For the past few weeks, I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S10+ as my primary Android phone. Although there are still a few things that could use work, notably the fingerprint reader and the camera's Bright Night Mode, in almost all the other aspects—the overall design, screen, the processor, and especially the new camera set up—it worked great. From an all-around perspective, it's almost certainly the most powerful Android phone on the market now.

The Best Screen Ever?

With a 6.4-inch display, the S10+ is the largest mainstream member of a family of Samsung Galaxy phones, which also includes the 5.8-inch S10e and the 6.1-inch S10. There's also a promised S10 5G, with a 6.7-inch display; the upcoming Galaxy Fold with a foldable 7.3-inch display; last year's Galaxy Note 9 with a stylus and a similar 6.4-inch display; and some mid-range Galaxy A series phones. But the S10e, S10, and the S10+ are the models you see most often from the major carriers.

The first thing you notice when you look at the S10+ compared with last year's S9+ or most other phones is that there is an oval-shaped "hole" in the screen where the front cameras are situated. This lets pretty much the whole front of the device be screen, with the bezels even smaller than in previous years (where the front cameras needed to be in the bezel.) At first, the hole looks disconcerting, but I got used to this quickly and don't think it got in the way much. When you hold the phone normally (vertically), in most applications, the hole appears on the top of the screen next to the normal top-of-phone indicators, such as the time, connection, and battery life. Given the phone's 19.5:9 screen ratio, it didn't get it the way of any of the 16:9 videos I watched. If you don't like the hole, you can turn the top area next to it black instead—it's in the Display > Full-screen apps section of the settings—but I didn't think it was necessary.

The 6.4-inch display continues to be big enough for me. It's technically a QWHD+ 2960 by 1440 display, but it defaults to FHD+ 2280 by 1080 to preserve battery life, though you can change that. As on the past few generations of Samsung Galaxy phones, the S10 and S10+ have curved edges on the side, that you use to more quickly pull up apps and connect with people. It's something that sounds good in theory, but I don't find myself using much.

Overall, though, the screen is yet another step forward. Researchers like DisplayMate who do technical comparisons say the color accuracy, picture quality, and absolute brightness has improved. Side-by-side against last year's models, the colors just look better. (Of course, last year's phones looked quite good, so if you look at either of them by itself, either looks excellent. But the extra brightness helps on a very sunny day.)

More Cameras, More Effects

The hole does show off one of the big improvements this year, though. It has an extra front-facing camera, compared with the S10, S10e, or last year's models. The extra camera continues to the back of the device, where there are now three rear-facing cameras.

The main rear-facing camera is similar to last year's—a dual-picture, dual-aperture 12-megapixel camera that can take shots with f/1.4 or f/2.4 aperture with a 77-degree field-of-view. It also continues to have a 12MP "telephoto" or "zoom" (2X) lens with a 45-degree field-of-view. New this year on the S10 and S10+ is a 16MP ultrawide camera with a 123-degree field-of-view. This is similar to the ultrawide cameras I've often liked on LG phones, but Samsung is offering an even wider field-of-view.

As a result, you can take a wide variety of photos:

This is a photo of Grand Central Terminal with the zoom lens (without any digital zoom).

Here's one with the normal Lens. You can see how crisp it is, because of the large aperture and relatively fast shutter speed.

Here's one with the wide lens. Notice just how much of the scene this captured—it really gives you a better sense of the overall environment. There is a little pincushioning near the corners, but that's normal on a wide lens. (There is an option to correct this, although, in practice, it didn't seem to make that much of a difference.)

Overall, I was very impressed by the third camera—it's particularly wide, and that lets you capture the most information possible in a landscape or wide area; things I would otherwise use a Panorama mode for. One feature I'd like to see in the future is something like the LG V40's "Triple Shot," which lets that 3-camera phone take a shot from all three cameras at the same time.

As usual, the Samsung camera has a number of other features, such as the ability to capture 4K 3840 by 2160 video at up to 60 frames per second. It actually defaults to capturing video at 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second, and there are a number of other options, including 2288 by 1080 (designed to fill the screen), 1440 by 1440, and 1280 by 720. Some new options let you capture HDR10+. That's an interesting format, but very few displays support that yet. (Of course, the Galaxy S10 screen does.)

The camera includes a 'scene optimizer," with a couple of interesting options. A Bright Night option is supposed to take brighter pictures in very dark environments, but in practice, I didn't notice a huge improvement with it. In this way, the S10+ camera definitely lags behind those on the Pixel 3 or Huawei P30 Pro.

On the other hand, I found an option to take scans of documents or slides to work surprisingly well. When the scene optimizer detects a document, a scan label appears, and if you press it, the phone will just capture the document, eliminating any distortion. I've seen this in a variety of apps but have never seen it as well integrated into the basic camera application. This turned out to be very useful.

Samsung has had a mode called "Live Focus" similar to the "Portrait" mode on the iPhone for placing some amount of background blur or bokeh. You can adjust the amount of blur after the fact. In general, I thought the iPhone was a slight bit better at the bokeh effect. But the Galaxy S10+ now adds more new options, including letting you set the background to spin, zoom, or a color point—in other words, it gives you more ways to display the background. I particularly liked one in which your subject is in color and the background is in monochrome.

Other options include slow motion (1080p at 240 frames per second) and "super slow-mo" photography. In the super slow-mo mode, you can now record 720p video at 480 frames per second for 0.8 seconds, or 960 frames per second for 0.4 seconds. You typically set it up to record only when an object enters a square on the screen. I can't say I've used this a lot, but it is a very cool effect.

Other options include a pro mode where you can manually change a lot of the settings, panoramas, hyperlapse, and a food mode, which adds more saturation to the picture. A flaw detection system notifies you if someone blinks or looks blurry. You can record motion photos so that each picture includes a few sections of video. There is the option to use Bixby Vision, which includes a few AR apps for things like choosing makeup, and some lenses designed to tell you more about what you are photographing—something that can make for cool demos, but in practice, didn't work particularly well.

As I mentioned, the S10+ has dual front cameras—an extra 8MP depth camera, in addition to the normal 10MP front-facing camera. (The normal S10 and S10e have just the single regular camera, just like last year's models.) This extra camera is designed to let you take better selfies, specifically using the second camera to offer more and better bokeh if you use the Live Focus option. As with the rear camera, you have new effects for Live Focus, including the spin and color point backgrounds, and the ability to create AR emoji. It's neat, though I still can't say I'm a huge fan of most selfies.

All in all, I have been very impressed by the photo features of the S10+. The photos I took look a bit more natural than those from earlier Samsung phones (including the Note 9), and with the exception of the bright night mode, they stand up to the best photos I've seen from any phone, but with a very large set of options.

A New Kind of Fingerprint Reader

One of the most interesting features of the S10 and S10+ is the new fingerprint reader, which is actually embedded below the screen. Samsung says this is ultrasonic, and thus very hard to fool, compared with other fingerprint readers.

On one hand, it's great not to take up the screen space with a button on a bezel. The fingerprint reader generally worked pretty well for me. But there were times when it didn't work, either when my finger was damp or because it wasn't in the exact right space. Then I had to press another button to wake it up and then use the fingerprint reader, an unnecessary extra step.

Unlike the last couple of generations, the S10 family no longer offers iris recognition, and the basic face-detection scheme can be fooled just too easily, by a picture of your face, for instance. Therefore, your only real backup to the fingerprint reader is a password or PIN.

Overall, my favorite unlocking method is still Apple's Face ID, followed closely by the very identifiable buttons on the back of the Google Pixel and most LG phones. I don't think this is a big drawback for the S10+, but it is a bit of an annoyance.

Processor, Connections, Battery

Like most other high-end Android phones coming out this spring, the North American version of the Galaxy S10 family is powered by the 2.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, with four "big" cores and four smaller, lower-power cores, and Adreno 640 graphics. This is made on TSMC's 7nm process. The version I used had 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage along with a microSD card slot for expansion. (The high-end version has 12GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, but that seems like overkill.)

In PCMag's benchmarks, the S10+ scored very well, as the fastest Android. (On some benchmarks, the latest iPhones are still faster, particularly on single-core performance.) In practice, it was very fast. As always, the only real slowdowns I notice on the latest phones come in areas with weak LTE connections.

Speaking of connections, the Snapdragon 855 comes with the Qualcomm X24 modem, which supports even more concurrent channels of data (technically up to five channels in a 4 X 4 MIMO configuration, with a theoretical peak of 2Gbps.) In the real world, performance depends on what your carrier offers in your market, but PCMag and Ookla report that the mean download speed for the S10+ was 51.26 Mbps, which puts the S10 family about 19 percent faster than the Note 9 or the iPhone Xs Max. Personally, as usual, I saw no great variations in speed, but generally, the S10+ felt a bit faster on downloads than other phones I've tried.

The sound quality was very good as well. Other features include Wi-Fi 6 for faster Wi-Fi connections if you have a router that supports this (I don't, yet).

With a 4100 mAh battery, you would expect very good battery life, and indeed it did great on PCMag's battery test. S10+ supports fast-charging both through wired connections and wireless charging pads. I found I could easily go two days of normal use on the S10+—and seemed to have more juice left over than with any other phone I 've tried recently.

One weird new feature is Wireless Power Share, which lets you charge another wireless device—say the Galaxy Buds earbuds—by putting it on the back of the phone. I can't say I found much use for it, but hey, it's neat.

UI, Bixby, and Conclusion

Samsung made some big changes in its UI with this year's release, coming up with what it calls One UI. The result is round icons; fewer, simpler, notifications; and redesigned options. This seems lighter and a bit easier to use, and I like the way that some of the commands have moved to the bottom of the screen, so you don't have to reach to the top to change all of your options. Still, my guess is that most Samsung users won't really find the changes either compelling or off-putting. The old UI worked, and so does the new one.

As before, you can swipe up from the home screen to see of all your apps, or right to see the Bixby UI, which acts as a notification screen. You can also push a button on the side to pull up the Bixby assistant or use a command to activate that. Despite Samsung's efforts, Bixby is just not a great assistant yet. You can do things like say, "Hi Bixby, what's the weather" and it will usually work. But for more complicated questions, Google Assistant is simply more accurate and versatile. You can assign other applications to the Bixby button on the left side (instead of Bixby), but unfortunately, Google Assistant isn't one of the choices. You can get to that by swiping up from the bottom of the home screen. This is still an area that cries out for improvements.

Even within Samsung's own line, the S10+ may well get overlooked by the smaller cheaper S10e with a 5.8-inch display; the larger S10 5G (expected shortly, with a 6.7-inch display and a fourth rear-facing camera, this one a 3D depth sensor) and the fancier Galaxy Fold (although that rollout has been delayed because of issues with the foldable screen.) To me, the 5G version is just a bit too large, and the Fold too pricey, so the S10 and S10+ strike me as the real flagship models. With new features such as the improved camera with a new ultra-wide-angle lens, a faster processor and modem, and a redesigned UI, it's a good step up from previous generations. Despite a few quibbles, these are simply the most powerful Android phones on the market today.

Here's PCMag's review.

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