t’s something of a perfect coincidence that
Samsung’s Galaxy S10+ went on sale the
same day Captain Marvel landed in cinemas.
Both were once the most powerful members of
their respective universes. Both are struggling
with an identity crisis spurred by a larger-than-
life existential threat. And both have a gorgeous
shimmer when the light hits them just right.And in many ways, they’re both the last of a dying
breed. The Galaxy S10+ may represent the culmination
of 10 years of Samsung’s Android engineering, but
it’s also the phone that doesn’t fold. Much like 2017’s
iPhone 8 Plus, which existed in the shadow of the
button-less and OLED iPhone X, the Galaxy S10+ no
longer represents the pinnacle of Samsung innovation.
That honour now falls to the Galaxy Fold, arriving 26
April. (In yet another curious coincidence, that date
just so happens to be the same as Captain Marvel’s
intergalactic turn in Avengers Endgame.)
But even with the forces of change closing in
on all sides, the Galaxy S10+ more than holds its
own. It might have a sky-high price tag at £1,099,
but the S10+ is also a massive improvement over
its predecessor, pushing the limits of conventional
smartphone design just about as far as they can go.
And just like Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), it’s not
about to fade into irrelevance without a fight.
Design
Even without straying too far from the Infinity Display
formula that began with the S8, the Galaxy S10+ is a
completely new device. Most notably, Samsung has
trimmed its empty spaces even further, leaving slivers
of black above and below the screen. That brings the
size of the S10+ down to 157.6x74.1x7.8mm, a touch
smaller than the Note 9 despite sporting the same
6.4in display dimension.
There’s not much to quibble with when it comes
to the design. The return to chrome along the sides
reflects a sophistication over the colourized aluminium
of the S9, right down to the classic five-holed speaker
grille along the bottom edge. The same chrome
accent also lines the triple-camera array, which has
been rotated to give your chosen colour even more
room to breathe. With so much glass, the S10+ tends
to be a little slippery, but because Samsung’s new
‘prism’ palette of iridescent hues is so gorgeous,
you won’t want to cover it up. I suspect clear cases
will be extra popular this time around.
The receiver has been pushed as high as it can
go, so it abuts the top edge rather than floating in
the bezel, and as a result, it’s barely visible now. My
only complaint is the power button, which is both
shorter and higher than it is on the S9, making it that
much more difficult to reach. The Bixby button isnow in a much better spot, and it’ll get a lot more use
this time, as Samsung is finally letting us remap it to
launch an app or perform an action. And once again,
the S10+ has a headphone jack, making it truly among
the last of a dying breed.
the hole is even more apparent on the S10+ because
Samsung needed room for two front cameras.
This is why all of the stock wallpapers Samsung
created for the S10+ have a clever bit of black
in the corner to cover up the hole. It’s the same
trickery Apple uses to cover up the notch on
the iPhone XS, and it speaks to the inherent
compromises of so-called all-screen phones.
I prefer a notch to the uncentred hole because
I dislike the indented status bar, but neither of the
solutions are very elegant. (Although some of the
wallpapers available are pretty darn creative.) Maybe
the future is in slide-out cameras or the complete
elimination of the selfie cam like Chinese companies
Xiaomi and Vivo are proposing. But for now, holes
and notches are just a fact of life. And the S10+ will
remind you of that every time you pick it up.
Hole complaints aside, the display on the Galaxy
S10+ is stunning. Samsung has always excelled at
displays, but out of the box the colours have always
been a bit too oversaturated for my taste. Well,
that’s not the case with the Dynamic AMOLED here.
Samsung’s colour gamut is clear, crisp, and remarkably
bright without requiring any adjustments, and colours
are realistic without looking too dull or muted.
The display also hides one of the S10+’s new tricks:
an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, which uses sound
waves rather than light to read the whirls and loops
on your skin. Samsung’s fingerprint sensor has been
a bone of contention ever since it moved to the rear
of the phone precariously close to the cameras, and
it’s no less of an issue here. In the age of Face ID and
time-of-flight cameras, fingerprint scanning tech
feels antiquated, and the hit-or-miss nature of the
S10+’s sensor doesn’t help it feel any more modern,
despite its under-the-glass hiding spot.
A mid-review biometric update improved the
accuracy tenfold, but it’s still not an ideal solution
for security or privacy in 2019. I wouldn’t necessarily
call it a step backward from the S9’s physical scanner
(which had its own placement issues), but it’s not
much an improvement either (though I do like
the ripple animation even if it is a millisecond slower).
What is a downgrade is the loss of the iris scanner,
leaving the fingerprint sensor as the only secure
biometric option on the S10. That needs to change
with the S11, and I hope the S10 5G’s time-of-flight
sensor is a sign that 3D facial unlock is on the way.
Battery life
With the Snapdragon 855 processor and 8GB of
RAM, the S10+ is every bit the beast it should be.Every benchmark I ran represented a significant Every benchmark I ran represented a significant
jump over any 845 phone, and daily performance
was stutter-, lag-, and slowdown-free. Here’s how
it compared to the Note 9:
Geekbench 4 (Single-core/multi-core)
Galaxy Note 9: 2,294/7,714
Galaxy S10+: 3,448/10,803
PCMark Work 2.0
Galaxy Note 9: 8,227
Galaxy S10+: 9,549
3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme
Galaxy Note 9: 4,659
Galaxy S10+: 5,456
Of course, off-the-charts performance is basically
table stakes for a £1,099 phone. Battery life is far more
important. The S10+ packs a 4,100mAh battery, bigger
than the ones in both the S9+ and the Note 9. The
larger capacity makes a big difference. In benchmarks,
I was able to top 11 hours of runtime, about 10 percent
longer than with other 4,000mAh phones I’ve tested.
In the real world, the S10+ is even better than
the benchmarks indicate. Samsung’s new phones
have Android 9’s new Adaptive power saving mode,
which uses machine learning to intelligently shut off
unnecessary apps and processes to conserve battery
life. Switching it on makes the S10+ seem like it has a
larger battery than it does. I easily powered through
a day of heavy use without needing to turn on the
battery saver. A few percentage points might not seem
like much, but over the course of a day it adds up.
And that extra battery life comes in handy when
you want to use the Galaxy S10+’s coolest party trick:
reverse wireless charging. It’s not the first phone to
include the feature, but it’s the most mainstream one.
Using it is simple – just tap the Wireless PowerShare
button in the quick settings, flip over your phone, and
viola, it’s a charger – but it’s probably not something
you’ll use much after your try it out or show it off to
your iPhone-using friends. But it’s definitely the kind
of thing that’ll be great to have on the rare occasion
that you need it.
Software
New Galaxy S phones traditionally usher in the
latest version of the Samsung Experience, but the
phone maker actually first pushed its massive One UI
overhaul to the older S9 this year. I’ve already written
at length about what One UI means to Samsung’s
family of devices, and on the S10 it truly feels like
the software and hardware are finally in unison.
The most obvious change is the switch from tap
to gesture navigation, but Samsung isn’t quite ready
to embrace it wholeheartedly. I was surprised to find
that full-screen gestures were switched off by default
when I powered on the S10, and without a prompt
during setup, I wonder how many people are going
to find its hiding spot inside the nav bar settings.
That’s a shame, because gesture navigation is
nearly perfect on the S10+. With ultra-slim bezels,
the swipes for back, home, and recent are natural
and easy to reach. The extra few millimetres of space
afforded by the elimination of the navigation bar
gives the phone a real full-screen feel. I’d like to see
Samsung experiment with more advanced gestures as
One UI evolves, but the simple approach works. My
only question is: why’d we have to wait so long?
Night mode is a standout feature. Like a light
switch for the S10+, Samsung’s Dynamic AMOLED
display generates deep blacks that accentuate text and
buttons even more than on the S9. The curved corners
of boxes and windows reflect the refined design, and
the barely-there bezels make phone and the UI blend
like never before. Even Bixby Home is better, with
smarter card selections and engaging animations.Speaking of Samsung’s digital assistant, Bixby has
learned some new tricks on the S10 in the form of if-
this-then-that-style commands. A powerful and useful
system of shortcuts, Bixby Routines isn’t so much
about voice commands as it is about intelligence. For
example, you can set your S10 to conserve battery
by turning off the always-on display if you forget to
put it on the charger at night. Or you can limit auto-
rotate to certain apps, such as YouTube and Netflix.
Samsung provides a few routines to get started, but
the combinations are basically endless, especially
when compared to the relatively limited options
with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa
Cameras
Samsung has returned the S10 and S10+ to photo
parity after making the dual lens an S9+ exclusive.
Both gain the new triple-camera array that finally lets
you capture ultra-wide images. Here are the specs:
Camera 1: 12Mp telephoto Camera, f/2.4, OIS
Camera 2: 12Mp wide-angle, dual f/1.5-f/2.4, OIS
Camera 3: 16Mp ultra wide, f/2.2
The result is a camera that can take different
photos than the S9 does, though not necessarily
better ones. That’s not so much a criticism as it is a
recognition that the Galaxy S9+ already offers one
of the best smartphone cameras you can buy, and
Samsung is basically in refinement mode at this point.
The biggest upgrade is in field of view. When
switching to the ultra-wide camera (accessible via a
button above the shutter), the viewing area increases,
from 45- to 77- to 123 degrees. That means you’ll
capture more of the scene without having to back
up as much, as you can see in the comparison
photos below, all taken from the same spot.
The S10+ also performs great when capturing
a range of colours, particularly when ample light is
available. Images were consistently sharper, brighter,
and more detailed when compared to the S9, and the
S10+ even held its own against Google’s incredible
processing engine on the Pixel 3. In the image of the
candy below, the S10+’s auto white balance results
in clearer definition and less saturated images, with
less muddiness at the low end. When dealing with
different shades of white, the S10+ wasn’t fooled
into unnatural adjustments.
| Night-time and low light are a different story.
While I was extremely impressed with the S10+’s
ability to focus quickly in extremely low light, the
pictures I snapped had far less detail than the ones
I took with the Pixel 3. In some instances, it looked
as though Samsung’s post-processing engine
applied a smoothing filter rather than even trying to
suss out finer details that were clearly visible with the
Pixel 3. I’d love to see a Pixel-style Night Mode for
Samsung phones at some point, maybe even later
this year as part of the Note 9’s feature set.
Around the front, Samsung has augmented the
standard 10Mp f/1.9 lens with a second 8Mp RGB
depth camera with a wider 90 FOV. If you take a lot of
selfies you’ll appreciate the edge detailing and depth-
of-field adjustments, but there’s nothing here that
isn’t also available on the S10’s single front camera.
I didn’t have a standard S10 to compare it to,
but the S10+ definitely outperformed the S9’s front
camera in basically every facet, as you can see
opposite. However, as it stands, the second front
camera seems like a missed opportunity. I would have
rather seen an ultra-wide second camera like on the Pixel 3 or a 3D camera for facial recognition. |
There’s no denying that the Galaxy S10+ is the
absolute cream of the premium Android phone crop
right now. It has the fastest processor, the most RAM,
the most storage, and the best display money can buy.
And it’s all wrapped in a beautiful package that’s hard
to find much fault with.But there are definitely places where it falls short.
The fingerprint sensor remains a point of contention,
and it’s the phone’s only biometric security
mechanism. The hole in the display for the front
camera is inelegant. The cameras are less impressive
than in Samsung’s past efforts – a point underscored
by Google’s processing abilities in the Pixel 3.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, the Galaxy
Fold. The S phone has enjoyed flagship status for
the better part of a decade, but suddenly it needs
to figure out where it fits in Samsung’s smartphone
hierarchy, at least in terms of wow factor.
Still, even without the newest specs and features,
the S10+ could very well still end up being Samsung’s
mightiest hero. It might not deliver the sci-fi sizzle of
The Galaxy Sthe Galaxy Fold. But like Captain Marvel, sometimes
old school is all you need to properly defend the
Galaxy. Michael Simon
Specifications
• 6.4in (3,040x1,440; 526ppi) Dynamic AMOLED
capacitive touchscreen
• Android 9.0 (Pie), One UI
• Exynos 9820 Octa (8nm) processor
• Octa-core (2x 2.7GHz Mongoose M4, 2x 2.3GHz
Cortex-A75, 4x 1.9GHz Cortex-A55) CPU
• Mali-G76 MP12 GPU
• 8GB, 12GB RAM
• 128GB, 512GB, 1TB storage
• Three rear-facing cameras: 12Mp, f/1.5-2.4, 26mm
(wide), 1/2.55in, 1.4µm, Dual Pixel PDAF, OIS; 12Mp,
f/2.4, 52mm (telephoto), 1/3.6in, 1µm, AF, OIS, 2x
optical zoom; 16Mp, f/2.2, 12mm (ultrawide)
• Dual front-facing cameras: 10Mp, f/1.9, 26mm
(wide), Dual Pixel PDAF; 8Mp, f/2.2, 22mm (wide),
depth sensor
• Dual-band 802.11ac/ax Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 5.0
• NFC
• Fingerprint scanner (under display)
• USB 3.1, Type-C 1.0
• Non-removable 4,100mAh lithium-ion battery
• 157.6x74.1x7.8mm
• 175g, 198g (ceramic)
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