It all started in 2014, with Samsung Note Edge. A bold smartphone with a crazy curved display at one end, which looks weird but managed to grab a lot of attention. It seemed to be a design experiment that somehow made its way to production. But, Next year, in 2015 Samsung surprised the whole world by going even farther away and launching Samsung S6 Edge. which has a two-end curved display instead of just one, as seen earlier on Note Edge.
9 years passed, Samsung has refined that design again and again which brings us to this -Samsung S10, and it's the best from Samsung factory yet. So, is Samsung s10 is that elusive perfect smartphone we have ever dreamt of? We will be finding this out, today, together.
Before diving down into a detailed review, here is a quick list of the specifications that Samsung S10 comes with.
S10 comes in a black box with S10 Printed in bluish shiny tint. Open the box and you'll see the smartphone at the top followed by a lid. Take off the lid and you will find underneath a premium AKG earphone, a Type-C 15W fast charger which supports Samsung adaptive fast charging, and two USB adapters - a Type-A to Type-C adaptor, and a micro Type-B to Type-C adapter. There are also some user manuals stuck within the lid if you ever feel like reading them and a micro sim ejector. Let's move forward to the next section to see how Samsung design feels like.
S10 looks just beautiful, It follows the same traditional glass sandwich design as seen almost on every other flagship, but the fit and finish are top-notch, and curved display over the top makes it one of the best looking device of the year. The curves are subtle, more subtle than last year S9 and it's a good direction to go in.
Samsung S10 features a Corning Gorilla Glass 6 at the front and CG 5 on the back-side which blends in smoothly with the polished aluminum frame on the side. On the bottom side of the frame is a 3.5 mm jack and a stereo speaker setup, the top of the frame is occupied by sim tray and a mic. The sides are kept clean with a power on/off button on the right and a volume adjustment button on the left.
The device weighs 157 gm, while the device isn't too good with the grip, the weight distribution is kept even, and you won't feel any unaligned heft anywhere.
The back-side has a horizontal camera setup on the top which houses all 3 cameras and Samsung health-sensor, the rest of the back is plain with a Samsung logo just above the lower side of the back panel. In any case, you're wondering where is the fingerprint scanner? Samsung S10, this time has gone with an all-new in-display ultrasonic fingerprint scanner which is more accurate and precise than a normal optical fingerprint sensor and works even with a wet or dirty hands
Samsung S10 has got a 6.1 inches dynamic Super AMOLED Quad HD panel with a resolution of 1440x3040p and comes in a 19:9 aspect ratio having a screen to body ratio of 93.2%. These are all-new display panels to be ever used on any Samsung Smartphones, and the new thing with these panels has to do with HDR. Samsung dynamic display panel supports HDR+ content, an upgrade over HDR only support on last year's Samsung S9.
Keeping traditional features behind the biggest highlight of this year Samsung Amoled panel is its notch. Samsung S10 comes with an Infinity-O display, with a small floating round notch situated on the top-right side of the AMOLED panel. Though you won't get the same seamless viewing experience as you get with the Oneplus 7 Pro, it's overall a better solution, as it hinders less than any traditional notch.
The colors are punchy and rich in details and the brightness can go up to 120 nits, so you won't have any problem reading the screen in any condition what so ever. You can also change the resolution of your S10 to your likings, the default screen comes set to Full HD+ but you can manually adjust it to Quad HD or HD+ resolution to save some more battery.
Samsung S10 comes equipped either with an all-new Snapdragon 855 chipset paired with an Adreno 640 GPU or an Exynos 9820 paired with a Mali 676 MP12 GPU. While both of them are top-notch chips available in the market. Snapdragon version is the faster one among two.
The best part about buying the latest flagship is that you won't have to worry much about its performance. The same goes to S10, The device seems clutter-free and smooth. We didn't notice any lag anywhere in our 10 days of usage, and it handles everything we threw at it, with grace.
You can play all high graphics game without any frame loss or lag even at high settings. We tried PUBG, Mobile Legends, and Asphalt 8 during our usage, and while we didn't notice any drop in frame rate the device does get warm after 15-20 minutes of gameplay.
It's possibly due to the high clock speed of chipset, and Switching to the power-saving mode which restricts the CPU usage to 70%, will fix this issue without affecting the gaming experience.
Below are some benchmarks results we performed with our S10. We have also compared these results with last year's S9 to show the leap in performance you get while upgrading a year-old chipset.
Samsung packs 3400 mAh battery inside, 700 mAh less than its Plus model. The battery capacity by no means is a wow factor in S10, and while it's isn't bad by anyways, it can last you for 24 hours with normal mixed usage. But, if you are a person who keeps checking emails, playing games, and watching online anime videos all the time, it would last no longer than 16 to 18 hours, it's not bad, but I would have loved to see at least a 4000mAh battery packed inside.
Samsung S10 comes with a 15W fast charging adapter that supports Adaptive fast charging via Type-C cable( has the same power as quick charge 2.0 adapter), which already feels out-dated and slow compare to the competition's offering. In our test, Complete charging of phone from %0 to 100% took 1 hour 40 minutes, while 30 minutes of charging left us with 47%-48% of battery.
If you'll ask us we will say, it's the notch. The infinity-O display looks just wonderful. the notch is round and floating, it rarely hinders the viewing experience, and better of all, it's not ugly like others notches.
Reverse Charging tech is another thing I found cool in this year's S-model. You can charge other devices with your Samsung S10, and if you plan to include within your collection a wireless bud, which Samsung is offering at a heavy discount with its S10, or a smartwatch, then this feature would make much more sense to you as you'll just have to carry a single adapter. You can also charge other devices simultaneously while charging your S10, another practical usage of this reverse charging tech. During my time with Samsung S10, I used to charge my smartwatch over my S10. Since it has merely 120mAh battery, it barely brought any real-world difference in my s10's battery performance.
Samsung S10 is a beautiful beast with capable a camera setup, best display to ever exist on any smartphone with HDR+ support, a cool looking notch, and an aesthetic build quality which is designed to turn heads. While it worth every penny spend over it, better battery capacity is one thing Samsung left us asking for. While I wholeheartedly suggest this device to everyone, I definitely would like to see better-charging technology next year too.
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