Samsung Gear VR review: Virtual reality for the masses – but is it any good?

Virtual reality has bubbled below the surface of the general public's consciousness for some time, only cropping up when a geeky friend talks breathlessly about its potential, or when journalists try out yet another expensive prototype. But all that is about to change as Samsung begins marketing its latest headset, the Gear VR, alongside the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones.

We reviewed the original Gear VR 'innovator edition' a year ago, but much has changed since those early days. For a start, the price has fallen from £170 then to £80 for the new Gear VR, and many Samsung fans will have just got theirs for free as part of a giveaway to everyone who pre-ordered the new S7 or S7 Edge.

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VR is now in more hands and at a lower price than ever before. But with the technology improving all the time and new headsets out later this year, is this the time to jump on the VR bandwagon? We put the latest Gear VR through its paces to find out.

Samsung Gear VR: Design

Will we look back on headsets like the Gear VR in 20 years' time and laugh at their size, just as we do now at old mobile phones? My colleague asks an interesting question, but for now we're stuck with looking like cyborgs. Having said that, the new Gear VR is 40% smaller than the last model and there have been a few useful updates.

The first and most obvious is how the trackpad has been given the layout of a D-pad to help make swiping up, down, left and right easier. Tapping the middle acts as select, while the back and volume buttons are the same as before. Also unchanged is the Gear VR's lack of a battery, as the entire thing is powered by your smartphone, which connects onto the front through its microUSB port.

Despite its size, the Gear VR is comfortable to wear thanks to padding around the front and two adjustable straps. I would have liked the front to wrap more tightly around my face, however, as light would leak in and produce two reflections in my field of view.

Samsung Gear VR: Setup and controls

One of the most challenging aspects of VR is trying to instruct people how to use it. The user interface is unfamiliar, the controls are unsighted and the instructor can't see what the user can. Thankfully the Gear VR's setup process and interface is simple and there are some useful tutorials which talk you through the controls and how to adjust the focus of the lenses before you start.

Most of the interface is navigated by moving your head to look at what you want, then tapping the trackpad to select it. Pressing the back button takes you back a page (obviously) and a prolonged press brings up a menu for adjusting the brightness, returning to the home page, and activating the 'pass through' camera, where you can see what's in front of you by using the phone's rear camera.

No Samsung phone comes with VR software installed, but as soon as you connect it to the Gear VR you are asked to download a suite of applications to the phone, including the Oculus store which is where all manner of VR games, apps, videos and other experiences can be downloaded from. Once installed, you can browse the Oculus store on the phone itself, rather than strapping on the Gear VR, and start downloading apps. Now it's time to play...

Samsung Gear VR: Software, apps and games

Navigating around the Gear VR's user interface is simple. The interface is set out in a grid and all you have to do is look at what you want (there's a small dot in the middle of your field of view) then tap the touchpad to make a selection. It can be overwhelming at first and difficult to know what to do first, so a good place to start is probably the video selection.

GoPro have a great catalogue of 360-degree action videos, mostly taken from helmet cams and selfie sticks. NextVR is another good video app which includes live 180-degree broadcasts from a wide range of events, from golf and motorsport to the US presidential debates. VRSE is another video app which includes high-quality documentaries and storytelling from Vice and others.

Samsung launched the Galaxy S7 duo on the back of a performance by Years & Years. The performance is available for free on the Oculus store and neatly shows how VR can turn something we're all familiar with - a band performing on stage - into an entirely new experience. Multiple cameras are used to give different viewpoints, including one which flies above the performance from one side of the room to the other. Another snippet of VR shows what Cirque du Soleil is like when you're on stage with the performers.

For US readers, Samsung's Milk VR store offers up loads more VR content, including 360-degree roller coaster rides and in-car footage from a Nascar race. Unfortunately, Milk VR isn't yet available in the UK.

Although fun, this has all been fairly passive so far. So let's head into the gaming section and see what's what. VR Karts makes great use of Samsung's Bluetooth gamepad, putting you in the driving seat of a game similar to Mario Kart, complete with speed boosts and weapons.

Other than VR Karts, we found very few games actually require the gamepad. Perhaps this is a good thing, given that Samsung no longer sells it, but relying on the Gear VR as your only input device can feel limiting. Tapping and swiping the touchpad is fine for menus but far from ideal as a game controller.

Instead, many games can be controlled and navigated solely by looking around and focusing on certain targets to progress or make decisions. The much more expensive Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will appeal to gaming enthusiasts when they launch later this year, leaving the Gear VR to win the hearts of casual and mobile gamers who put value and fun ahead of graphical performance.

While the £80 Gear VR offers great value compared to the £689 HTC Vive, most games for the Samsung headset are relatively expensive. Many cost £7.99, so it doesn't take long at all before you have spent a quarter or even half of the Gear VR's price again on apps. Some are also quite short and offer less appeal to play again than similarly-priced (or cheaper) games on iOS and Android. It is early days though and this will likely change.

Our verdict

Samsung Gear VR

If ever you needed an excuse to get into VR, then this is it. Owners of all recent flagship Samsungs can now get their hands on good VR experiences for £80. It isn't perfect, because the resolution is still quite low, resulting in slightly grainy video which at times is difficult to focus on.

That said, the rest of the experience is excellent. The Gear VR is easy to set up and use, comfortable, and already offers a wide range of content for the casual gamer and VR enthusiast. VR is currently at the stage mobile phones were at when they resembled house bricks. The technology will improve greatly, it will get much smaller and it will become cheaper over the coming years.

As technology reporters, we sometimes forget how fortunate we are to try all of the latest gadgets from day one. Giving the Gear VR to a friend and watching their reaction as they experience VR for the first time is a truly special moment. It has a much greater effect than 3D ever did, it is much more exciting than Google Glass, and it is more recognisably a game changer than even the first iPod, iPhone and iPad were.

Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: Not The Next Big Thing, Just a Fantastic Phone

Remember the good old Samsung Galaxy S III? It was a fantastic little trooper, but we’ve come a long way since plastic phones were king. Today, the Galaxy S6 goes on sale—and it’s finally, finally catching up with the iPhone, Nexii, and other glass-and-metal devices that have been catching your eye for years. It’s stylish, it’s solid. It’s the whole package.

What Is It?

Samsung’s new non-giant flagship phone. A drastic glass and metal redesign of the plastic handset that became one of the most ubiquitous Android phones out there. A 5.1-inch stunner with a 577 PPI, 2560 x 1440 AMOLED screen, Samsung’s own Exynos 7420 processor, a great 16MP rear-facing camera, two forms of wireless charging, a non-removable 2550 mAh battery, and no microSD expansion. A smartphone that looks a whole lot, even suspiciously, like an iPhone—way more than the lineage of plastic phones that triggered an avalanche of lawsuits. It’s uncannily familiar. It’s also a pretty fantastic phone.

Oh, and it’s a phone that comes in two variants, one with a curved screen. Read more about its counterpart, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, right here.

Why Does It Matter?

Regardless of the Nexus phones and Moto X’s that nerds like me (and maybe you?) fawn over, Samsung is Android to lots of people. Next time you’re on a subway or a bus, just take a look around and you’ll see what I mean. Samsung reached this incredible ubiquity not (just) through snarky ads but by making cheap phones that weren’t total garbage. It’s a strategy that pretty much topped out with the band-aid-esque and pretty relatively underwhelming Galaxy S5. With the S6 though, Samsung’s offering something a bit more premium, and way more iPhoney.

If you’re a diehard Samsung fan, the Galaxy S6 might actually push you into the waiting arms of another brand. But if you’ve been waiting for Samsung to finally figure out how to build a premium smartphone, this could be the moment you hop aboard the TouchWiz train.

Design

Beautiful and cohesive in a way a Samsung phone has never been before. No more fake leather, dimpled Band-Aid plastic or fake metal edges—the Galaxy S6 is all glass and aluminum. Previous Samsung phones tried to look premium, but there were always telltale signs that the Korean manufacturer had cheaped out in one way or another. The S6 nails it.

It looks great from all angles. The glass back feels and looks classy, the buttons feel great, the metal trim is lovely. On the one hand the Galaxy S6 design is not particularly unique or exciting, but on the other much more important hand, absolutely nothing about it sucks.

And yes, it looks like an iPhone. A lot like an iPhone! Enough so that my fiancée and I have confused my white S6 for her white iPhone at least a half-dozen times. It’s only ever for a split second—after all, the S6 has a smaller button and different front facing speakers and a SAMSUNG logo—but with the same color and shape, the similarity is the first thing you’ll notice.

But Samsung isn’t (just) aping the iPhone’s style here; there are some considered differences that make it better. Yes, the Galaxy S6 has a unibody aluminum frame which means no removable batteries, but the glass back gives it a sort of old-school premium feel like the Nexus 4 or iPhone 4 / 4S. It feels pretty fantastic.

Around the sides, the S6 has a rounded metal rim that’s a little like the iPhone, but not entirely. Instead of being fully rounded, it actually plateaus a bit, which does wonders to make this thing easy to hold and settle into your hand. The iPhone 6’s full rounded edges make it feel like it could pop out of your hand like a bar of soap if you really gave it a death grip. And the S6 doesn’t suffer from that.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t drop it. That glass back can be pretty slippery! The second you try to hold the S6 in any sort of open-handed way—which is to say just letting it lay on your hand without exerting pressure on the sides—it’ll slowly slip until you (hopefully!) catch it on the protruding camera. That’s not the end of the world, but it can be annoying!

But as for shatters and scratches, I’ve seen none of either yet. I’ve kept the S6 in the same pocket as my keys (heresy! I know!) but all i’ve managed is cosmetic scratches on the home button. When I got a little more, ahem, deliberate, the Gorilla Glass 4 back withstood considerable pressure from my keys and the tip of my pocket knife unscathed. As for drops, it’s survived a handful of three-foot falls from hand to hardwood and tile floor, and more aggressive tests suggest it can take much more.

The S6’s screen is eye-poppingly good, but at ludicrous 577 pixels per inch (the iPhone 6 has 401, and the Note 4 has 518) it’s reaching the point where it mostly doesn’t matter. Yes, the screen is crispy as hell, but not like it’s soul-rendingly better than other phones that creep up on the same ~500 territory. The only point at which this starts to matter is if you strap this thing to your face. Gear VR, Samsung’s phone-based virtual reality headset that’s soon to be revamped for use with the S6 and Galaxy Edge, actually makes use of that extra resolution.

With its 5.1-inch screen but smallish top and bottom bezels, the S6 is not that much bigger than the iPhone 6. It falls right into what I personally (admittedly with largish man-hands) consider to be the sweet-spot for non-gigantic phone-size. It’s right in there with the HTC One M9 and the Nexus 5 and the new Moto X. This is Android’s new “small” and it’s pretty much what you’re stuck with unless you’re willing to do something drastic, like buy an old 2013 Moto X or hunt down a Sony Z3 Compact.

Using It

The Galaxy S6 is blisteringly fast. Switching between apps, scrolling through the multitasking queue, pulling down the notification shade, opening the camera, running games, I never once saw the slightest hitch in performance. There’s nothing wildly throw-your-hair-back about the speed; it’s not unbelievable or anything like that. Other recent flagship phones feel fast, too. But the S6 does everything you’d want it to as quickly as you could ask. And it does it consistently.

The S6 runs an Exynos processor—one of Samsung’s home-grown chips—instead of the Qualcomm’s new flagship Snapdragon 810, but it doesn’t suffer for it in the slightest. Apps launch with a snap, and even with Samsung’s historically bloated TouchWiz interface sitting on top of Android, swiping through homescreens, pulling down notification shades, and opening app drawers is quick and fluid.

To push the processor a little further, I loaded up old faithful Dead Trigger 2, which ran fantastically on the auto-detected “low” settings, and barely any worse once I manually jacked up the settings all the way to max. Similarly, GTA: San Andreas runs smoooooooth as hell, although I did see some super weird graphical glitches. So far, though, it’s the only place I’ve seen anything like that.

But all of this performance talk comes with a big ol’ asterisk. It’s great for now. Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has been getting less and less obtrusive—the newest version that runs atop Android’s latest Lollipop update is the most scaled back it’s ever been—but Samsung phones can get bad quickly. The Galaxy S5 we have banging around the office (still waiting for its fabled Lollipop update) is a shadow of its former self performance-wise, staggering under the weight of Samsung’s software plus new versions of Android. It’s impossible to predict if the S6 awaits a similar fate.

For now, though, the S6 a pleasure to use and it’s worth expressing one more time how not-terrible Samsung’s proprietary UI has gotten. In a streak of good decisions, Samsung has culled most of the extra bullshit options out of things like the camera. Once cluttered with useless toggles, it now looks simple, clean, with just the buttons you want and need. It’s practically indistinguishable from stock Android when you boot it up.

The quick notification buttons, those ones you use to toggle things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the notification shade? TouchWiz gives you options to customize the ones you want, without slapping you in the face with like 50 superfluous buttons for “Golf mode” or whatever insanely extraneous bullshit it used to. All that, plus the material design ethos in Android Lollipop has bled over into TouchWiz and made it less ugly than ever. Samsung has (mostly) learned how to keep its bullshit out of your way.

And when it isn’t getting out of your way, it’s actually doing a good job of adding value. The Galaxy S6 can run apps in windows, and even run two different ones side by side, just like the Note 4, though admittedly it’s not quite as useful on a smaller screen and without a stylus. What is useful though is that a double tap of the home button will immediately bring up and open Samsung’s quick and snappy camera app, which makes the Galaxy S6 maybe the best split-second shooter I’ve ever used.

If you’re looking for a real down-and-dirty look at how the Galaxy S6 shapes up shot-for-shot against its toughest competition, you can check out our camera comparison. But that’s almost beside the point. The point is that it’s fucking fast, and in the end that’s all that really matters. The app launches fast, it focuses fast, and shoots fast in a way that makes every other phone I’ve used feel like something from the civil war. When the camera is this fast, little differences in color quality hardly matter when you catch a photo that you would have missed entirely.

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السبت، 28 مايو 2016