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.