TouchWiz has multiple personalities

It's amazing Samsung is as successful as it is with software like this. A lot of people give it a pass because they are used to it by now, but compared to a stock Android device or iOS, the Galaxy S5 software is a mess. At any given time, you'll be jumping between apps with three different design styles. About half of Samsung's software still looks like old-style Touchwiz, and the other half is more in tune with the company's still-in-development Tizen OS. The third design style is Google's apps, which Samsung must include but isn't allowed to skin. So some apps use a white card design (Google), others use Samsung's usual blue/green design (Touchwiz), and the rest use a Windows 8-esque white icon silhouette on a primary color (Tizen). Who would guess that the three screenshots above were from the same device?

Samsung couldn't even decide on a single icon style. The app drawer apps use normal Android icons with unique shapes, but the settings screen (which is six screens long!) uses Tizen's colored circles with white icons. The notification panel uses blue and green circle icons.

Besides the three clashing design styles, the Galaxy S5 app selection includes multiples of everything. Samsung wants to push its own software, but the company has a contractual obligation to include all of the Google apps. As a result, the device ships with two browsers, two voice assistant apps, two galleries, two app stores, three music players, and four texting apps. We really don't understand how smartphone newbies deal with this. By default, there are so many apps in the app drawer, we're starting to wish there was a search function.

To the left of the main home screen is "My Magazine" a picture-based news reader built by Flipboard. You can pick your favorite news topics and see pictures and headlines. My Magazine isn't really much of an app; it mostly serves as a launcher for the main Flipboard app, and the two aren't integrated very well. For instance, tapping on a headline and pressing back doesn't go back to the My Magazine page you came from; it goes to the main screen of Flipboard.

With the removal of the hardware menu button, Recent Apps has been given a top-tier spot on the bottom of the phone. Now that Samsung can't rely on the menu button as a dumping ground for controls, many of the TouchWiz apps have moved over to a navigation panel, just like what the Google Play apps use. Samsung's apps used to be almost entirely driven by the menu button, which made it difficult to assess the primary functions of an app without digging through the menu. Now options are on the screen, and the user doesn't have to think to hit the menu button in every screen just to see what commands are available.

There is a lot of functionality in Samsung's software, though, which will be more important to some people than design and ease-of-use. All the usual Touchwiz features are here: multiple windows, floating windows, air view, smart stay, motion input—the list goes on forever. Almost all of these are turned off by default, which seems to suggest that even Samsung is worried about overwhelming its users.

One of the newest features is the "Ultra Power Saving Mode," which, like what was announced at the HTC One M8 event, drops the phone into what basically amounts to a "dumbphone mode." It turns off all syncing and push notifications, multitasking, and much of the interface to get as much battery life as possible. HTC's version of this idea was not released with the phone and will be patched in later, so it's hard to compare the two.

The power saving mode turns off the usual Android interface and drops into a simple 2x3 grid of icons, with the battery and estimated runtime at the bottom. Samsung even cuts the display down to grayscale-only. Mobile data turns off when the screen turns off, and the list of applications you're allowed to run is extremely limited—you can see the whole selection of allowed apps in the third picture. For some reason, the only allowed communication apps are Samsung apps and, strangely, Google+. If all your friends and family are on, say, Hangouts or Skype, you're out of luck. This is a legitimately useful feature though. It's a nice middle ground between completely turning the phone off to save battery and burning through it at the usual rate.

Camera

The camera of the Galaxy S5 has been bumped up to a whopping 16MP. Besides the more pixel-dense sensor, Samsung has greatly improved the auto focus with a hybrid auto-focus system (contrast and phase detection) usually found in expensive stand-alone cameras. Samsung says the Galaxy S5 can hit focus in 0.3 seconds, which the company says makes this the fastest auto focus of any smartphone.

Like the HTC One M8, Samsung has added a "selective focus" feature. Like the M8, it's really a "selective blur" feature, allowing the user to add blur to certain parts of the picture after it is taken. (It's similar to the filters already available to Instagram.) HTC added an entire extra camera to the One M8 in order to enable selective blurring, but Samsung is doing it all in software.





























































Performance

The Galaxy S5 uses the new Snapdragon 801 SoC, which first hit the market in the S5's high-end Android rival, the HTC One M8. It seems like every new phone just uses the latest go-faster Qualcomm parts at the highest clock speed. Everything gets very samey, very quickly. But Samsung has scored a paper victory over the HTC One M8. The M8 uses a Snapdragon 801 clocked at 2.3GHz, and Samsung has gone with an even faster version running at 2.5GHz.

While Samsung's extra 200MHz looks great on a spec sheet, in the real world almost every phone is heat-limited after a short period of sustained use. So while the extra 200MHz will help for "bursty" usage like loading an app (which, granted, is common), for gaming or any other heavy usage it won't matter much. The extra MHz pay off in the benchmarks, though, making the Galaxy S5 our new spreadsheet champion. During actual usage, you're unlikely to notice the 8.7 percent speed boost over HTC's latest flagship, but every little bit helps.

We've covered the Snapdragon 801 before (and again in the HTC One M8 review), but the basic gist of it is that the architecture is the same as the Snapdragon 800. The CPUs, GPU, and memory bus have all received clock speed boosts. The quad-core Krait 400 CPUs are up to 2.5GHz from 2.3GHz, the Adreno 330 GPU now runs at 578MHz instead of 450MHz, and the memory bus speed can now hit 933MHz (up from 800MHz). For most benchmarks, we compared the Galaxy S5's performance to a small group of relevant handsets:

The HTC One M8 and its 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801 SoC.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 and its 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 SoC.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 and its 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 dual-core SoC.

Apple's iPhone 5S and its ~1.3GHz A7 SoC.



















Samsung has even improved the network performance in the Galaxy S5. It's the first smartphone to use a MIMO antenna with 802.11ac—it's got two antennas instead of one, which boosts the S4's maximum theoretical link speed from 433Mbps to 867Mbps if you've got a compatible router. This technology has been used in routers (anything with more than one antenna) and laptops for some time and was a fixture in some 802.11n phones and tablets, but this is the first time we've seen it show up in a phone with 802.11ac.

One of the new features is called "Download Booster," which will tie your LTE and Wi-Fi connections together to make large downloads happen even faster. It's not on all versions of the Galaxy S5, however. This sadly includes our AT&T version, so we won't be testing it for now. Even if we did frequently download big files to our phones, we wouldn't want to burn through our precious monthly mobile data allotment if we had a Wi-Fi connection already. If you're one of the few people still on a truly unlimited plan, we could see Download Booster as a nice addition. For the vast majority of us that get the mobile data tap shut off or limited after two or four GB, the small time savings probably isn't worth it.

Not enough basics, too much other stuff

It's hard to argue with Samsung's across-the-board improvements. While it's really not exciting and doesn't blow the S4 away, the S5 is a perfectly serviceable upgrade. On the other hand, there is a lot of junk here. "Headline" additions like the fingerprint sensor don't work as well as what Apple has come up with, and a heart rate sensor would be much more at home on a fitness wristband. Samsung seemed to be searching for something to set the S5 apart, so in the process the company just threw in every hardware feature it could fit.

While the design is similar to the S4, the S5 bezels are actually fatter. As a result, the whole device looks less modern than its predecessor. In fact, we actually prefer the design of the Galaxy S4. If we had set out to improve the Galaxy S series, we would have focused on the design, build quality, and material selection, but for Samsung, the company's biggest weakness (and the HTC One's biggest market opportunity) again seems like an afterthought.

TouchWiz is actually getting worse as Samsung tries to modernize its design, but the S5 is stuck halfway between the new and old style. It's sort of like a mini-Windows 8 situation, or like the move from iOS 6 to iOS 7: you'll frequently be transitioning between two sets of apps with wildly different design styles and ways of presenting information. It's very strange and jarring compared to past versions of TouchWiz, and even other parts of the current operating system.

We often get the feeling that there are two groups at Samsung—one that wants to make an awesome phone and another that needs to pile on features that the marketing department can advertise. Under all the new gimmicks is a fine piece of hardware, but we wish Samsung would go back to basics and focus on getting the design of both the device and the software right.

The Good

A 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 makes this the single fastest smartphone available (for now).

The new button layout, with "Recent Apps" becoming a top-tier button, makes multitasking a lot easier.

With no menu button, Samsung has had to add on-screen controls to the Touchwiz apps, which makes feature discoverability a lot easier.

It's waterproof, provided you snap everything closed correctly.

The Bad

TouchWiz is a fragmented clash of three different operating system styles.

We aren't sure a heart rate monitor would be useful on a phone, but the one on this phone is only right about half the time.

The fingerprint reader can't be used one-handed.

The usual cheap-feeling plastic. It's a little improved over the glossy S4 but still not great.

The Ugly