While I was on hiatus from talking about new tech releases, Samsung finally held their much anticipated event where they unveiled this year’s generation of Galaxy phones. We saw the introduction of 4 new smartphones, the Galaxy S10, S10+, S10E, and Fold.
Before I get into more about these new phones, take a look at the detailed specifications from Samsung because it looks a lot cleaner there than if I try and copy it all here. Most of these specs got leaked before the official release, but it is nice to see them confirmed by Samsung. Samsung’s big new feature is the hole punch cut out for the front facing camera. This is Samsung’s choice for avoiding the notch as they try to stretch the display to the edges of the frame. With this solution, they were able to increase the screen to body ratio to just over 93%. That’s crazy big. Thus the trend of maximizing screen real estate continues into 2019. The tech here is actually pretty interesting. Samsung uses an OLED panel with the hole literally laser cut, making the hole a super clean circle with none of the light leak problems that would arise if Samsung used an LCD display.
The real question with the hole punch, though, is if it is actually better than a notch. Most reviewers seem to think it does not make much of a difference and agree that it is not overly intrusive. I personally prefer the smaller cutout on the S10 as opposed to the double wide cutout on the S10+ which adds a depth sensor. Samsung also worked intensely with the software to make the hole less annoying by adding a variety of wallpapers with dark top corners so that it doesn’t show as much. They also gave the phone a cool animation that plays around the hole when the front-facing camera is activated. The internet has had a hay day making wallpapers that exploit the camera cutout to add to the picture, like having the cutout on the S10+ be Bender (from Futurama) or Wall-E’s ‘eyes’.
Another really cool feature of the S10 and S10+ is the ultrasonic fingerprint reader. It is located underneath the display similar to the OnePlus 6t from last fall. However, the advantages of the ultrasonic sensor are that it doesn’t require the screen to light up to take a picture, it operates faster, and it does better when the fingerprint is not ideal like when it is wet.
To see more about the S10 and S10+, check out MKBHD’s video here. Dave2D on the other hand, makes his case in this video that the S10E is the real gem of this year’s lineup. With a significantly reduced price and many of the same features, the S10E falls in direct competition with the iPhone XR. It will be interesting to see how the 10E fares after watching the sluggish movement of the XR from the shelves at the end of last year.
As far as the new Galaxy Fold, I’ll return to that next week when I discuss folding phones as a whole.
