Samsung Galaxy S5, White 16GB (AT&T)

Having used the Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 - I am familiar with the changes made to the user interface between the models. I felt the S3 has the best app menu / home screen interface because it allows me to go forwards and backwards without coming to a complete stop forcing me to go backwards. I believe the change was first made with the S4 and carried over to the S5. I noticed the S5 has a bit more bloatware from Verizon, but many of them can be easily turned off via Application Manager (such as My Magazine). I was also forced to subscribe to Verizon Basic Visual Voice Mail, which didn't work right for the first 24 hours. However, now I feel it is actually pretty good. I still haven't tried HD calling/voice yet, but it is available on the S5 with Verizon. The quad-core processor on the S5 makes the interface feel a lot faster and more fluid than my S3 for obvious reasons. AnTuTu benchmarks showed the S5 rated at 42,412 points which is very high at the time of this review. The battery life is just under 46 hours and 56 minutes with infrequent use, about the same as my S3. The screen on the S5 is larger than the S3's screen and has a higher resolution. However, the end result is that everything just looks larger and sharper. With the Tech Armor ballistic glass (which is a very thick but clear protector), the screen looks absolutely gorgeous even in bright conditions. The WiFi performance is exceptionally good - much better than my S3 or the Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition. I am seeing the maximum number of WiFi bars throughout the house whereas my other devices are kind of wishy washy. The camera on the S5 is a great feature. It actually swayed over quite a few of my coworkers who have been die-hard iPhone users. The low light capability is extraordinary without the use of a flash. The HDR feature is also very cool. I'm not a newbie to videography as I have used my S3 for a variety of photography and video projects. The S5 has the ability to record video in 4K/30fps and 1080P/60 fps. I learned from using my GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition that the use of a proper Class 10 micro-SD card is the key to maximizing data bitrate for the videos. The slower microSD cards that are still Class 10 may only be capable of 45-50 MB/s, resulting in the device backing off the bitrate to under 30 Mbps for the video. There's a noticeable loss in quality on the Hero3+ Black Edition when this occurs. I picked up a PNY Class 10 that is rated for 90 MB/s, and found that my S5 records 4k/30 fps at 56 Mbps and 1080P/60 fps at 27 Mbps - which is less than the 48 Mbps I get from the GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition. However, the S5's video quality still blows the GoPro away. The S5 offers some water resistance, but the USB 3.0 port cover gets very annoying. I'm sure that over time the cover will get damaged/broken and the gasket may be damaged as well, reducing the effectiveness of the water resistance. The USB 3.0 port itself is also annoying as USB 3.0 is harder to quickly plug in versus a basic micro USB port. Overall: 5/5 stars, one of the best phones for 2014. I looked hard at the LG G3 and HTC One M8, but the S5 offered the best battery life, fastest performance, and a removeable battery. The LG G3's larger screen was also its downfall as it uses more power and it slows down the phone a bit based on all the benchmarks and reviews I have read. If you already have a S4, the S5 won't be that great of an upgrade. I had the S3 and still felt that I could have used the S3 until the S6 came out, but the Black Friday deals for the S5 were too hard to pass up! The quad-core processor makes a huge difference as well!

This is the fourth Android phone model we've used in our household used since evolving into smart phone use six years ago. Before I begin gushing about the phone itself, some context about *any* mobile phone purchase (if you're already comfortable with the variables of mobile phones and their providers, you can skip this part): These major factors that will contribute to (or detract from) the smart phone experience of *any* user: (1) the hardware...the phone itself (2) operating system software (3) installed applications (4) the network (overall, and where you happen to be using the phone at a particular time) (5) the service provider. Serial dependencies come from these factors, as many phones are tied to specific operating systems or service providers. Just remember that even if you make a great phone choice, deficiencies in the other areas can still diminish your overall user experience. Make your move to your next (or first) smart phone only after researching these choices. Which provider? Which mobile operating system? Who offers the best service, or the best combination of value and service? The rest of this review assumes you've already figured out why a phone with the Android operating system might be a better choice for you than an iPhone, a Blackberry or a Windows-based smart phone solution (yes, Blackberry and Windows options remain alive...sort of). Every provider --including Sprint-- has a variety of pricing options. If you're a Sprint customer with two years on your current hardware and are ready to re-up: many phones are available at a deep discount from both online retailers and big box stores. I've asked Sprint if they will match those prices..and they won't. It's no big deal; you won't hurt their feelings if you buy from another source (but you might not be able to take a suddenly balky phone into a Sprint store and have it replaced at no charge, either). For this phone, Amazon's pricing was at a 90% discount vs. buying from Sprint. Be sure and negotiate with them and look for plan pricing discounts for loyatly or organizational/corporate affiliations. For the phone itself: this is an outstanding device for each of telephony, online activity, still photography and video capture. The display is crisp and brilliant, the controls (each of the three buttons on the phone's side, the home/soft keys on the front and the options within the OS) are intuitive and responsive. The touchscreen keyboard is the best onscreen text input experience I've ever had...period. Audio output (for phone calls and music --streamed via Bluetooth or via the aux connector) is excellent. Both photographs and video are easy to use. The 16 megapixel rear camera images (still and moving) are outstanding in quality. Obviously the front is a grainier at 2 megapixels. But wait there's more: the rear phone cover easily removes to reveal an easily user-replaceable battery. Shame on phones that don't offer this. You'll also find access to a slot for a microSD card adjacent to the battery. Charging and sync are via a USB 3.0 port. If you don't have any cables with this form factor, this phone ships with one, but you'll want extras so you don't have to keep tabs on a possible single point of failure. This is not a negative...bust an issue if you replacing a phone with a different cable type. Outstanding smart phone that will keep you from the clutches of the Apple tree. Select with confidence.

I love my Galaxy S5. I've used a broad range of smartphones, and never have I been satisfied or felt anything other than disappointment and aggravation, so I do not say this hastily, the Galaxy S5 is the best smartphone I have ever used, and the best smartphone on the market. First off this PHONE looks amazing. It's stylish, just the right height, ridiculously slim, and I no longer fear bringing my phone out in a room full of iPhone users. The DISPLAY makes you feel like you have a 42 inch plasma TV in the palm of your hands. It is by far the brightest screen I have ever seen. Images are vivid, crisp and detailed. You see things you never knew you didn't want to see. You will quickly delete that all too up and personal selfie you thought looked good in. This phone is the FASTEST phone I have ever used. Boot time is nonexistent, as in the unlikely event you will ever have to actually restart it will only take about five seconds. Not only boot time but everything is amazingly fast on this phone. I have never had to wait for this phone to catch-up to my gestures or wait for an app to load. Even webpages load instantly. BATTERY life is a worry of the past, you will rarely have to worry about finding a power outlet because your battery died. I use this phone rigorously and the battery has never drained 100%. The few times I got to about 20% I just activated one of the two power saving modes. Standard power saving mode, which at 20% gives you about an hour of continuous use, and about a day of standby. Ultra Power save mode, restricts the phone to several applications. I've only had to use this mode once when my battery was at 2% and I just needed to make sure I had enough power to make a phone call when I got off the subway, and sure enough an hour later the phone was still on and I was able to place that call. Fear of the screen cracking is so 2013, this is the most DURABLE phone out there. Cellphone protectors are hideous, I refuse to put one on this phone, so I was very surprised when I accidently threw it on concrete and the screen did not break, crack or chip. I was even more surprise the next time, and the next. Now I have dropped it so many times I can't even remember how many, and the screen is still perfectly in place without a scratch. There are a couple of minor nicks on the body however but there aren't many, especially considering how hard the phone dropped. I could go on, and on about the many features that make the Galaxy S5 the best smartphone on the market. I haven't even mentioned the FINGERPRINT reader (which could use a little work on its accuracy), or SIDESYNC the desktop app by Samsung which allows you to control your phone from your desktop or Galaxy Tab. It is like remote desktop for your phone. I say again I LOVE MY GALAXY S5!

This phone has been reviewed to death, so I will not bother reviewing all the small details. I did, however, notice that no reviews mention wakelocks, so I would like to take a moment to discuss those. I will also tie this into the battery and battery life. At home, my S5 has amazing battery life. I consistently get nearly 6 hrs. of screen on time with a single charge. However, at school (a large university) my battery life takes a nose dive while on wifi. A tl;dr explanation of what is happening is that the android operating system has a bug where busy wifi networks are able to wake your phone up while it is sleeping (keyword: wake locks). This means your phone cannot go into a consistent "deep sleep" after you lock your phone and it will continue to drain your battery even when you're not using it. Feel free to google it for more info, but as of now, there is no fix. A quick fix for me was to download an app called MacroDroid. I set it so that when I am connected to my university network and I lock the screen, it will automatically shut the wifi off. When I turn the screen back on, the wifi is turned on automatically. Disclaimer: I am running kitkat right now, lollipop may or may not fix this issue. Related to this is a problem my S5 seems to have when I change specific things. For example, both after installing a microSD card and syncing my text messages from my old iphone to my current phone, the phone would not go into a deep sleep. I was able to fix these issues by clearing my phones cache and clearing the cache for the associated apps. I've always been able to fix this issue, but I feel like it shouldn't be happening at all in the first place. If anyone cares to know, I will describe how to prolong your battery life below, both on a day to day basis and its lifetime overall. To extend day to day battery life: 1. I immediately turned off all gestures (apparently they can get toggled while the phone is in your pocket and use up battery?) 2. Turn off location unless I'm using it 3. Disabled all the random apps that come preloaded on the phone and you can't delete If you are having issues with your phone's battery life, try using Greenify, which will let you hibernate apps that may use up battery with one click. You can also download an app called "System Monitor" (the Lite version is free and works fine for this purpose) and you can use it to monitor the CPU speed on your S5. If, while the phone is locked, the phone is not in "deep sleep," something is wrong and it will cause your battery to die faster than it should. Note: The first time you turn on the phone and as the phone is installing all the initial updates, the battery will probably drain very fast. This is only because the phone has been off for a long time and the calibration (so to speak) will be a little off. After you charge your phone completely it should go back to a normal discharge rate. To extend the overall lifetime of your phone's battery: 1. Do not leave it in your car when it is very hot (> 80F) or very cold (<35F). It can do irreversible damage to the battery. 2. Limit the number of charge/discharge cycles. I.e. charge your phone when you have to. The best thing to do would be to only charge it once it's below about 20%, and when you do charge it, charge it all the way up. Unplugging it as soon as it reaches 100% is recommended. 3. Don't leave it at a low % charge for a long time, it's unhealthy for Li-ion batteries. There is no need to "cycle" your battery (you do that with Ni-Cad batteries). Other than that, it's a really nice phone and being samsung's "flag ship," there are a lot of available accessories for it. I am using the Spigen Slim Armor case and really like it. I also would highly recommend a tempered glass screen protector, it has a much better feel than a plastic screen protector. Lastly, I had no issue switching from an iphone 4 to this phone. It took a bit to get used to, but I was quick to realize the many new benefits. The new screen was daunting at first, but my hands are big enough to hold it, and it is a lot easier to use and see.

I received my Galaxy S5 last night, and I'm absolutely loving it so far! Setup was extremely easy. Amazon will send you an email once your order has shipped with instructions on what to do. Once you've finished with that part, the phone has a wizard that will take you through the rest. For me, this was much better than having a sales associate do it while I wait. I upgraded from an OLD Samsung Droid Charge, so this phone is quite a jump from what I've been using. My husband has an S3, and there are noticeable differences between those models, as well. I'm not a super techy person, so I won't get into specs and the such. However, I really like the design and the feel of the phone in my hand. Everything that I've had a chance to set up and play with so far has worked almost flawlessly, and of course the screen looks wonderful. My only slight hesitations are with the finger print sensor and heart monitor. It's probably just me adjusting to something different, but I rarely am able to unlock my phone on the first scan of my thumb. I saved my scan at two different angles - straight down and with my thumb held sideways - but I still haven't quite gotten the hang of it. Hopefully this will improve as I get used to doing it, though. Also, I'm not sure how accurate the heart monitor is. It seems a little all over the place, but I really like the rest of the fitness app so far. Neither of these things are real gripes, most likely just things that will improve with time and use. UPDATE 4/30/14: I felt the need to update my review regarding my last paragraph. I have definitely gotten used to both the fingerprint security/unlock and the heart rate monitor. Both are working very well now that I've had the phone a few weeks. Other important things to note are (1) how much I love the driving mode that allows for completely hands free voice commands! This is WONDERFUL and remedies my concern about trying to unlock my phone while driving using the finger print swipe. (2) I also am super impressed with the camera on this phone. It is seriously as good as most point and shoot cameras I've owned. Still loving my new phone!

After you read this review you are probably going to think the author (me) is half-crazy and I've got nobody to blame but myself. Probably true. But in my defense I am merely a consumer and a first-time Android customer. My problem is that I needed to buy an English phone that worked in China (where I live). Yeah - I could have bought the exact same phone in China, but all the menus and apps would have been in Chinese, and the app payment system would have been linked to the Chinese banking system which I, as a foreigner, don't really have access to. I was really excited about the new Samsung Galaxy S5 and thought the blue phone looked cool, so I waited and waited and waited until it was launched. Launch date arrived and at 12:01 AM I was on Amazon ready to buy (it was lunchtime in China). Nothing. Ok - yeah - there were the Galaxy S5 phones that you could buy from AT&T but they had already been posted on Amazon for weeks. Nothing had changed, and the blue phones that had been plastered all over were absolutely not available. What had happened to them? A complete mystery! This is why I think Samsung are stupid - their big "launch" was, in fact, marked only by the complete absence of any marketing activities. Apple's marketing is amazing. But what's even more amazing is that companies like Samsung can't even copy the basic things that Apple do so well. Leading up to the launch Samsung leaked information like a sieve. But after the launch Samsung eliminated all communication. The result was always going to be highly disappointed and frustrated customers! After weeks of more waiting I decided to take the plunge and buy and AT&T "no contract" white phone at the full price of $699. I didn't really want AT&T to be involved, but it seemed like it was my only option. It was, after all, a "no contract" phone. It just appeared as if Samsung couldn't distribute the phone by themselves and needed AT&T's help. My friend then hand-carried the phone over for me and placed it in my tingling hands. But the first message that popped-up on the screen was "Enter Your SIM Unlock Code". I contacted AT&T. They explained it like this: "you don't need to have a contract but you do need to have a paid AT&T service agreement". I challenged them: "but if I have a paid service agreement then that would mean that I have a contract". I went to law school so I thought it was a pretty clever argument. But I could not prevail - apparently there are legal exceptions for telecommunication monopolies. This is why I think AT&T are awful, and why I am begging you never to do business with them! But I took my half-bricked phone and persevered. I wouldn't be able to make phone calls, but at least I'd be able to play Angry Birds. Enter Google. I searched the Google Play Store in vain before finally trying to download Angry Birds from the Rovio website. But after sending me back to Google this message appeared: "This app is not available in your country". Definitely not true as I had Angry Birds on my old iPhone. So it must just be that Google sucks. Google, for reasons that are just inexplicable, do not want me to buy Angry Birds or, in fact, any app that requires a payment (yes - I was logged in with a credit card). Why, why, why? I can think of a few evil reasons but I certainly can't think of any good ones. Then, out of nowhere, Samsung start selling "international" blue phones on Amazon that are $50 cheaper than the AT&T phones. I really do hate you all!

I really wanted to love it, but in the end, like is as far as I can go. It really is a deal in the smartphone universe - Android 6, 2GB RAM, nice screen, fast CPU, for not a lot of money. So it has a lot going for it, honestly. However, it has some quirks that my Galaxy Note 3 (an older phone than the S5) did not have. Specifically, the OTG functionality is very buggy, mostly not working at all. Exact same cables and devices work fine on the Note3. The fingerprint scanner is pretty picky, almost always takes me 2 or 3 tries to get it to work (in fairness, the note3 had no scanner), and it seems to be a little glitchy in it's SD card functionality (sometimes it takes it 2 or 3 minutes after a reboot to figure out it has one). Otherwise, a pretty solid phone, that works in Canada (the verizion locked Note3 would not). For the relatively inexpensive price, I am satisfied, it is a capable smartphone, in my opinion, much nicer than similarly priced phones that are currently on the market. However, were it not for the fact that I use MHL and a cable to watch Amazon video on my TV, I would have bought a Google Nexus 5x instead (Nexus only supports ChromeCast or similar, no 'real cable' hookups, and my experience with Amazon Video and CC and similar is that the quality sucks on non-cabled methods - more the fault of Amazon Video than the hardware). Update: Had this phone about 2 months now, and the screen cracked (and I didn't do anything even close to what I feel could be expected to cause such damage). So, minus one more star. In fairness, it's just a hairline crack that doesn't affect usability (can't even see it from normal viewing angles). However, in many years of using various smart phones, this is the first phone I've ever had a cracked screen with. My wife has the same phone, and her screen is also similarly cracked (has been for over a year now, though still not affecting use of her phone). She has never cracked the screen on any other phone either, and she has been using smartphones for years also. Both of us use mil-spec (drop tested) cases, and neither of us are hard on phones (ie: we're not dropping them on a regular basis). So I have to conclude, that the screen on this model is a bit wimpy as compared to other models.

Upgraded to this from galaxy S3, so many improvements. I'm an extreme critique when it comes to everything, and this phone has minimum downsides. First off, I was tired of paying Sprint for phone insurance, because they wouldn't fix my S3 when it was obviously bugged and broken, even though I paid $11/month for a year and a half. That being said, I wanted to save $11 a month which adds up fast. Well luckily this phone is water resistant and known for being very strong. So I took a chance and bought this, never paid for insurance, and never will. Finally engineers had more influence than businessmen. Along with a Spigen case, this phone works perfectly after many big drops, spills, and even swimming with it. This is a big deal for anyone on a budget as you can save a lot by not buying insurance, where you might need it for other phones. Note it's not water proof so don't have it underwater for long periods of time, and take any case off after. As I left mine on, which trapped water underneath case, and phone glitched out for a few days, but returned to normal. The battery life is amazing, better than any phone I've ever seen or used. I know there are a few others recent phones with similar quality battery life, but the extreme power saver mode which I use if I'm near out of battery and don't have charger is extremely useful. Plus with the usb 3.0 charger, it's charges EXTREMELY fast, 20 minutes will get you a substantial charge. This also is nice for transferring pictures/movies to/from phone to computer. As an audiophile, the audio drivers are great and provide amazing sound to my high end earphones. The included equalizer has a simple mode and advanced mode which both work nice. It's nice not to need an additional app for that. Literally the only downside to this phone that I can think of is that the "drop down menu" does not include a mobile data toggle button. Which is extremely retarded of the software developers (May be an operating system flaw). Because along with Wi-Fi and location (gps) it is one of the few buttons I would use. I used a third party app to make a homescreen widget to do this, but why not include it in drop down menu like my old phone? After my S3 which I found a little big for my liking, the S5 which is even bigger doesn't annoy me size wise, it seems just right. If desired you can even shrink the screen for "one-hand" use. Conclusion: Get this phone, you won't be disappointed. - Sorry for long review, May it be helpful.

The battery worked well.

good