I have now owned my Galaxy S10+ for 5 months receiving it on launch day with my pre-order which included a free pair of Galaxy Buds. Here’s my verdict on the phone before we have the Note lineup release. Samsung did a great job at making the Galaxy S10 a powerhouse for what it is. But lets talk about what makes this phone a great one and a little about the not so great.

The Good

One UI is smoother than ever with the new iteration of the Galaxy S Series. Now it’s easier to navigate through the UI by being able to pull down on almost every page to have your reach-ability accessible. Lets not forget about the infamous dark mode finally being system wide even before the Android Q release.

Battery life is made much better with the 4,100 mah battery. Its optimized very well in order to get me through my day. I can leave with a full charge in the morning never having to worry about charging mid day.

Cameras. Three. Cameras. These are more than enough for any avid phone photographer to get their dose of wide, super wide, and telephoto. I’ve found the super wide camera to be more useful than I thought. I see myself using the super wide camera a lot in outdoor environments to snap a photo of either a landscape or a skyscraper located in my field of view. There’s no more need of having to take a couple steps back in order to achieve what you want.

Fingerprint Scanner for this phone has been greatly updated in order to provide a pleasant experience. When I first received my Galaxy S10+ I found it to be slightly off and slow. Samsung pulled through with plenty of updates to improve upon this in display fingerprint scanner to make it way faster and accurate upon every unlock. Us phone users do tend to unlock our phones over 40 times a day so its something important to get right.

The Bad

Selfies are not my most favorite thing in this world. But I expect a phone with a front facing camera along with a depth sensor to take better photos than its rivals. I don’t like Samsungs post processing made to make my face look smoother than butter and whiter than I usually look. Yes, I do turn off all the beauty modes and I still can’t achieve a great selfie picture that I can take and say “Wow, that’s actually a good picture”.

Notification LED was probably one of my favorite features since I started using Samsung phones with the Galaxy S4. I had a quick glance at my phones LED and knew whether I got a text or a notification from a certain app. I even knew when my phone was finished charging without physically checking. Unfortunately, this feature is now gone. I understand trimming the bezels to make them as thin as possible can have some impact done to the hardware of the phone so I have switched over to the AOD in order to replicate some sort of active notification at all times.

Powershare has been pretty weak for me in terms of charging another phone. I’ve been pretty generous at times to charge my friends iPhone up when its been completely dead. The only issue here is how powershare is only outputting 4.5w therefore it takes around 10 minutes to be able to revive the phone to even turn on. Luckily, the Note 10 is upgrading this to a generous 15w. Good on Samsung for that.

Final Verdict

Overall the Galaxy S10+ is a great daily driver that I would have kept until it died with its last breath. I really love the software and hardware of the phone and all the little things are what keeps me happy. I do recommend this phone to anyone looking to buy the latest Samsung phone. I will still be switching over to the Galaxy Note 10+ due to the incremental updates they’re featuring that just makes everything about the S10+ even better.

Update: A fellow redditor from the r/GalaxyS10 subreddit named u/Bat_Chatllion replied with the following: “One thing I have to say is that for the charging part of the notification light I have found a partial solution, in Bixby routines make AOD on when charging. This allows you to see if it’s charged or not because of the new battery notification that comes up when the battery is full is fairly easy to see since it’s bright green. Mine is set to turn it on when charging if the time is not 10pm – 6am. So far it has worked well for me but it is still slightly worse than the notification light, the only thing I miss from my S8”. This is a good tip for users to try out to replicate the missing piece of knowing when your phone is fully charged. Thank you for the advice!

What do you guys like and dislike about your Galaxy S10? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.