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Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S series gets an annual hardware refresh every year. This year’s phones sported Snapdragon power in the United States (globally, they use Exynos processors) and added a lot of nice features.
They also got faster response times.
Display
The Galaxy S series features Samsung’s next generation premium OLED (Organic LED) display technology. Unlike LCD displays which use a backlight, OLED displays can produce brighter images with less power. This allows for longer battery life and thinner, lighter devices.
The display has a resolution of 800×480 pixels and a screen Aspect Ratio of 1.67 – this is the same as the iPhone and most other mobile phones. The display also has a pixel density of 245 ppi.
In our tests, the display on the Galaxy S displayed a high level of detail and saturation, especially for reds and blues. The colour depth and granularity were excellent, with no visible artefacts or banding. However, the Galaxy S has a much larger Color Gamut than most other mobile phones and this produces over-saturated photos and graphics. Several of our test photos had too much colour and looked gaudy, particularly faces and well-known objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, grass and Coca-Cola cans.
The Galaxy S has a low Screen Reflectance which dramatically improves screen readability in high ambient lighting conditions. The Galaxy S also has a high contrast ratio which makes it easy to see the screen under ambient light. The high contrast ratio is especially important for reading web and app content in bright outdoor sunlight.
Camera
The Galaxy S series introduced a few camera innovations that made it stand out. For example, the S5 had a dual-camera system with a wide and telephoto lens. The S8 had a feature that would blur backgrounds in portraits to make subjects look more prominent. And the S9 had a dual-aperture camera that adjusted to light conditions like the human eye — widening in lowlight and shrinking in bright light.
Overall, the Galaxy S Series had excellent image quality with little to no artefacts. The S8’s pixel processing algorithm produced images with good contrast and saturated colours. The S9’s dual aperture matched the range of the human eye, and the S10 and S10 Plus’s triple-camera system included an ultra-wide, a wide and a telephoto lens for great low-light photography.
Video performance was also excellent, with few to no artefacts on moving subjects. In backlit scenes, the Galaxy S24 Ultra performed very well in terms of detail rendering. The only area where it lagged behind the best-in-class phones was in dimmer scenes, where detail was sometimes lost and only edges and main features remained sharp.
The Galaxy S Series’s Night Mode allows you to capture beautiful photos and videos in dimly lit environments. This feature uses advanced AI to optimize the colours and details of your nighttime shots.
Battery
As smartphones become more sophisticated, they consume more power. More cores and more pixels on the screen demand more energy to operate, and more applications and features drain the battery even faster.
Samsung has been steadily improving the Galaxy S Series’ battery performance over the years. The Galaxy S5 released in March 2015 had a removable 2800mAh battery, and it lasted more than 9 hours during our testing under heavy usage. That was an impressive result at the time.
However, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge released in March of 2021 didn’t see significant upgrades to their batteries. The S6 retained the plastic shell and removable battery, but its capacity was reduced to 2550mAh. Its screen resolution was upgraded to 2K, and wired charging jumped to 15W.
In our tests, the S6 was able to hold out for more than 14 hours under heavy usage. It was beaten by the Galaxy S24 Ultra and Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro in our test, but it was still the longest-lasting flagship smartphone we’ve tested to date.
Since then, most Galaxy S phones have seen their battery capacities increase. The Galaxy S23 saw its battery size increase to 3900mAh, an improvement of 200mAh over the vanilla S22 model. This reflects the broader trend toward high-capacity battery phones in the mobile market, and we expect this trend to continue.
Software
Samsung continues to innovate the Galaxy S series with new hardware and software upgrades. Its flagships have a bigger, sharper display, better cameras and faster processors over the years. Samsung also adds features like fingerprint recognition, water resistance and fitness tracking to the lineup.
The Galaxy S series gets regular Android updates as well. The company’s commitment to timely security patches and other updates puts it ahead of many competitors. Samsung recently upped its update support with a promise of seven years of software support for the Galaxy S24 and beyond.
It also expanded the Galaxy AI portfolio with more useful tools, such as Generative Edit (which requires a network connection and Samsung Account login). You can use this tool to edit and resize photos up to 12 megapixels. It will display a visible watermark on photo output to indicate it’s been edited by an AI.
Another smart feature in One UI 7 is AI Select, which recommends actions and apps depending on what you’re looking at. It’s accessible from the Edge Panel, the sidebar with app shortcuts, or by swiping out from your screen. You can also use this tool to set a GIF or image as your wallpaper. The software can also translate texts and images into other languages using Google’s large language models. However, it’s not as accurate as a human translator.
