6. I will compare the phones to other phones in the market, but the main comparison is two phones. I want to preface all of this by stating, I use to be an Apple Fanboy around the time the iPhone 3GS came out, but after using the Galaxy S2 I found my self becoming an Android Fanatic. At this point I don’t consider myself to be impartial to either side, though I do firmly believe Apple has the lead in a better predictable phone at the moment. My experiences begins with the Nexus 6, which I owned from November 2014, until about March 2015, it was a significant upgrade of my Nexus 5, in a few departments but mainly it just felt a lot more polished and minus some issues with Android Wear and my Moto 360 I thought it was a great phone. It was very predictable until you got to messaging. This is an issue that I see present on every android device I have owned, messaging is not smooth at all — there is a very noticable and unpredictable lag while using the keyboard, and after hitting send the phone takes a couple seconds to get become usable again. Though overall I would give this phone a 8/10.

In March I was given an opportunity to trade my Nexus 6 for a iPhone 6, and being out of touch with the Apple ecosystem for a few years I was honestly quite excited to see what all the hype was about again. From the moment I turned the phone on, I felt it. Now the phone is definitely slower with the transitions and sometimes feels like it takes a second too long for a simple task like changing pages in the settings menu, however every single time — it was the same transition. Now the phone itself, has a very polished build quality, and you can argue a very simplistic design. Though, the Galaxy S6 has a similar design and in my opinion the S6 does supersede the iPhone in build quality. Samsung’s design team deserves a pat on the back, compared to the S5 the S6 is miles ahead. Though after putting both phones down, and waiting for a notification the polish fell right off the S6. Now this was a issue with the Nexus 6 too, but I never noticed it until I began using the S6 after the iPhone.

The Android option seems to have two options though to be honest it’s hard classify the different options as they don’t consistently happen. If I tap the notification it will get highlighted slightly — this takes a little to get use to as it is very subtle. This means that if you unlock your phone it should open the application and should show you the reason for the notification. I emphasize “should” about a third of the time I will highlight the notification put my fingerprint in there and the application will not launch, or the application will open to the home page with no indication that I have a notification actually present. Now this is not a huge issue, I can always swipe down and see the notification and see what I missed right? Nope. Once you look at the notification on the lock screen, or open it, its gone. The other option with the notification is to swipe left or right, both of which dismiss the notification completely. No option to snooze, delete, reply or even mute.

With the iPhone when I receive a notification, I have 4 options. I can ignore the notification, which will cause the phone to remind me in a couple minutes again, swipe left, which will show me available options (close notification, mute, reply, snooze, etc.), swipe right, which will dismiss the notification, and lastly double tap the notification, and the iPhone will prompt you to unlock the phone (if you have any form of security) and after that you will get directed to the notification. It feels very consistent and very solid, I can’t say the double tap to launch would always work, but about 9/10 times it worked as expected. The beauty about this system was not just in the consistency, but if I missed a notification, and swiped down to the notification list I would see every notification — even some from the previous day if I had failed to tap on the notification, or dismiss it. This is very handy as during the work day, I will miss notifications and use my phone afterwords, so the ability to at the end of the shift to go through my notifications and respond to everything becomes a breeze.

So notifications aside, how does the experience differ? Okay, so Android gets the upper hand where with the home screen layout, hand down. The ability to launch the application I want in the exact layout and size I want is amazing, and while the iPhone excels at keep a very uniform layout that is not something I value. A consistent layout is important and both excel at that.

The big difference here is application launch. With the S6 I feel like its a hit and miss, some applications will take under 50ms to launch while some applications will take upwards of a second to launch. I understand that some require more time to get things going, however why should I feel like I’m getting a surprise every time? If an application requires more time to deliever the content, that is okay — launch the application and show me a loading screen. The time from when I tap the icon to the time the animation starts, until the application is displayed on my phone should not differ from application to application. Over the last few days, I have realized that I have been avoiding applications entirely on the fact that they seem to take longer to launch they don’t make me feel good about my phone. That sounds silly, but I want to get into one more thing before I wrap this part of the review up.

Battery Life. Oh my goodness. Everything I have said up to this point can be ignored, and changed and played with. I can download different launchers that could fix animation times and make notifications a little less displeasing. Now, do not get me wrong, I can get 16 hours of battery life out of this phone. My Nexus 6 could do 2 days on a good day. Though the issue comes when we start to factor in consistency. The best way I could describe this is with my iPhone regardless of how I used my phone, unless I was playing a game, or watching YouTube all day, I knew exactly how long my phone was going to last. If I had location services on, if I had WiFi on, if I had Bluetooth on, and my brightness up, it had very little to change my battery life. To get 16 hours of battery life on my S6 you will have to, turn on power saving mode, if not ultra power saving mode, and use the phone very lightly, don’t forget to turn off all of the services you aren’t using. I don’t feel like I can explain this well enough but I’ll provide you an example. I live in Calgary Alberta, we had the Calgary Stampede going on in the city for the past 10 days, google it if you aren’t familiar with it, its quite an amazing festival I am blessed to see every year. Now last night I worked a 10–6 shift, I woke up a little earlier than 8, and by 5pm my phone was around 30%. 9 hours and my phone has used 2/3rds of my battery life, how? Google Play Services (GPS) , and Display. I had about an hour of SoT and for some reason GPS decided to leave itself running and eat at my battery. Okay fine, I’ll charge it before leaving work and heading out to the stampede. I left work with about a 70% charge, I got to the Calgary Stampede an hour later with about a 60% charge. Again that’s fine, I’ll be out for 5 hours or so I should be okay — or so I thought. By the time I’d met up with our group of friends, my phone was at 35%. How?! Bluetooth was off, WiFi was off, Location Services was on, but again no drain when looking at the usage, and I had a pretty good cell signal. I hate Micromanaging my phone. So power saving mode came on, and lets turn off facebook messenger, if people need me they can call me or text me. An hour later I check my phone and its gone down to about 25%, I still have about 3 hours until the fireworks, and even longer until I get home. So Ultra Power Saving Mode (UPSM) came on, now my phone is essentially a flip phone. No data, no camera, no location services — the phone is limited to the phone and messaging application, with a Grey Scale theme applied to the phone. I will admit I was very impressed at the end of the night. I got home a couple hours later than I had anticipated and my phone was at about 5%. UPSM did it’s job, but is that how you want to use your smart phone? If that's the case, you can save yourself about $50/month and $600 on the phone. Now don’t get me wrong I have had situations where I ran low on my iPhones battery, but never did I feel like I wasn’t going to make it. The battery indicator on the iPhone is very predictable and in contrast makes the Galaxy’s seem useless.

Both phones are not perfect, and in the next part I will delve deeper into contrasting the phones, and why I believe Android phones can come up ahead of the iPhone.