I bought my first iPhone about 7 years ago. The iPhone 3G was only available on O2, you couldn’t switch between apps and you couldn’t copy and paste text. It’s strange the things we thought were pretty normal because it was so exciting that you could use this phone for more than just calling people.
I’ve never really used an Android phone other than trying to take photos for other people, so I was really excited when Three got in contact to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing the Samsung Galaxy S6 for them. They sent it to me with a PAYG SIM card so I could get the full benefits of using it on Three – I’m with Vodafone with my iPhone and it is painful to use, especially at lunch time.
The phone is slightly bigger than my iPhone 6, but smaller than an iPhone 6 Plus. I’m so used to the silver, whites and golds of the iPhone family that it was a really nice change to have a blue (“black sapphire”) phone.
You can customise the Galaxy S6 so much to suit your style – I didn’t realise this for a few days, but once I found the themes shop, I was trying out all of the available items!
The strangest thing to get used to (besides menus, etc) was the responsive feedback from the screen. Whenever you tap something, or type on the keyboard, the phone sort of vibrates back at you.
My favourite feature of this phone was the camera. It’s just so good. My outfit post on Friday was taken with this camera – in fact, I didn’t bother taking any camera to the Laura Ashley event, I just took everything with the phone! There is a bit of snobbery in the blogging world that if you don’t have a big dSLR camera for your blog photos, then your pictures aren’t going to be very good, but I found the camera on this phone was so good, even for super close up photos.
Apps wise, I didn’t miss too many of my most used apps from the iPhone. I thought that I would be unable to use my iCloud calendars, but since I use Sunrise, I was able to get all of my calendars. I used Snapchat more than I have previously (have you noticed more bloggers using Snapchat lately?), and I especially liked the two apps that came with the phone, Flipboard Briefing (a nice way to get lots of different news stories to you – I’ve used Flipboard previously, but this wasn’t customised to my feeds – still useful though!) and Google Now which was surprisingly very useful. It brings together lots of items like stories that it thinks you would enjoy based on your previously reads and Google searches – a little creepy when you think about it like that, but the stories were generally pretty interesting. It also brought out things like shipping notifications from Gmail, told me how long it would take to get to work, and the weather at home and work. Nothing in Google Now was set up specifically for this app, they were just things I already had set.
Would I make the switch? It’s difficult to say. I really enjoyed the phone, and I liked some of the features that were better than my iPhone, but I’ve been an Apple girl for over 10 years now, so it’s just so much easier to stick with Apple. Perhaps if I were to have a second phone for work, etc, then I’d probably choose this one – features like the camera, the detailed reports on how you use your phone and Google Now are things that I found surprisingly useful.
The phone was provided for a short period to review. This review has not been viewed by Three, Samsung or any representatives before it was posted. No wording on links in the review were requested.