This year marks the 10th year anniversary of Samsung’s Galaxy line. I can still remember the very first Galaxy S we reviewed back in 2010. Time flies so fast and we now have the Galaxy S10 family – the S10, S10e, S10+ and S10 5G.
Of the lot, the Galaxy S10+ is the most intriguing of the hero line-up, primarily because Samsung packed it with a lot of practical features. So this will be the one we will review first.
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Samsung did not have to go very far from when they designed the Galaxy S10+. Much of the inspiration came from the Galaxy S9+ and Note 9. Nothing surprising there. Yet, there are quite a lot of surprising features included in this device that puts it on the spotlight.
First, that Infinity-O design meant Samsung did not have to go thru that ugly notch design many others have fallen trap into but more on this when we tackle the display section.
The two cameras up front are embedded into the display itself, just along the top right corner of the display. This creates a black hole that isn’t really noticeable unless you inspect closer. Of course, they’re visible and in order for it not to be bothersome, they just draw a black bezel along the edge so that videos and games will still play at full screen. Many other device manufacturers have done the same thing to hide the unsightly notch so this is nothing new.
Second, the use of an under-display fingerprint sensor is a big shift from the physical sensor at the back, though we’ve already seen this from the likes of the VIVO Nex and the Mate20 Pro, among others.
The third is the triple-camera setup, although Samsung has already outed a model with a quadruple camera before in the Galaxy A9. In retrospect, they’ve installed two cameras at the front so that’s a total of 5 all-in-all. More of this later.
The rest of the design is the usual Samsung DNA — the earpiece is located up top by the slim bezel. On the left are the dedicated Bixby button and volume rocker, while on the right is power/lock button. They’re solid and clicky and has this metallic finish to match the metal frame. The Bixby and volume down buttons are easily reachable, but the volume up and power/lock buttons would require a bit of a stretch, especially if you don’t have big hands.
At the top end are the microphone and the SIM card slot for the dual-SIM tray. It uses a hybrid setup so you can place a microSD card in the SIM 2 slot. At the bottom end are the USB-C port, microphone, loudspeaker, and the 3.5mm audio port which is good news for those who prefer wired, adapter-free music listening.
At the back, there’s the LED flash and the heart-rate scanner just beside the slightly protruding camera module, along with the Samsung logo just below it. The prism white color variant that we have looks pristine, glossy and a bit slippery then used naked.
The Gorilla Glass 5 used at the back curves inwards along the edges, making it easier and nice to hold with one hand. It also is a lot thinner at 7.8mm compared to the 8.5mm of the Galaxy S9+ and the 8.8mm of the Galaxy Note 9. That 1mm is actually very noticeable once you hold the device in your hands. Of course, there’s also IP68 water and dust resistance rating here.
Like S9 series and Note 9 before it, the Galaxy S10 Plus is still very premium. It’s easy to grip thanks to the narrow frame and the tapered sides. It looks seamless as well as it features an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner under the display. Compared to previous Galaxy devices, the S10 Plus is more attractive and feels better in the hands.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus sports a 6.4-inch Dynamic AMOLED Infinity-O display with WQHD+ (3040 x 1440) resolution or equal to 534ppi. When it comes to size, it’s 0.1-inch bigger than the S9 Plus but 0.1-inch smaller than the Note 9. The resolution can be lowered to FHD+ (2280 x 1080) and HD+ (1520 x 720) if you want to save brightness, or tweak the screen color between Vivid (what we prefer) or Natural.
The screen boasts high visibility in any lighting condition, supports HDR 10+ with Dynamic Tone Mapping, improved blue light filtering (41% decreased blue light even before activating Blue Light Filter) and more accurate color coding through an improved, low-gradation dithering algorithm. What it means is that you’ll still be able to see a wide range of colors even if scenes are dark.
In other words, the Galaxy S10 Plus has one of the richest and most vibrant screens in the market which is excellent for those who like watching videos or playing games. It even has a video enhancer to improve vibrancy, color, and sharpness.
If you’re curious about how the video would look like given the Infinity O display, well, the video will play in its standard aspect ratio by default, so you will see thick borders on the left and right, hiding the front cameras. But if you want to take advantage of the full screen, you may zoom the video or stretch it, it will look awkward or cropped, and the front cameras will block a small portion of the view.
When it comes to audio, the Galaxy S10 Plus’s speakers did not disappoint. The earpiece at the top end also serves as a secondary loudspeaker. By comparison, the main down-firing speaker is louder and has a hint of bass. Still, the combination of the two speakers can provide an immersive listening experience.
While this is the first time that Samsung is using a triple camera system in the Galaxy S series, it’s not new to it. They’ve previously released the Galaxy A9 with four cameras at the back.
For mobile photographers and cinematographers, the S10 Plus feature what Samsung calls the True Vision Multi-Camera. The rear setup consists of a 16MP 123-degree ultra-wide angle lens, a 12MP 77-degree wide, and a 12MP 45-degree telephoto. Both 12MP lenses have OIS for blur-free shots.
The 12MP wide gets last year’s variable aperture, and it’s also the only rear lens that gets Dual Pixel Auto Focus. Pinching to zoom in-and-out on the viewfinder is awesome and feels seamless just as it should.
For selfies, it has a 10MP front camera with Dual Pixel AF and an extra camera for sensing depth to help produce selfies with creamy backgrounds.
When it comes to features, you get a bunch of options from Pro to Panorama to funky focus modes, and photo filters to beauty filters, AI options, the list goes on. It’s a pretty packed camera app, and you could spend hours on tinkering with this alone.
Quality-wise, the photos themselves come out good. Colors are rich, has great contrast, and plenty of details. The dynamic range is phenomenal, especially in well-lit scenarios. That ultra-wide-angle lens is cool to use which we feel should be a standard in flagship smartphones moving forward. Check out some of the samples below:
Sample video below:
The dual front facing camera craetes some interesting depth-of-field effect:
Using the native camera app, it’s easy to switch between the three cameras. You just tap on any of the three icons that represent the field-of-field (very self-explanatory actually). Video recording ranges from 720p, 1080p at 30fps/60fps and UHD/4K at 30fps/60fps. the front-facing camera can also shoot UHD/4K at 30fps.
Samsung has done pretty well in the software department. It’s got one of the cleanest and most beautiful user interface, intuitive yet distinct. There’s not much left to polish it but additional features are added after each iteration.
Running the software is Samsung’s new One UI layered on top of Android 9.0 Pie. It’s a clean and user-friendly interface with new features like Focus Blocks to show essential information, Segregated viewing and interaction areas for comfortable, one-handed usage, and Night Mode.
Other features present are Bixby with Bixby Routines which is similar to the Google Home Routines, Smart capture, Direct share, Motions, and gestures if you don’t like using the traditional navigation buttons, Game Launcher, Dual Messenger which is perfect if you handle multiple accounts, Digital well-being which gives you a summary of your device activity, and Device Care which is a one-stop shop to keeping your device optimized.
Like the previous Galaxy devices, it comes with a number of pre-installed apps which include those from Samsung, Google, and Microsoft. We don’t mind these apps as they’re mostly essential while others are there for productivity purposes. Storage shouldn’t be an issue as it starts at 128GB with an option to expand via the microSD card of up to 512GB.
For the 128GB variant that we have, System Data took about 25.3GB of space and left us with 102.7GB for apps and files to use. This unit also comes with 8GB of RAM which is more than enough for what we need. We’re actually pretty stoked with that variant that comes with 12GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage.
Powering the Galaxy S10 Plus is the Samsung Exynos 9820, the company’s most powerful mobile chipset to-date. It’s manufactured using the 8nm FinFET process and features a tri-cluster architecture with a CPU that consists of two 4th-gen custom cores, two Cortex-A75 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores. Compared to the 10nm Exynos 9810, it offers 15% better multi-core performance.
In addition, it features a Mali-G76 MP12 GPU which offers 40% improvement in performance or 35% enhancement in power efficiency compared to the Exynos 9810’s Mali G72 MP18 GPU and an integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI and AR tasks.
| Benchmark | Exynos 9820 | Exynos 9810 |
|---|---|---|
| Antutu v7 | 336,611 | 239,067 |
| GeekBench 4 | 4,457 (Single-Core), 10,019 (Multi-Core) | 3,731 (Single-Core), 9,038 (Multi-Core) |
| PC Mark | 7,682 | 4,896 |
| 3D Mark | 4,449 (SSE – OpenGL 3.1), 4,393 (SSE – Vulkan) | 3,341 (SSE – OpenGL 3.1), 2,870 (SSE – Vulkan) |
| Androbench | 819 MB/s (Read), 192 MB/s (Write) | 823 MB/s (Read), 192 MB/s (Write) |
Notice the significant improvements in the raw scores in most of the benchmarks we tested. The Exynos 9820 is definitely more powerful and power-efficient than its predecessor.
In terms of overall performance, the Galaxy S10+ breezed thru anything we threw at it. It’s powerful, snappy and responsive. Can practically handle a lot of multi-tasking and anything we threw at it while games are buttery smooth at ultra high settings. Even with the previous chipset, this is already powerful that it can do 4K video recording at 60fps as well.
Read and write speeds of the internal storage is on par so we reckon it’s the same type they used in the previous models (S9 and Note9).
As expected, the S10 Plus features all the connectivity features you can expect from a flagship phone. That includes dual nano-SIM support, the latest dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 technology, dual GPS for better accuracy, NFC USB Type-C, and a combo of biometric features which includes the facial recognition and an under-display fingerprint scanner.
It also comes with an LTE-Advanced Pro modem that supports LTE Cat.20 to offer downlink speed of up to 2.0Gbps with 8x carrier aggregation (CA) and uplink speed of up to 316Mbps.
Call qulity is pretty good, voice calls are loud and clear as signal reception is strong. We’re always getting 4G or 4G+ around the city. Same goes with WiFi connectivity and Bluetooth.
Samsung packed the Galaxy S10+ with a sizable battery of 4,100mAh, an indication that it no longer fear the stigma brought about by the Note7 from years back. That’s even slightly higher than that of the Galaxy Note9 at 4,000mAh, which is supposed to be the larger of the two.
Using PCMark battery test, we managed to get 10 hours and 15 minutes on a single full charge at 50% brightness and zero volume. With the video loop test, we also got a solid 21 hours and 20 minutes with the same settings.
For charging, the Galaxy S10+ supports QC2.0 and AFC and wireless charging also supports WPC and PMA. A new feature is reverse wireless charging that allows you to charge another smartphone by simply placing them back to back.
It’s hard not to ignore that Samsung has done very well with the Galaxy S10 series this time and the Galaxy S10+ is a testament to that. The polished design, impressive performance, and up-to-spec camera system are all on-point, not to discount that they bumped up everything from the RAM (up to 12GB) and the storage (up to 1TB) to insane proportions. Samsung is indeed showing its might and saying it has not run out of ideas yet.
There are a lot of new things going on here for the Galaxy S10+ — from the new improved display, better processor, more cameras, ultrasonic fingerprint sensor and longer battery life. They aren’t necessarily new in the market but Samsung managed to packed everything in such a sexy thin device that stores up to 1.5TB storage. There’s nothing more that we could ask for.
General availability of the Galaxy S10+ and the entire series started yesterday in concept stores and retailers. Here are the prices of the Galaxy S10 family:
Galaxy S10e (128GB) : Php39,990
Galaxy S10 (128GB) : Php49,990
Galaxy S10+ (128GB) : Php55,990
Galaxy S10+ (1TB): Php89,990
Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus specs:
6.3-inch Dynamic AMOLED WQHD+ (3040 x 1440) Infinity-O Display, 534ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 6
Samsung Exynos 9820 octa-core CPU
Mali-G76 MP12 GPU
8GB, 12GB RAM
128GB, 1TB storage
microSD up to 512GB (SIM2 slot)
12MP Dual Aperture, Pixel OIS rear
16MP Ultra Wide 123-deg, FF rear
12MP Telephoto 2x Optical Zoom, OIS, AF rear
10MP Dual Pixel AF front
8MP depth front
4G LTE (5G capable)
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
Bluetooth 5.0, A2DP, LE, aptX
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, Galileo
NFC
USB 3.1 Type-C
Ultrasonic Fingerprint Scanner (In-display)
OneUI 1.1 (Android 9.0 Pie)
4,100mAh battery w/ Wireless PowerShare
157.6 x 74.1 7.8 mm
175 g
Prism Black, Prism White, Prism Green, Ceramic Black (1TB)
Freeje says:
Insane storage capacities and also prices,