The Samsung Galaxy S10 family has laid out what we should expect for phones of 2019. 5G is coming, but not ready yet. The next generation of augmented reality hardware is here, but the software to use it isn’t.
What’s left for a phone that needs to sell in big numbers, right now? It’s mostly tech we’ve seen before, either in a form we recognise or tweaked for 2019.
This means the standard Galaxy S10 is not radically removed from 2018’s top phones, though. Let’s see how it compares to two 2018 favourites, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and Google Pixel 3, based on an early look at the Galaxy S10.
Design
The Galaxy S10 has a 6.1-inch screen and is 70.4mm wide. The Mate 20 Pro has a 6.39-inch screen and is 72.3mm wide. Both max out the front of the device for the display, and the Pixel 3 simply doesn’t.
That the Samsung Galaxy S10 also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, missing from the others, is a surprise. And a relief.
Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10 make the Pixel 3 look pretty flat, almost retro. They have curved glass on front and back, aluminium on the sides. The Huawei in particular comes in far more eye-catching finishes.
There’s a strange effect here, though. The deliberately plain Google Pixel 3 seems more unusual, in aiming for a low-key look. It’s also the smallest of the three at 68.2mm wide. It has a distinct appeal, avoiding the same-ness of competitors that take aluminium and glass to their natural design conclusions and, unsurprisingly, end up with similar-looking mobiles.
The Pixel 3 is also extremely light. You could almost mistake it for a shop dummy at 148g. The Mate 20 Pro is 189g and the Galaxy S10 is almost as light at 157g.
Display
These three phones show three different generational approaches to screen design. The Pixel 3 has the earliest kind, a simple 18:9 rectangle. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro has a fairly wide notch, which became the standard for high-end phones in 2018.
Samsung’s Galaxy S10 has a punch-hole screen, and is the first of its kind to use an OLED panel. Just like a notch, it cleaves space out of the display for the front camera, but less of it than the Mate 20 Pro. Asking which you prefer is like a question in one of those dreadful personality quizzes.
All three phones have OLED displays, but there’s a clear hierarchy of quality here. The Pixel 3 has a 5.5-inch 2160 x 1080 pixel panel made by LG. Its OLED panels were heavily criticised in 2017 for their blue tints, but the Pixel 3’s is sound enough.
The Mate 20 Pro has a much higher resolution, 3120 x 1440 panel made by BOE, a Chinese display manufacturer. And the Galaxy S10 has a 3040 x 1440 AMOLED made by the most famous maker of mobile OLEDs, Samsung.
All three phones appear well-saturated. All three obviously offer excellent contrast and support HDR footage. The Galaxy S10 is easily the brightest of the lot, though - 400 nits is the Pixel 3’s peak, the Mate 20 Pro manages up to around 580 nits and Samsung says the Galaxy S10 reaches 1,200 nits. This might be hard to believe if Samsung hadn’t already proved this capability of its OLED panels in the Note 8, as tested by DisplayMate.
Fingerprint scanners
To go with their displays from different micro-eras, the phones also have completely different finger-scanner hardware. Again, the Pixel 3’s is the most traditional. A capacitive finger scanner sits on its back, ready to measure the conductive properties of your forefinger to make sure you are you.
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s finger scanner sits under the display, and uses an optical sensor made by Chinese manufacturer Gudix. It makes the OnePlus 6T’s scanner, too. A little ring of the OLED screen’s pixels light up your fingerprint. And an optical sensor not entirely dissimilar to a camera sensor “reads” your finger from underneath the OLED layer. The Mate 20 Pro’s fingerprint reader was not perfect at launch, but it was one of the first with this hardware.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 uses a different kind of reader, but it still lives in the screen. It’s an ultrasonic finger scanner, that bounces sound waves off your finger. These are outside the range of human hearing, and the changes in the reflected signal let the sensor recognise your print.
Ultrasonic hardware is, according to Samsung and the sensor’s maker Qualcomm, less put off by wet fingers and cold surroundings. Samsung wins here on paper, but all these strategies work.
Camera
We haven’t yet analysed the Galaxy S10’s night mode or processing yet, but it had better be good. Its own cameras are, in a very basic sense, similar to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s. The Galaxy S10 has a primary 12-megapixel camera with OIS, a 12-megapixel zoom with OIS and a 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera.
As the main camera has much larger sensor pixels than the Huawei, it doesn’t have to rely on software to the same extent. Huawei uses a process called pixel binning, where sensor pixels are combined to emulate the effect of a large, lower-res sensor. Samsung doesn’t need to.
It also has variable aperture, switching between f/1.5 and f/2.4 depending on the light conditions, just like the Galaxy S9. Samsung also claims the Galaxy S10 is the first phone to be able to record HDR10+ video. This only means it adheres to a standard, not that it achieves some amazing new benchmark of video capture quality.
We can’t draw any firm Galaxy S10 camera conclusions just yet, but it seems promising.
The way some talk about the Google Pixel 3’s camera, you could think its images are made by magic instead of a sensor. However, at its core sits a Sony IMX363, as seen in the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, the Nokia 8.1 and Xiaomi Pocofone F1. Its software manages to hugely boost dynamic range without ending up with a flat-looking image. The Pixel 3’s photos are hard to beat for their sheer contrast and richness of colour. Google, somehow, manages to increase colour saturation without an unsaturated look. The Pixel 3 is far less aggressive about raising shadow detail in some scenes of extreme light contrast, such as when you shoot into the sun, though.
It’s also much less versatile as a creative photography tool than either the Mate 20 Pro or the Galaxy S10. Both have a zoom and an ultra-wide lens. A zoom is great for gigs. The wide is excellent at shooting architecture, letting you capture images you can’t get by just moving back from your subject.
The Pixel 3 has an “AI” zoom, which uses the optical stabilisation motor to ever-so-slightly tilt the sensor to shoot images in fractionally different positions and combine the results to mimic the additional data of a higher res sensor. But it’s no replacement for a lens with a natural 2x or 3x focal length.
Still, while Mate 20 Pro has good image processing, it rarely gives nature scenes the same kind of natural eye candy appeal of the Pixel 3.
When shooting at night, both the Mate 20 Pro and Pixel 3 have excellent night modes that use computational photography principles to boost dynamic range. Which is better? It depends on the scene. Sorry.
Performance
Rival high-end phones often end up using the same processors, but these three all have different CPUs.
Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro has the newer Kirin 980, made by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon. Run a general benchmark like Geekbench 4 and the Kirin will come out on top. It has newer, faster cores. However, in one of the areas that matters most, GPU performance, the older Snapdragon 845 is still better. It has an Adreno 630 graphics chipset, the Kirin 980 a 10-core Mali-G76.
The Exynos 9820 of the Samsung Galaxy S10 is likely to beat both of these for pure CPU performance. The Google Pixel 3 has the oldest, the popular Snapdragon 845 from 2018. Once again it all gets a bit stickier with the GPU.
The S10 has a Mali-G76 MP12, similar to the Mate 20 Pro’s but with two more cores. It may beat the Pixel 3 for raw gaming power, but it won’t do so by much. This is why we miss out a little in the UK. Samsung uses the Snapdragon 855 for its Galaxy S10 phones in other countries, and it beats the Exynos 9820 for both CPU and GPU power.
For a phone with a “last generation” processor, the Pixel 3 holds up well. However, it only has 4GB RAM whereas the Samsung and Huawei have 8GB.
Software and battery life
Pure Android software is one of the most obvious reasons to choose a Pixel 3. How does this slot in next to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S10? It’s a case of simple-ish, simple-er and simplest. The Pixel 3 is simplest.
Both Samsung and Huawei did try to slim down their interfaces with these phones, though. Samsung even gave its UI a new name, One UI. Huawei’s is still called EMUI.
On the S10 series, Samsung has replaced its weird old hieroglyph soft keys with more conventional-looking icons. And Huawei slimmed down its Settings menu as EMUI’s used to be like the index of an encyclopaedia.
These redesigns shown what happens when teams are a little too close their own products, though. You could hand the Galaxy S10 and Huawei Mate 20 Pro to the average phone user and they’d have no idea these were intended to be dynamically re-launched interfaces. They look like custom UIs. They are custom UIs.
All-important battery life of these phones is yet to be determined. We know the Huawei Mate 20 Pro categorically outlasts the Pixel 3 with general use, not least because it has a 4,200mAh battery to the Pixel’s 2,915mAh.
At this pre-review stage we can’t confirm if the Galaxy S10 will compete. But, well, it probably won’t. The S10 has a 3,400mAh battery, and there are no reasons to assume it will even get close to the Mate 20 Pro’s stamina. The Galaxy S10 Plus, though, has a 4,100mAh battery so could be on par or very close.
Initial verdict
The Google Pixel 3 has the least interesting hardware of these phones. Its CPU is ageing rapidly, the rear camera has one sensor, one lens, and the screen size is not impressive considering the phone’s dimensions. However, it’s a vessel for Android above all else, and will get updates before the others. And it demonstrates Google’s camera algorithms perfectly.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 and Huawei Mate 20 Pro have more aggressive hardware. Triple rear cameras, in-display finger scanners, sharper screens and new processors make them seem techier, higher end phones.
For the price-conscious hardware fan, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro might be a good choice, especially as its cost has eroded a little since launch, with the Mate 30 and 30 Pro expected in March. Still, if you can hold off a week or two before making your choice, it's worth finding out whether Samsung can deliver more in use than Huawei currently offers.
- Read the WIRED Recommends guides to the best smartphone and the best Android phones to see which models we recommend right now. We'll be updating these guides soon when we review the Galaxy S10
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
