SAMSUNG GALAXY S10+
Packed with new tech all over, plus a smart new twist on Android, Samsung retakes its Android crown
The S10+ is the ultimate Galaxy experience right now, sure, but is it good enough to buy instead of holding
out for the Galaxy Fold or S10 5G?
From $1,120 samsung.com/au
The Samsung S10+ exists in a weird limbo right now. It’s currently the pinnacle of Samsung’s prowess: this is its most advanced, expensive phone so far. But that’s only until the Galaxy Fold and the S10 5G arrive to take its technological crown. So is the S10+ just a caretaker manager then, waiting for the real boss to arrive? If so, it’s Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
…and beyond
The design isn’t a massive break from the S9+ of last year, but it has been upgraded with features such as the striking Infinity-O display, ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, rear-mounted triple-camera, and wireless powersharing, to name a few.
It’s brimming with new features and has a price tag to match: it starts at £899 for the 128GB model, but rises to £1,399 for the maxed-out model with 12GB of RAM and 1TB of built-in storage, plus the option to expand with a 512GB microSD. This is the ‘Ultimate Performance Edition’ which seems like a fitting description.
However much you pony up, you get the same excellent hardware experience. The curvaceous front and back feels solid in the hand, and while the aluminium band doesn’t have quite the same premium heft as the stainless steel on the similarly-priced iPhone XS, that’s a tiny nitpick in an outstanding piece of hardware.
The expansive 6.4-inch Quad HD+ AMOLED display feels like it fills every available corner of the handset, though there is a bit of a bezel around it. The OLED panel itself is absolutely stunning. It’s bright, with gorgeous colours and cavernous blacks. It’s a genuine joy to behold.
Samsung offers two settings for the display: Vivid and Natural. The latter is the default and is a little more subdued than some of the previous entries in the Galaxy S series, but feels more accurate. We much prefer it.
The curved edges mean that the Galaxy S10+ isn’t as wide as rivals including the iPhone XS Max, so typing one-handed while juggling a coffee isn’t impossible, but it does take some practise.
The Infinity-O display isn’t the prettiest design and does take some getting used to. Samsung does a good job of obscuring the hole-punch camera with some aggressive shading in the top right-hand corner of its preinstalled wallpapers. But when you’re presented with a bright white screen – like every time you launch the Messages app – the pill-shaped cut-out for the dual front-facing is a real cycloptic eyesore.
It also means the battery life, Wi-Fi and 4G signal icons are shifted into an asymmetrical position close to the centre of the screen, which looks pretty awful. Hole punch screens can be done well, but Samsung hasn’t quite nailed it yet.
Double vision
What the dual selfie cameras lack in beauty, they more than make up for when snapping. The S10+, which is the only model in the S10 range with dual front-facing cameras, is the only device capable of shooting Live Focus selfies. These photographs add an adjustable, artificial bokeh-style blur to the background behind the subject, as well as other effects including the excellent Colour Point mode, which turns the background greyscale so that only the subject is left in colour. The new Live Focus modes produce usable shots more reliably than Apple’s similar Portrait Lighting effects on the iPhone.
Standard selfies look great, too – while the photos aren’t quite as sharp and detail-packed as those from the Google Pixel 3’s front camera, we don’t necessarily feel the need to see each individual hair and pore.
Flip the phone over and you will find a new triple-camera system. This includes a 12MP wide-angle camera, a 16MP ultra-wide sensor and a 12MP 2x telephoto lens. This setup means you can take 0.5x wide-angle shots, the same as those seen on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, as well as 2x optical zoom. Both are hugely useful – the ultra-wide, in particular, can produce really striking photos, especially in the middle of cities.
With the S10+, Samsung has finally ditched the rear-mounted fingerprint
scanner. Instead, the sensor is now found underneath the OLED display. The ultrasonic sensor is a first for smartphones (other in-screen sensors so far have been optical). Samsung claims its ultrasonic scanner is more reliable and accurate, recording every single ridge on your fingertip.
While we can’t vouch for exactly how many ridges the scanner picked up, it worked perfectly for us, even when the screen is wet. That said, using it isn’t totally infallible. Samsung highlights the area of the screen above the sensor with a fingerprint icon. However, you have to be fairly precise with the placement of your digit. Absent-mindedly pulling out the phone and trying to unlock it while navigating pavements bustling with weekend shoppers leads to quite a few error messages.
Still we’re impressed overall, and prefer it to the older rear scanners.
One love
The Galaxy S10+ runs the fantastic Samsung-designed One UI mobile operating system, which is based on Android 9.0 Pie. In the past, the words “fantastic” and “Samsung-designed mobile operating system” would rarely be in the same sentence, but we’re big fans of this. It acknowledges that while we want massive screens on our phones, massive phones are really annoying to use. To solve the headache of using an expansive 6.4-inch display, One UI shifts all the elements of the user interface that you’ll actually need to tap into the lower-third of the touchscreen where they are within easy reach.
It’s a bit like the Reachability feature Apple introduced on iPhones, which temporarily drops the top of the screen into the lower-half of the display, but applied across an entire
user interface. Even swiping on the notification shade drops the quick action toggles far enough down to tap without a stretch.
Samsung fills the top of the display with comically-large menu titles. When you first pick up the S10+, it looks very odd. But as soon as you start using it, it all makes sense.
Not everything about One UI is perfect. Some of the default Samsung application icons are a little gaudy, and there are still some duplicates between Samsung and Google apps. There’s also a question mark over whether Samsung will keep One UI updated in good time – until now, Samsung has always dragged its feet, but fingers crossed that changes with its new-look software.
Fuelling the S10+ is a 4,100mAh battery cell. For comparison, that’s bigger than the battery in the Galaxy Note 9, despite that having a larger footprint. For us, that mammoth battery was more than enough to keep the device powering through a full day of heavy usage. With some restraint, it’s easy to eke out a day and a half between charges.
That extra battery comes in handy for a new feature called Wireless PowerShare, which enables owners to top-up any device capable of wireless charging from your S10+. The new feature is enabled in the settings, then you simply flip over the phone and place any Qi-compatible gadget on top of it to charge. Huawei introduced this feature with the Mate 20 Pro last year, and we’re happy to see it in more phones. It’s a little finicky to find the exact spot on the rear to activate the charge, but after a few tries we got pretty good at locating it.
Jack it in
One thing we’re glad hasn’t changed is that the 3.5mm headphone port is still here, so there’s no need to throw out your wired cans or cough up extra for a converter. Like its predecessor, the Galaxy S10+ is rated IP68 for water and dust resistance, which means it should withstand a swim in 1.5 metres of water for half an hour.
The Galaxy S10+ boasts the same premium build quality and stunning fit-and-finish we’ve come to expect from Samsung, but now sports a bigger display, bigger battery and faster internals. There’s also new camera features you won’t find anywhere else in the S10 range and while some are gimmicky, others are definitely not.
After a quiet year for the S range in 2018, this feels like a much bigger step forward. If you’re looking for the ultimate Galaxy S10, look no further. If you weren’t a fan of huge phones before, we’re not sure that One UI will be enough to convince you. That said, if you want a super-premium Android phone, and the biggest, fastest, most feature-packed Galaxy phone you can buy right now, this is it. The S10 5G and Galaxy Fold might be coming, but they’re uncertain first-gen products. The S10+ is excellent now.