Half a decade ago, Samsung phones were known for packing in every piece of tech possible. Whether people wanted it, were likely to use it, or not. The Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S10 phones are much more tasteful. They even leave out some features rivals have.
The tech show-off side of Samsung is compartmentalised. Phones like the Galaxy Fold and Galaxy S10 5G live in that box. This means the Galaxy S10+ is not the tech showcase you might expect, for one of the highest-profile launches of the year.
However, there are plenty of little extras currently far more useful than 5G, such as incredible video stabilisation and a camera whose creative avenues match the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s.
Design
Samsung’s new-found conservatism may be behind its decision to avoid using display notches for what feels like a half-decade. But it has caved, sort of, by devising the Infinity-O display.
This is its take on the punch-hole screen, one of 2019’s key design trends. “Cut a hole” in the display to fit the front camera hardware and you can fill the rest of the front with screen. And phone manufacturers’ desire to do just that has become borderline pathological.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+’s is the most obvious punch hole we’ve seen. It’s more than twice the size of the Honor View 20’s and Galaxy S10’s, because this phone has two selfie cameras rather than one.
When you’re trying not to be distracted by the blob of black in your Netflix movie, you might question Samsung’s decision. However, this does seem a much more practical solution day-to-day than a slider, which offers yet another part to fill with dust or come slightly loose after six months.
Pretend the punch hole isn’t there and the Samsung Galaxy S10+ seems a lot like the Galaxy S9+ but with more screen. Curved Gorilla Glass sits on front and back, and the screen bends around the sides to make the phone seem even more display-filled, front on.
Those curves collect reflections, and are a reminder that even new OLEDs suffer slightly from a blue tint at an angle. But this is one of the best displays around.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ is also one of a tiny band of high-end phones that still has a headphone jack. This may well be enough to draw some away from obvious alternatives, like the Mate 20 Pro. The phone has at least 128GB storage, with 512GB an option, loud and punchy stereo speakers and IP67 water resistance.
It’s also a reminder of quite how aggressive Samsung designs are, compared to Apple’s. This phone has a 6.4-inch screen. The iPhone XS Max has a 6.5-inch one, but is much wider, 77.4mm to 74mm. That may not sound a lot, but the Samsung Galaxy S10+ feels a significantly smaller phone.
Much of what is notable about the Samsung Galaxy S10+ as a potential purchase was already there in the Galaxy S9+. But what’s new?
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ is the first phone we’ve used to have an ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint scanner. At the outset, in phones at least, fingerprint readers used capacitive sensors, measuring conductance. In-screen tech moved this onto the arguably less secure optical type, which effectively photograph your print. Ultrasonic sensors bounce high-frequency vibrational (sound) waves off your finger. And, just like all the other methods, it lets the S10+ map your fingerprint.
Its claim to superiority over the others is that it’s less fussed about grease and moisture than a capacitive scanner, and likely more secure than the optical kind. Samsung adds a complication, though.
All other in-screen finger scanners show you where to put your finger, lighting up a ring on the display when the motion sensors detect the phone is handled. This isn’t just to be helpful, as the sensor needs that extra light, but it is helpful. Samsung doesn’t seem to have twigged this, because you use the ultrasonic pad “blind”, unless you press the power button to reach the lock screen. And this minimises the time saving of a finger scanner, the main function of this tech.
As learning curves go, this is a fairly brief one. But like the use of a punch hole instead of a notch, a degree of belief helps in appreciating this as progress. Out in the real world, a notch is as good as a punch hole. A good capacitive finger scanner is as good as an ultrasonic one.
Software
Samsung has manufactured “progress” in its software, too. The Samsung Galaxy S10+ has One UI software on top of Android 9.0, designed to look simpler than the Galaxy S9’s launch interface.
Settings menus are less full, icons and feature toggles are given much more space. However, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ is at its best when some of these changes are rolled back, using the same under-the-skin customisations Samsung’s UI has had since the beginning. The four columns of icons the phone uses by default seems almost clumsily simplistic, as if to suggest people spending £1,000 on a phone only use a handful of simple apps.
If that’s the case, you should probably save your money and buy something cheaper, like a Moto G7 Power.
There are no groundbreaking revelations in the core hardware either. The UK version of the Samsung Galaxy S10+ has a Samsung-made Exynos 9820 processor, with eight cores and a 12-core Mali G76 GPU. The iPhone XS family’s A12 processor is significantly more powerful on both CPU and GPU sides, and the graphics processor is no more powerful than the Snapdragon 845 used in many of 2018’s flagships.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ has the Snapdragon 855 in the US and China. Only the most committed of spec-heads should consider importing, though. General performance and gaming performance are both excellent. For now at least, any clock cycle competition between top phones works much better on paper than in person.
This may change if, as Google likely hopes, another push on AR apps and games makes the form take off. You may have noticed that a few phones with enhanced depth-sensing Time of Flight cameras have started to appear, suggesting a renewed focus on AR in the next version of Android.
Samsung has not bet on this, though. The Samsung Galaxy S10+ does not have a dedicated augmented reality camera, only the Galaxy S10 5G does.
The standard Samsung Galaxy S10+ also lacks 5G, likely to be the most visible invisible piece of technology added to some of this year’s top phones. However, you’re unlikely to feel bereft without 5G before 2022 in the UK. And by then the Samsung Galaxy S10+ will be categorically old anyway.
Camera
It does have three rear camera sensors, though. They, sensibly, focus on increasing the kinds of photos you can take with your phone.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ has a standard view 12-megapixel camera, a “2x zoom” 12-megapixel camera and a 16-megapixel ultra-wide. It’s roughly the same array as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s, but with a slightly more traditional approach.
There’s no ultra-high resolution main sensor, the zoom’s focal length is less ambitious, and the wide does not have autofocus, making it useless for true close-ups. Huawei capitalises on its wide camera’s AF, letting you use it as a macro shooter.
Despite being newer, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ is less dynamic than the Mate 20 Pro. It is still quite brilliant, though.
Image quality in general is great across all three cameras. Just like every half-decent phone, the raw capabilities of the hardware are amplified with software, making it almost difficult to take a shot that is overexposed.
Strangely enough, though, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ actually seems worse at relaying what image you’ll get in the preview image than the Galaxy S9. Shots that look a bit dull in the camera app end up perfectly exposed in the gallery. This is one aspect Apple’s iPhone nails. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a more faithful preview than this phone, too. Samsung may address this in an update.
Processing is a little keen, too. Colour tends to be bold rather than entirely natural, and if you look close enough you’ll see Samsung’s usual slightly watercolour-like processing character, rather than the more natural style of the Pixel 3.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ also currently lacks an extreme low-light mode, perhaps the most talked-about innovation in phone computational photography of the last couple of years. This is a big hole, leaving the S10+ lagging quite far behind the Mate 20 Pro and Pixel 3 at night. It still takes good low-light images, but they simply do not compare to the high clarity, low noise of those given extra help with tailored software. Samsung is reportedly working on such a mode.
Make no mistake, this is no B-team camera, but it does not instantly set a new standard, which is what we’d hope for in one of the most anticipated Androids of the year. Though it will likely improve in the coming months.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ does set a standard in one often under-appreciated area, however: software-based video stabilisation. This is where a phone, or camera, crops into what the sensor can actually see, so there’s some buffer area outside that captured which is used to buffer movement. Switch "Super Steady" on and resolution drops all the way down to 1080p, but you get the best stabilisation seen in a phone, ever.
The principle is just that of normal image stabilisation, but the Samsung Galaxy S10+ shoots a normal field of view using the ultra-wide camera, leaving a gigantic image buffer around the sides. You can run with the phone in your hand and footage will look near-smooth. There’s so much smoothing scope the phone uses a predictive algorithm to try to work out which movement is deliberate, and which is unwanted jogging about.
There’s a slight hit to image quality, and fine detail can seem to flutter along with certain movements, but this is almost gimbal-like stabilisation. And a very clever use of a wide angle camera.
Shoot using standard stabilisation and the Samsung Galaxy S10+ uses the usual software method right up to 4k at 30 frames per second. It reverts to optical stabilisation at 4K, 60 frames, but even this is fairly effective.
The front cameras have standard and wider views, too. However, as the fields of view are not radically different, depth effect shots seem the real use for the dual-camera array. As well as simple background blur, the Live Focus mode allows radial “spin” blurring, “zoom” blur and colour pop.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+’s selfies are great, but those who don’t continually post selfies on Instagram may end up wondering whether the extra space cut into the screen is worth it. We are not convinced.
Battery
Samsung has significantly increased the Samsung Galaxy S10+’s battery capacity this year. It has a 4,100mAh cell, up from the S9+’s 3,500mAh.
That is a bigger proportional increase than that of the display. Samsung screens are also renowned for their efficiency. If you leave the phone playing a video on loop, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ will last a very long time. An hour of YouTube streaming takes 6-7 per cent off the battery level, suggesting it’ll last 15-16 hours.
However, while other reviews have praised the S10+'s battery performance during video and browser tests, we aren’t hugely impressed by its real-world longevity, with more 4G audio streaming than Netflix or YouTube. At the time of writing it’s 5:38pm. The Samsung Galaxy S10+ has only 27 per cent charge left. The phone reports a few hours of podcast streaming as the biggest drain.
This is not a one-time occurrence, either. The phone is regularly left with only half its charge by the early afternoon.
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is much better at keeping the power use of low-level background jobs to a minimum. Will you get a full day’s use from the S10+? Sure. Two days? Not a chance.
Like previous Galaxy flagships, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ supports wireless charging. And this time it can charge other Qi-compatible devices by resting them on its back, a feature seen first in the Mate 20 Pro.
Verdict
Samsung has left trailblazing tech progress to its Galaxy Fold and Galaxy S10 5G this year. With the Galaxy S10+ the aim seems to be to make a phone whose tech is made for 2019, not prepped for life in 2021.
Paying £900 or more for only moderate future-proofing may seem strange, but the market has spoken. Phones this expensive are not outliers anymore. They are normal.
Still, this is one of the best phones in the world, and is only set to improve if Samsung does update it with a Huawei and Google-matching low-light photography mode. Battery life is perhaps less likely to get such an overhaul. The Galaxy S10+ lasts long enough to satisfy, and can stream video for the better part of a full day, but the Mate 20 Pro lasts significantly longer with mixed use, despite very similar battery capacity.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
