by Jason Snell
Samsung Galaxy S 6
At Mobile World Congress yesterday, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S 6. And yes, it looks like an iPhone 6, as Flo Ion reported from Barcelona for Greenbot:
This is the last thing I want to admit as an Android user, but apparently it’s how you sell smartphones today: Make the product appear just as posh and stylish as Apple’s iPhone, and consumers will flock to it in droves. It worked for Xiaomi in China, and now Samsung’s going to take a stab at it, too.
Gone is the cheap-feeling plastic back, replaced with a Gorilla Glass back that looks nothing like the one on the iPhone 6, but does call to mind the iPhone 4’s all-glass approach. By ditching the plastic back, which I always felt was the most disappointing bit of Samsung Galaxy hardware, Samsung is also ditching the SD card slot and access to the battery. For ages, one class of phone reviewer would endlessly complain that Apple didn’t offer storage expansion1 or a swappable battery2 on the iPhone. Now even Samsung has given up.
Samsung also seems to have scaled back its software approach, which was to toss a zillion stupid features into a release and pretend they were useful. The software on the Galaxy S 6 is, by all accounts, less cluttered and weird. The home button’s fingerprint sensor now works like the iPhone—you lay your finger on it and the phone unlocks, instead of swiping it. And Samsung’s introducing a new service called Samsung Pay that—well, you can figure out what that one does, can’t you?
- Android has never handled external removable storage well. External storage adds all sorts of UI complications, since you have to choose between storage devices, move items back and forth, and deal with the prospect that some of your apps might be installed on external cards and only available part of the time. Yuck. ↩
- The Galaxy S 6 does offer inductive charging, so while you can’t swap batteries, you can charge it in several different ways. ↩