Here's our breakdown of everything you need to know about the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Price: The Galaxy S5 is priced at $599.99 for the 16GB variant, whereas the 32 GB model is available for $649.99 without any service plans.
Deals: Samsung Galaxy S5 can be purchased for less than the suggested retail price on Amazon. For a $488 factory unlocked White S5, check out this page, and for the same model in black for $488, go here.
Pros: One of the major pros of Samsung Galaxy S5 is its fantastic camera. Samsung powers the phone with a 2800 mAH battery which provides a stand by backup of up to 390 hours whereas the talk time backup is 21 hours, still very good if you compare it with the other phones which fall under the same category. The phone supports all Samsung gear accessories and even comes with an option of expandable memory up to 128 GB through a micro SD. The addition of the fingerprint sensor which is more of a response to the feature added by Apple works beautifully. One can assign up to three fingerprints to unlock the phone.
Cons: Galaxy S5 is priced steeply. The design is still the same as the Galaxy series with very small changes which do not justify the price. Also, the interface in the phone is not very organized and hence lead to a lot of clutter. The hardware updates in this phone as compared to its predecessor failed to impress reviewers as well as customers. One of the headlining features i.e. the heart rate sensor does not seem to work, even after continuous jabbing, the S5 just refuses to register a reading.
Specs: The Galaxy S5 has a 5.10 inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a 1080 x 1920 display and supports 16 million colors. It is powered by a Quad-core 2.5 GHz processor and is supported by a 2GB RAM which ensures zero lag. It has a primary camera of 16 MP which is well equipped to take amazing pictures. The secondary camera is just 2.1 MP. The phone comes with two storage options i.e 16GB and 32GB and has an expandable memory up to 128 GB. The battery used in the phone is a 2800 mAH LI-Ion battery. The phone comes with Android OS v4.4.2 (KitKat) and is upgradable to v5.0 (Lollipop).
Talking Points: Samsung Galaxy S5 did not turn out to be very successful. The sales dipped drastically hence leading to a 64 percent drop in profits from $5.7 billion to $1.65 billion. During the first three months of its availability, Samsung sold 12 million units of the S5 compared to 16 million of the S4. As a result of this, Samsung ended up with a lot of warehouse inventory and they had to offer an extremely attractive pricing to customers. United States was the only market where S5 saw an uptick in sales in contrast to China where the sales dropped by 50%. Similar was the scenario in all other markets as well.
Conclusion: Samsung Galaxy S5 is a very good phone in terms of performance and usability but fails to meet the expectations of the users. The major drawback is its price since one can get better features from Samsung's competitors at the same or at a lower price.
