The Galaxy S6 is finally here, and it will be the benchmark for any new Samsung devices this year. So far, the S6 is looking pretty fine, but how does it compare to Samsung’s most recent overpowered beast? You can unlock your Galaxy S6 here!

I’m of course talking about the Galaxy Note 4, and in this article we will be putting the Note 4 and the S6 head to head to find out which is the better smartphone. To unlock Galaxy Note 4 just visit here!

Build quality and design

If you haven’t seen any of the teasers and reveals for the Galaxy S6, you’ll have missed out on the one thing that Samsung has been putting a lot of emphasis into this year.

The build design is perhaps one of the most important design factors for the S6, so it’s no doubt that the device is a looker.

Two panels of Gorillas Glass 4 have been used, one for the front and one for the back, and the sides have been crafted out of “aircraft-grade” aluminum. It looks amazing, but it also feels great.

It really feels like the S6 is made for your hands.

On the other hand, the Note 4 looks a lot blockier, and the plasticy feel that Samsung devices have been renowned for in the past is seen all over the Note 4.

There is no doubt that the S6 has a far superior build design to the Note 4, and the S6 finally feels like the premium flagship device it is.

Display

The display is where things start to get interesting. Obviously the Note range has always held the crown for it’s amazing display, both in terms of size and overall quality. As expected, the S6 has had a significant display upgrade from the S5, but how does it to compare to the Note 4?

Both devices use Super AMOLED displays, which is pretty standard for Samsung at this point, and there is surprisingly little difference between the specifications of each display. Both the S6 and the Note 4 are Quad HD displays, which means they have a resolution of 1440 x 2560.

As expected though, the size of each display is different. The Note 4 has a 5.7 inch display, whilst the S6 has a 5.1 inch display. Because of the size different, the pixel density on the S6 is higher, at 577ppi, as opposed to the Note 4’s 515ppi.

Honestly, these two elements are really worth comparison. On paper, the S6 will have the advantage in terms of picture quality, but the Note 4 display is larger. In real world usage though, there is little noticeable difference between the two, besides from display size.

UI and apps

Once again, there is little different between the Note 4 and the Galaxy S6 in this category. The Note 4 runs TouchWiz on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop, as does the Galaxy S6.

The S6 version of TouchWiz is slightly less in your face, which means more features have been tucked away into different areas so that you’re given more immediate access to the apps that are actually useful in your everyday life.

This minimal style approach is something that Samsung have been working on since the Galaxy S5, and each new iteration has brought Samsung closer to the feature-rich UX that limits the amount of noticeable functionality on the front end. Personally, we think the small changes to the S6 UX give it the upper hand, but the differences between the Note 4 are very small.

You do miss out on the S-pen functionality of the S6, but unless you’ve grown to use this as part of your daily smartphone usage, we doubt you’ll miss it much.

Performance and specs

Now, this is obviously the area where you’d expect to see the most difference. Samsung have now dropped Qualcomm to go for their own chipset that will be used internationally.

The Note 4 uses the industry standard Snapdragon 805, or the Octa 7 chipset depending on your region. This SoC was very decent, but from our first impressions of the new Exynos 64-bit eight core processor in the Galaxy S6, there’s just no competition.

Early benchmark tests show that the S6 completely destroys the performance of the Galaxy Note 4, which is pretty crazy considering the Note 4 is still a very powerful device. Fortunately, both devices sport 3GB of RAM, which is great to hear.

When it comes to internal memory for the Note 4 and the S6, there is a bit of a catch. Whilst both support either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of internal memory, there is absolutely no microSD card slot for the Galaxy S6. This is something that may turn away previous Samsung fans, especially since SanDisk has recently announced a huge 200GB microSD card.

Camera

Our final comparison point is of course for the camera of the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy Note 4. So far we don’t have full tests for the S6 to go by, but from our first look comparison and early spec reveals, we can say that whilst the S6 uses a similar 16 megapixel camera to the Note 4, more work has been done to other elements of the camera to improve it’s performance.

The biggest difference is that the 16MP camera now flaunts a F1.9 aperture, as opposed to the Note 4’s F2.2 aperture. This difference will allow low light shots to be a lot more detailed on the S6. The front facing cam on the S6 now captures 5 megapixel images, whilst the Note 4 only has a 3.7MP front facing camera.

Summary

What we can gather from our comparison is that the S6 has many areas where it beats the Note 4 without question. Whilst the device unfortunately has no microSD card slot, it still has a beautiful design, a beastly SoC, and a more updated version of TouchWiz on Android 5.0 Lollipop. Learn here how to unlock your Samsung phone!

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