The Galaxy S10 line of phones from Samsung is just the latest in an increasingly great line of phones. They just keep getting better. You might not be into the slightly rounded edges of the phone, but you can’t argue the fact that the phone is top notch. I have had my Galaxy S10+ for a little over three months now so I thought I would share my thoughts about how the phone has held up. Watch the video, or continue reading below.
Product Links (Amazon):
Galaxy S10+: http://jerad.link/s10plus
Galaxy S10: http://jerad.link/s10
Galaxy S10E: http://jerad.link/s10e
Fast Micro SD Card: http://jerad.link/fastmicrosdcard
Galaxy Buds: http://jerad.link/galaxybuds
Galaxy S10+ Cases: http://jer.fyi/galaxys10cases
I wanted to talk to you about my three months… actually, it’s been a little bit longer than three months. I asked Google, “How long since the S10 released?” And the S10 has been out for 105 days at the time that I am recording this video. So I wanted to do my three months plus review or recap of my experiences with the S10+ from Samsung. It’s an absolute fantastic phone. I don’t think that there is much that I could really say spec wise and things just specifically to what is on the phone, the technology and all of that stuff, because so many people have talked about that, but I wanted to talk about my experiences because I have been using, prior to that, the Google Pixel XL, the Pixel 3 XL. I’ve been using that since it came out.
Galaxy S10+ Display 
Samsung Galaxy S10+ Back with Cameras 
Galaxy S10+ Side View 
Galaxy S10+ Fingerprints 
Samsung Galaxy S10+ 3 Cameras 
Samsung Galaxy S10+ Ceramic Black Finish 
Galaxy S10 + Display Brightness 
Samsung Galaxy Buds 
Samsung Galaxy S10 Headphone Jack 
Samsung Galaxy S10 Wireless Device Charging
Of course I’ve had the iPhone 10S Max, 10 SXX Max, whatever it is, for the whole time that it’s been out as well, and so I’ve had several flagship phones that I’ve been using, and so why would I use one versus the other? I know this might contradict things a little bit because as you can see I have an Apple watch on, and I am wearing that. I haven’t been able to kick my habit of having the Apple watch on, and my primary phone number is on the Apple watch. Well, actually it is on my iPhone and connected to the Apple watch because I do like leaving my phone behind, and though I do have the Samsung watches, I have both the Active, the newer one, and also the Samsung Galaxy S watch, whatever it is, that does have cellular.
But just the Android or even the Samsung experience on the Smartwatch just isn’t enough for me to have the watch and want to wear the watch all the time. The Apple watch kind of solves that, but hey, we’re getting derailed here. Let’s talk more about the S10+. Of course this phone does have the three cameras and I thought at first I wasn’t really going to care so much about having three cameras. Maybe it’s kind of getting gimmicky at this point to have so many cameras, but the ultra wide camera on here is absolutely fantastic.
I love having it, even though it doesn’t have auto focus, sometimes you just need that ultra wide angle for a shot that you want to get. Maybe you’re taking a group photo of some people in a tight place, or for example, I was with my family driving through the Boise National Forest and we stopped off at these hot springs and there just would have been no way for me to capture this photo within the area that we were in if I didn’t have that wide angle on there. So, being able to use that wide angle, I think absolutely is a necessity. I love having it and and if it didn’t have it, I think I’d have less to say about this phone. So, kudos to Samsung for adding that wide angle lens.
As far as the cameras go, the cameras are great. Sometimes I do feel that the photos are a little bright or a little hot. For example, if I’m taking a photo of, for example, what you see behind me which is just a mountainous range, and in this video it’s a little blown out just because I don’t have all of my lighting, I’m not in a studio. I wanted you to be able to see me somewhat and also see what’s behind me, but the Samsung phone kind of does a little bit of what you’re seeing in this video. It kind of blows out some of the areas to make sure that the dark areas are exposed enough to see what they are as well.
For me, I kind of prefer a little bit of contrastiness. I want to be able to choose, and even when I tap in the bright area to bring that down, I still have to go into like a manual camera mode to actually get the camera to expose the shot the way that I want it to be.
Now the phone itself is super-snappy and three months later using this phone it is just as snappy as the day that I first started using it. That is the thing that has been a standout for me with this phone, is just getting around the phone and navigating it, opening and closing apps, moving through the UI of the phone is super fast and I don’t know what they did, if they just sped up the animations, they’re using maybe some of this extra RAM to preload different aspects of the phone or assets so that things just load faster. I don’t know what they’re doing, but they definitely are doing something right because getting around this phone is great.
Now, like I said before, I have had the Pixel 3 XL since it came out and sometimes it gets a little jumpy and hangs on some tasks, and this phone has not done that once at all. This is the 512 Ceramic Black phone, so it is a little bit more expensive. I think it does have a little bit more RAM than maybe the more entry level, but from what I’ve heard the experiences that everybody have had with his phone is that it’s super snappy, whether you have the lower amount of RAM or the higher amount of RAM.
Of course, when you get the higher amount of storage like 512 to one terabyte of storage, you actually need more RAM to utilize that storage. A lot of people don’t know but actually having more storage on your device uses more RAM just to keep all of that going, so they put a lot more RAM storage or memory on the phone to compensate for all of that extra storage. So, on this phone, I feel like I’m probably getting the best of both worlds because I’ve got a great amount of storage. Even though there’s expandable storage and I could expand the storage with a 512 gigabyte micro SD card, I don’t need to do that because I’ve got 512 gigabytes of onboard storage.
And even the base model of this phone still comes with a lot of storage, much more than most people need, and yes, even though they still do give us that slot for the micro SD card, the storage is much slower, the access of that storage is way slower, even if you get a fast micro SD card, it’s still a lot slower than the storage that’s on the actual device. I found that when I am saving things out to that storage, the external storage on the phone, even though I don’t need to because I have the 512 gigs, by habit I put a micro SD card in there and things just seem to be a little bit slower. For example, if I play back a video, a 4K video that I shot with the phone, on the phone storage, it was the video was stored on the phone storage, it seems to load and play back faster than if it’s being accessed from the micro SD card.
So think about that. Depending on what you’re wanting to do with the phone, that’s not a limitation of Samsung at all. It’s a limitation of the read and write speeds of micro SD cards in comparison to the memory that is built into your phone, hardwired right into your phone. So another standout thing from this phone is its battery life. It lasts for ever, and it does have a large battery in it. The battery lasts a lot longer than my Pixel 4 or my Pixel 3 XL does, and the battery is on par, sometimes lasts a little bit longer than the battery on my iPhone does as well.
Of course, like most Android phones, if you start doing any real heavy lifting with the phone, then it tends to drain the battery a little bit. I’ve been editing some video using the newly released Adobe Premiere Rush app on Android. It was available for, I think about a year now on iPhone, but now it’s available on Android, and using some of those more graphic, intense processes on your phone tend to drain the battery a little bit more, but that’s definitely not a specific to this phone as it is just a generalization about battery usage. But overall, the battery has been absolutely fantastic on this.
Now the wireless charging, being able to actually put something that has Qi charging on the back of this phone and charge, it was gimmicky at first, it was weird, but it actually ended up being something that I utilized quite often. I travel a few times for work and now of course I’ve been traveling full-time with my family for the last couple of weeks, and we’ve got a good month-and-a-half left of travel, and with that, I definitely find myself using that.
I may forget to charge my Earbuds and maybe even they are AirPods, I was just going to pull them out but I’ve got too many things in my pockets. Maybe they are AirPods. I’ll pop them right on the back of this and charge them up. I can also charge up another phone a little bit. It’s not the fastest charging, and yes, it does work on draining the battery on this, but, hey, it’s a backup. It’s not necessarily something that you’re going to need to use every day, but sometimes when you do need it, it’s there and you don’t have to use cables, you don’t have to mess around with trying to plug-in somewhere. You could just get a quick little top off on maybe your Earbuds or whatever you’re using.
When I got this, I got the Galaxy Buds with it, and the Galaxy Buds are absolutely fantastic, but sometimes I forget to charge them. Set them right on the back here, charge them up to a usable percentage in a matter of no time and I’m good to go again.
So I’ve talked about the camera, I’ve talked about how the phone has stood up over the test of time of using it. I do have an OtterBox case on it right now. When I got the phone, I immediately went and looked for a case. There was very limited cases, but this OtterBox case has served me pretty well. So, before I jump into the display and maybe a few little things that bother me about the phone, I wanted to talk a little bit more about how this has worked as far as how the phone unlocks. People have given this in-screen fingerprint reader kind of a bad rap, and I found that I’ve actually had to go in a couple of different times and delete out my fingerprints and re-add them.
Sometimes I’ve had some issues there. If I don’t have my fingerprint just right at the correct spot sometimes the phone won’t unlock, and of course after five fails it asks me to wait and then I have to type in my password which can be kind of annoying. But having the Face ID unlocker, it’s not Face ID, I know it’s Apple’s thing, but having the Face unlock actually works best for me I found. I know some people say, “Oh, it’s not as secure,” or whatever, but it works good for me. I like being able to just lift the phone up, it unlocks, and then I can swipe.
Of course the fingerprint is an alternate. I can put my thumbprint there, maybe in a lower light situation or if I’m wearing sunglasses or something the phone isn’t used to, I can unlock the phone that way as a secondary. So I utilize the fingerprint as a secondary, and use maybe one of the others like the Face unlock as my primary when unlocking the phone and it works great every single time.
So, let’s talk about the display. Now the display is absolutely beautiful on this phone. Samsung has had the lead in the displays for a long time. They make everybody else’s displays just about, so there isn’t really anything that I can say about this display other than my display has a flaw and that is that it came from the factory with a blown pixel. I ordered my phone directly from Samsung and I didn’t notice the blown pixel because these pixels are so teensy tiny, I didn’t notice it until I’d had the phone for about a week.
So I got in contact with Samsung through their website and there wasn’t an option for me to exchange my phone. All I wanted to do was exchange it for a model that didn’t have a blown pixel, and they gave me a hard time. They didn’t respond to my request for a couple of days, and then when they did they said that it was out of the return window. I could do an exchange but then when I talked to them about it they said that because it was shipped, I have to deal with the shipper and it probably happened through shipping. So Samsung gave me a runaround for sure.
And then they even made the suggestion that I contact my credit card company and see if I could get insurance from my credit card purchase. I mean, it was really bizarre. They were trying to do everything possible not to have to take responsibility for the phone having any sort of a flaw.
So, my PSA at the end of this video is, don’t buy your phone from Samsung because this is not my first time having an issue with Samsung. I had an issue where with one phone I had a scratch on the display and I sent it into Samsung for a repair, not expecting anything else. I sent it in for repair and they turned around and sent the phone back to me saying that the scratch was caused by something that I did and that they couldn’t return it. And I wasn’t looking for a return, I was looking for a repair.
So I’ve wasted a lot of time dealing directly with Samsung. Samsung is not really good to deal with at a consumer level, so I recommend buying your phone from somewhere that you can walk into, perhaps like the carrier that you’re going to activate it on, or a Best Buy or even online through Amazon or something like that. I’ve got some links down below where you could pick up this phone on Amazon. I’ve boughten many phones on Amazon and had to return them on occasion for issues, and the policy there, everything is great on Amazon just as you would buying anything else.
So, let me know what you think. I hope that I answered some questions and maybe let people know as to whether or not this phone is great over time. A lot of times with Android phones they’re not, they dip out after a while, they become less stable and all that stuff, but this phone has been absolutely awesome. Yes, maybe the cameras on some of the other phones are a little bit better in certain aspects. Even though this phone has the dual front-facing selfies or whatever, I found that still my Pixel 3 XL takes better selfies than the iPhone I think does too, maybe a little bit better.
But if you’re looking for Android, really, there is no better Android phone out there other than the Galaxy S10 or S10+. They’re fantastic phones and they do stand the test of time. They run great and the only downfall is, is that sometimes they’re a little slow to get those new milestone software updates. But that’s okay. I think I’d rather have long-term stability over the latest and greatest in little tweaks that you might get from time to time with Android updates.
Let me know what you think down in the comments section below. Have you messed with one of these phones, do you have one, have you had similar experiences to me? And if you’ve had a bad experience with Samsung directly as a consumer, make sure to share that down in the comments section. I just want to make sure that we’re not getting burned out there by the companies that sell us our stuff that we rely on day-to-day.
Every time I see that little blown pixel, which I can’t during the day but when I’m looking at my phone during the night, that little blue spec shows up no matter what and it drives me up the wall, and I can’t do anything about it. I’m stuck with a phone that cost me nearly $1,500 and I can’t do anything about it.
So… whatever. But that’s going to do it for this video today. Thanks so much for checking it out. If you want to see more videos from us, make sure to click that Subscribe button and the bell next to it so that you get notified when I put them out and I hope to see you back here soon on State of Tech. Thanks a lot.
This article was transcribed from the the video “Samsung Galaxy S10+ 3 Months Later” originally uploaded to State of Tech on YouTube.
