Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus Complete Walkthrough: Best All Around Phone?
OK, so this has been a while coming so let’s not waste any time. I think that I’ve had enough time with the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and that it’s finally time to do a proper complete walkthrough.
If you aren’t familiar, a complete walkthrough is where I try and go through every feature on a new device as thoroughly as I can so you guys are better prepared should you be interested in going out to buy one.
With that said, there is a lot to go through, so let’s get started with the styling.
The S10 Plus is covered in glass on the front and back and comes in Prism White, Blue, Black, and Flamingo Pink coming to the US with another Prism Green color available in some other markets. The Prism White is what we were all given as review units and I personally love it as it’s sort of a pearlescent white and has a bit of a color change effect to it.
Here is the best price I could find for the Galaxy S10 Plus.
For the screen, the S10 Plus has a 6.4″ QuadHD+ resolution curved glass AMOLED screen with a 19:9 aspect ratio. Samsung says this is the first HDR10+ certified screen and that it’s the world’s first “Dynamic AMOLED” screen. That means, apparently, that it automatically reduces blue light (the type of light that can cause eyestrain and affect sleep according to studies) without affecting the color of the screen. So we’ve seen a blue light filter mode on tons of phones at this point (and you can still turn that on to further reduce blue light), but according to Samsung, this will remove 42% more blue light automatically even without that on.
The most iconic feature on the front of the Galaxy S10 Plus is the new cutout for the front cameras. This was achieved by using a special laser technique to literally cut a hole in the display without damaging the surrounding pixels and while some people have told me they still don’t like it because it removes some content, I beg to differ and love the way it looks. In a world of more and more all display front phones, this gives it even a subtly different look that I appreciate.
Something else that I found clever about the cutout is that Samsung implemented a light around it that turns on with various effects depending on what you’re doing. For example, whenever it is searching for your face for face unlock it’ll pulse a bit. Switching to the front-facing camera while in the camera app will do a similar effect and if you set a timer on the front camera it’ll actually count down for you.
It’s the little touches sometimes, no?
That front camera system is a 10MP Dual Pixel auto-focus f1.9 sensor along with an 8MP RGB depth camera. And that second camera is just a depth camera by the way, even if there is a wide-angle mode in the front camera UI. That seems to just crop or uncrop the image, which you can tell by putting your finger over the depth sensor and realizing it doesn’t affect the image).
In the display, we have our Qualcomm ultrasonic fingerprint sensor that is different than the optical ones we’ve started seeing on other devices in that it actually takes a 3D map of the ridges of your fingerprint using sonar essentially and so it’s much harder to spoof apparently. That fingerprint sensor just got an update on the device this week actually and made it a bit faster to the point where I’d say it’s as fast as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro now.
Moving around the device, we have the power button on the right.
We have the MicroSD card slot at the top.
On the left, our volume buttons and the Bixby button that you can go into settings and remap to another action if you want according to some people who have a newer software version than I do which I think is amazing of Samsung to do considering how many people watched my video on how to remap it for older devices–clearly there’s a large portion of people who want this.
And at the bottom, we have one of our two dual AKG Dolby Atmos capable speakers, our USB-C port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
For the battery, we have a decent sized 4100mah battery that so far for me and most reviewers has been pretty good (see my real-world battery test on that once it goes live, coming soon). The battery is also capable of Fast Wireless Charging 2.0 via a capable wireless charger apparently and Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 via the USB-C cable.
As far as battery life is concerned, its lasted me all day so long as I don’t use the video camera too much, but even with that, I’d say its definitely improved over last year’s models and might come close to the current battery beast, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Since it’s hard to compare them side by side in a real-world test, let me know if you’d like to see a standard benchmarking test with them running the same thing next to each other to see which wins.
See how the Huawei Mate 20 Pro did in its real-world battery test.
Samsung also took a note from Huawei’s book and added the neat party trick of reverse wireless charging. You can turn this on and set another wireless-charging capable device on the back of the S10 Plus to have the S10 Plus charge the device. It isn’t really fast enough to be terribly useful in charging another device, but, personally, I found it more useful for the Galaxy Buds, the new wireless earbuds Samsung released alongside the phone and it even works on my older Galaxy Watch making it convenient at night to charge both things at once.
The device in the US market at least is running the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, Cat 20 2Gbps LTE, IP68 water resistance rating, and a MicroSD card slot.
Also, the phone supports Wifi 6 (also known as 802.11ax) which is 20% faster than 802.11ac and just better optimized so if you have a router capable of that at home, you’ll be able to use that better WiFi standard (more on how WiFi 6 works and its benefits in a later video, subscribe and ding the bell next to the word subscribe to be notified when I do more videos like that one coming soon).
For storage and RAM, we have either 8GBs of RAM and 128GB or 512GBs of storage or a ridiculous top model with 12GBs of RAM and 1TB of storage. Something clever of Samsung I think is that they decided to help differentiate those people that buy the top models over the base ones by offering them (the 512GB and 1TB models) in ceramic white and black. And it’s actually made out of ceramic so not only does it have a matte finish but it’s more resistant to scratching, dings, etc.
And now, let’s talk about the cameras.
On the back, we have three cameras. One is an ultra-wide 16MP fixed focus F2.2 123-degree field of view camera, then we have a more standard 77-degree field of view 12MP camera with a dual aperture of f1.5/f2.4 and dual-pixel autofocus, and finally, we have a 12MP f2.4 optically stabilized 45-degree field of view 2x telephoto camera. Having three cameras with three different focal lengths on a device has always been useful to me as it gives you the option for different shots, in the same way, having multiple lenses for your DSLR/mirrorless camera does. Personally, I prefer the 3x zoom on the Mate 20 Pro for a bit more of a different focal length but regardless helpful to have the three options.
Check out my Instagram for some comparison photos of the Galaxy S10 Plus vs other top flagships.
For video, the phone is capable of shooting in 4K HDR10+ and in 4K up to 60fps. Unfortunately, in both of these modes, you do keep OIS which is great, but you lose Samsung’s additional “Super Steady” mode that crops the image slightly to add a pretty good EIS stabilization on top. If you turn this on, you definitely get some seriously smooth footage but at 1080P only and at the cost of battery life (as you can see in my real-world battery test I mentioned).
Regardless, the camera’s dynamic range in video and photos is definitely improved over last year’s models in my opinion, but based on the photos I’ve shown, let me know in the comments what you guys think.
The phone is available for preorder already and will go on sale March 8th starting at $999.99 (which honestly is less than I expected considering it’s the top model basically and starts at 128GBs compared to the iPhone XS Max lowest model of 64GBs is $1100).
There we go, as much as I could go through on the Galaxy S10 Plus. Let me know what you guys think below and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter for more tips tricks, videos, and more. Thanks for reading!
