Galaxy S6 try outs

I have acquired a Galaxy S6 128GB to test it out.  I am still using my ATIV SE as my regular phone while I check out whether the switch to the Galaxy S6 is feasible.  The Galaxy S6 is physically a very well made phone.  So far, there does not seem to be any major physical respect in which the ATIV SE is markedly superior.  Let's deal with the big ones. 

The ATIV SE has a removable battery.  So far, the Galaxy S6 seems to go a couple of days on one charge but that will have to go down a lot when it is actually being used.  Assuming though that the battery is about as good as the ATIV SE's this is unlikely to be a problem given that the ATIV SE easily lasts me more than a day. 

Next is the microsd card.  I have a 64GB card in the ATIV SE which is not full.  I occasionally remove it so that I can offload photos from my Sony RX100 II's 8GB microsd card when I get caught short on the road.  Here is the thing though: if I swap over to the Galaxy S6 full time, that will free up the 64GB card to go into the RX100, meaning longer gaps between getting caught short, and hopefully with a bit of discipline, if I offload at home the mobile transfer will not be necessary.  But wait, there is a bonus.  The Galaxy S6 has USB hosting, so even without the microsd card, it is still possible to offload photos from the camera. 

That leads neatly into one big feature that the Galaxy S6 has all over the ATIV SE (and indeed every Windows Phone presently on the market).  The micro USB slot on the bottom of the Galaxy S6 is not limited to mass storage.  It can also handle my Fiio D5 USB decoder.  That means S/PDIF output.  But wait, there's even more.  The micro USB slot can also support a hub, so I can connect the Fiio at the same time as external storage.  I have not yet tested that with a hard drive but it has worked with a USB drive.  This capability to play from external storage and output a digital signal was one of the things I loved most about the Nokia N8 but that classic phone only allowed one USB device at a time so I had to connect a hard drive to the USB port and an HDMI to S/PDIF converter to the HDMI port (still, the N8 at least had the ports to achieve this).  (While I am reminiscing about past loved hardware, the Renault Laguna that had a S/PDIF input to the audio head unit had to go,  The audio head unit still worked fine but the, shall we say, motive power head unit was, ahem, "le tired".)

The Galaxy S6 does not have any video out which is a shame but not something I used that much and the ATIV SE does not have it anyway.

In conclusion on the hardware I would say the Galaxy S6 is pretty close to the best phone I have ever worked with.

On the software side, I still do not like Android much.  Windows Phone is superior even without the same collection of apps.  Also, I hate the fact that Samsung have left out important standard Google flavour Android features.  For example, for no reason I can fathom, there is no "priority mode" on the Galaxy S6.  Maybe there's a Nexus version on the way.

Testing continues here at the lab but it is looking good for a handover.