Performance
+++ Benchmarks are naturally impressive. This is a Snapdragon 801- quadcore running at 2.5GHz. Plus god-knows what naughty benchmark optimisations Samsung has been up to.
+ in terms of real world usage, the performance is fine but never felt groundbreaking. Likely the fault of Touchwiz, yet again. Just know that the phone’s going to really perform if you use a (excellent) 3rd party launcher like Action Launcher or flash an AOSP (Android Open Source Project, i.e. no bloatware) rom like Cyanogenmod.
Of course, you could also wait for the Google Play Edition which is basically the hardware but with all 3rd party stuff stripped off. Assuming it gets a release, you can grab one directly from Google Play directly.
— real world performance can be inconsistent at times, i.e. lags in places. Not the best of impressions considering how powerful the processor is on paper
Battery life
+++++ ultra power saving mode is the ultimate feature in squeezing the last drops of battery our of the S5. While other battery-saving apps will help you disable background data, do periodic syncs, dim the display brightness and so forth; Samsung’s ultra power saving mode goes a step further and restrict apps that can be used and turns the display to monochrome. I suspect the cpu speed is severely reduced and cpu cores turned off as well.
To put this into perspective, with 10% of battery remaining, you will get 24 more hours of usage in ultra power save mode.
+++++ the S5 just lasts and lasts. I has 3 (THREE) bluetooth devices- a Gear Fit, a pair of Google Glass and a pair of Jaybird Freedom if you must know, paired to the S5 all day (15 hours) long. and it still had, on average 15% to spare by the time I retired for bed.
Bonus
+++++ taking after the Moto X perhaps, the Gear Fit has the ability to keep the device unlocked. Acting as a sort of bluetooth leash, it eliminates the need for the user to constantly unlock the device. When the Fit is out of bluetooth’s range, the phone will lock.
One caveat though is that this feature currently does not work with fingerprint and password / passcode security- it only works with security patterns.
+++++ Galaxy Gifts are basically free subscriptions to services such as online magazine racks, streaming music, online storage and so on. They’ll be different depending on your region but generally I found them to be of good value, at least for as long as the subscriptions lasted.
Also consider
HTC One 2014
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