Samsung Galaxy S6

I've often wondered how a brand like Samsung could have messed up so badly in the smartphone space. When I saw the Galaxy S4, I sighed. When the Galaxy S5 rolled around, my shoulders sagged further.

Samsung found itself in sort of a bind last year: Its flagship Galaxy S5 wasn't the blockbuster the company hoped it would be. That, coupled with the news that Samsung was going to focus on a smaller number of devices in 2015, signaled a pretty dramatic change for a brand that seemed like it was unstoppable. As if to silence the doubters, Samsung has not one, but two flagships on offer -- the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge -- and they're surrounded by questions. Can they restore Samsung to its former glory? Has the company figured out how to build a truly interesting smartphone again? It's too early to make a call on the former, but after a week of testing, the answer to the latter is a clear and definite "yes."

How could a brand with so many hyper-intelligent researchers and well-paid designers make something so bland yet complex time and again? Both phones packed amazing power in a boring case, with each element somehow negating the other.

This year though, following a reshuffle, things have changed. The Samsung Galaxy S6 is a thing of beauty, a complete redesign that really works, but blended with large swathes of power once again.

The key thing here though is, it appears that power is not there for the sake of it - each element has a purpose, to ensure the Galaxy S6 works well under the finger while finally being a phone you'd consider alongside an HTC or iPhone.

Let's not get too carried away though. TouchWiz is still on board, adding a cartoonish feel to things where other brands still feel more premium, but Samsung has refined this again (building on good work from the S5), removed a lot of the bloatware and cleaned up the icons.

It's easy to see the S6 is a great phone, and one Samsung sorely needed - but coming from so far back (its flagship device was barely a top 10 phone last year) it wasn't hard to improve dramatically.

Design

Smartphones stopped needing more power a long, long time ago - arguably we could have called it quits with 2013's specs and spent the following months optimising them to allow days-long battery.

So with that race already run it became a battle for the best design, which meant that HTC suddenly rose to prominence once more, with a good-enough spec list sitting inside one of the best phones I've ever held.

Apple managed the same thing with the new iPhone 6, focusing on a premium metallic shell while getting the battery life just about tolerable.

All the while Samsung toiled in the background, promising that we'd start loving plastic at some point, showing that it's more robust and scuff-free and rugged... and it didn't work.

So Project Zero was born, a plan within Samsung to completely redesign its S6 model from the ground up. Plastic was out, waterproofing gone, and in their place a fusion of glass and metal.

Put simply: it's a much, much better phone, but again that's not hard when you've got the Galaxy S5 to improve upon. But the S6 does feel very well packaged, the combination of metal and Gorilla Glass 4 giving no hint of creak or give when pressed.

It does sound a little hollow when tapped on the back though, which does diminish the effect somewhat - however, at only 6.8mm thick, that's kind of understandable.

Samsung's gone bold with this design in more than one way. It's got rid of two of the staples that users have loved for years: the microSD slot has been removed and the battery is locked in.

The reasoning behind this is sound: Samsung tells me the former is to improve performance and speed (something the S5 struggled with terribly as it aged) and the latter is clearly to allow for a unibody design.

I'm behind the loss of the removable battery - after all, it's easier to carry a battery pack than shell out for a replacement power unit - but the microSD card disappearance is a shame. I appreciate the quest for a better performance, and perhaps it will turn out to be up there with the iPhone when my full Galaxy S6 review comes out, but other Android phones seem to manage to tick along just fine with expandable storage.

Samsung is offering the S6 in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB flavours to compensate, but those latter options are likely to be pretty expensive.

I'm hugely impressed with the way Samsung has put this phone together though - it's managed the incredible feat of bringing the best screen on the market (the brand's words, although the combination of QHD resolution and a 5.1-inch display with Super AMOLED technology means I'm inclined to agree) in a package that's barely larger than the iPhone 6.

That means Samsung can offer a phone with a huge, crisp display while still being small enough to be considered alongside Apple's non-phablet and Sony's Xperia Z3 Compact - both phones that I'll point to when people ask 'I want a phone, but not one that's massive'.

Considering the options from Sony and Apple both have a 720p resolution, and Samsung's packed in four times as many pixels in the same footprint, and you can see why I'm impressed by Samsung's option.

Of course, this could all come at the expense of battery - after all, more pixels take more power, and the smaller package means there's less space for a battery (a 2550mAh pack is smaller than the 2800mAh seen in the Galaxy S5, which is a bit of a worry) so I'm intrigued to see how Samsung has managed to solve that problem.

Samsung needed to sort out the build quality of the entire phone, but one of the big issues was with the home button, which was too soft to push.

Looking at it dead on, though, the S6 is pretty plain. Your eyes will immediately get sucked into the 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED screen, but a 5-megapixel selfie camera sits above it while the Home button lies below, flanked by discrete Back and Recent Apps keys. High on the S6's back is a squarish plateau that houses the 16-megapixel camera, and to the right lies a tiny black divot where the LED flash and heart rate sensor live. Unlike the crater that marked the Galaxy S5's back, the assembly here is almost flush with the S6's rear. It's a small touch, but it makes taking heart rate and blood oxygen readings in S Health quite a bit easier.

The S6 has a really nice action now, with a lot of effort put into the satisfying click (useful for when you need to activate the camera, which I'll come onto later).

The phone is going to be unveiled in four colours at launch too, with a pleasant jewel-like exterior that changes colour slightly as the light hits it. It's got a nice translucent effect, which again adds to the more premium chassis.

Really, it's details like these that speak most loudly to Samsung's new design philosophy. Let's put aside for a moment the fact that Samsung traded its trademark plastic bodies for sturdy metal frames and Gorilla Glass 4 panels lining the S6's front and back. What's more important -- and consequently harder to express in words -- are the little touches that tie everything together. The S6's rounded sides are punctuated by a flat edge for your fingers to rest on. The gaps between the metal and Gorilla Glass are so fine as to be imperceptible. The sole speaker has been moved to the phone's bottom so you're not blasting tunes straight into your desk. I could go on, but the S6 just feels seamless in a way its predecessor never did.

And no, your eyes don't deceive you: The Galaxy S6 looks (and feels) an awful lot like an iPhone. From those rounded sides to the chrome-rimmed, fingerprint-sensing Home button to placement of the volume buttons on the left edge and the power button on the right, there's an odd air of familiarity surrounding the thing. (A brief aside: One of Samsung's spokespeople picked up my iPhone 6 during our hands-on time in February and it seemed to take him a few moments to realize what he was actually holding.) Flame wars on the matter are already starting to brew, but I'm not too concerned; Samsung's end result is lovely, and that's all most people will care about.