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Thursday, December 17, 2015
OK Android Phone - Samsung Galaxy S5
I have owned this phone for 7 months but I was pretty disappointed.
The main issue is that it lags, user interactions were squarely second class.
The phone is jam packed with unnecessary and very underwhelming bloatware and hence the paltry 2GB RAM is already used up running all this garbage that user apps run in what remains, in the realm of 300MB so apps will be unloaded from RAM and have to re-establish themselves, lagging and hence reload the entire webpage for example and of course double your data usage.
The phones internal memory is also a weak point, Australia got the 16GB instead of the 32 which was the norm worldwide and it fills up rapidly after 5GB is chewed up by the system.
The SD card slot is there but most apps cannot write to it due to the Kitkat limitation locking this access out and the SD card controller they have used is poke-slow to read and write so it's really not worth considering as a feature.
The camera is TERRIBLE, despite offering a lot of fancy novelties, the camera has the worst inability to focus I have ever seen (Easily beaten by an agora and a Nokia E71) and you cannot tap the screen to pick the exposure either.
The width of the lens is very narrow and to add insult this is a widescreen sensor so you lose even more from the top and bottom. The lens on mine was also defective and the bottom right of the images is always blurry
The software is very clunky to use, offer no image control over sharpness, saturation and contrast and these are all set to the extreme by default.
Viewed at normal 1080p resolution on a computer, the images lack vibrance, are washed out, taking on a grey and look of too much contrast, sharpened artificially to the point there are halos around everything and the noise reduction kills any form of texture, smearing it like a watercolour.
Images viewed closely look clearly atrocious and any night shoots are at such a slow shutter speed to mask the under-performing image sensor that most shots are simply a blurry mess.
The phone also seems very prone to "runaway apps" where your battery gets mysteriously eaten totally in 6 hours, probably caused by the amount of rubbish pre-installed.
Video playback is also not even wroth mentioning, the phone pretty much only supports MP4, H.264 putting it squarely into the same category as the iPhone which is often lamented for it's poor codec support (MX player will support others) Where it does save itself is how long it can play an mp4 video for, more than 8 hours.
Audio playback volumes are good but not great but the inbult decoder is not the best and I get a lot of squallowing sounds. (Poweramp bypasses this)
Saying that, the phone is tough, depsite being dropped numerous times in a jelly case, it has emerged without a mark of any sorts. The waterproofing was excellent and save it once and the battery kit I bought certainly proved its worth. The phone's reception also also commendable.
Had Samsung but in a better camera and released a "Google play" edition, this phone would have been pretty good, tough, stylish and reliable but they clearly tried to cut costs in every way.
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