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Todays Samsung'due south Unpacked event in New York City brought 2 new big-screen smartphones — the Milky way Notation five and the Galaxy S6 Edge+. There's plenty to like hither, along with a few questionable things that I'll become to below.

Beginning, let'due south hit the practiced stuff: The Galaxy Note 5 keeps the stunning 5.7-inch quad HD (1440p) Super AMOLED display it had earlier, but surrounds it with a thinner bezel and a curved dorsum to assistance with one-handed apply. For the get-go time, the Galaxy Annotation 5 lets you write on the screen even when it's off by using the included stylus, and yous tin annotate PDFs or download an entire webpage with Scroll Capture. An improved Air Command hovers an icon for instant access to S Pen tools.

The Galaxy S6 Border+ as well trims downwards a bit compared with the current-gen Edge, and has the same-size 5.seven-inch display as the Annotation v; information technology'due south more than than one-half an ounce lighter, and lacks the congenital-in stylus. You lot can do a few things with the edge portion of the screen, merely it's mainly a gimmick here.

Both phones sport ii.1GHz Exynos 7420 octa-core processors — a pregnant crash-land for the Milky way Note 5 that brings it on par with the S6 — and 4GB of RAM. Both run Android 5.1 Lollipop, contain 3,000mAh (sadly, non-removable) batteries with fast-charging and wireless charging capabilities, 16-megapixel f/i.9 rear cameras, and 5-megapixel front-facing sensors.

Galaxy S6 Edge+

While I always appreciate top-notch sound, two snake-oil-similar things stand out here. In that location's now back up for 24-bit, 192kHz audio files, fifty-fifty though the difference over uncompressed 16-fleck and 44.1kHz is most inaudible for mastered music. 24-scrap certainly helps when recording and mixing, but non with the terminal product in any real sense. And at that place's a fake upscaling feature called Ultra High Quality Audio that can't mayhap work, because you lot can't re-add the missing musical data to compressed music files once it's already gone. I would tread lightly with those, and just hope that the two new phones still accept high quality DACs and headphone amps (recent models like the Milky way S6 certainly do).

You can get either phone with 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, simply there are no more than microSD card slots, and then keep that in heed when choosing up forepart. The S6 Border+ comes in black or golden, while the Note 5 comes in blackness or white.

Samsung got it right with the first Galaxy Note, back when few expected big demand for a large (then five.3-inch) telephone. More and more, large screens are kickoff to dominate the spotlight, and increasingly, sales. These two phones will certainly keep Samsung in the game. No one else has developed the capacitive-screen stylus to equally high a level, and connected refinements of the stunning-in-person Edge screen are certainly welcome.

The biggest question remains a larger one over Android in general. While it's far and away the dominant mobile Bone worldwide, cracks are appearing in its power to stay ahead of security exploits, and its app market continues to trail iOS — both a result of the widespread fragmentation that affects the unabridged platform.

In the meantime, these two Samsung phones certainly seem like luxurious purchases, and if contempo trends continue hither, with less software bloat and a more streamlined UI on height of Android than before. And in my experience, Samsung phones tend to lead in RF functioning, photographic camera quality, and outright speed, and I'm always a sucker for super AMOLED. Both models volition be available at Best Buy starting tomorrow (Baronial 14th) and beyond other AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless one week later, with pricing to exist appear.