My Beautiful New S10+

[Glory1]

First off let me start by saying this will not be a technical review. I leave that to the expert @viridis. This is a personal, user review, with me as the user.

To give you some idea of my new phone, the following photo may help:

Unpacking

As you can see this is a beautiful phone, with an edge to edge screen, top to bottom and side to side. The screen size of 6.4" is obtained in this way. The phone itself is actually ever so slightly smaller than my S8+ in height, though again fractionally wider in width.

It comes complete with charger, charging lead, screen protector, already fitted and ejector pin to open the slot for your sim card(s) and/or sd card. You can either have 2 sim cards or 1 sim card and 1 sd card.

Storage & data transfer

Storage capacity is a massive 128gb which can be increased to 512gb by adding an sd card. However, I think 128gb is enough, even for me 

Having charged my new phone, the next step was transferring all my apps, games, music and files over from my S8+, which with Smart Switch ran smooth as silk. 

I backed up my phone prior to transferring it all to my new phone . However, my music couldn't be backed up, insufficient cloud space and O2 have blocked our ability to increase cloud storage, through mobiles at least! My music hadn't been back up since 2017, so I envisaged having to download quite a few tracks from Amazon. What fun!

You will, therefore, imagine my surprise to find every track, including several tracks downloaded only a few days previously, had transferred over. And not only transferred over but in their correct playlists too.

When I transferred my music to my S8+, the tracks transferred fine but the playlists they were in did not I had to set all the playlists up again: an absolute pain when you're dealing with just under 1,000 tracks!

I would greatly appreciate one of our tech experts explaining how tracks that were not backed up transferred over with tracks that had been backed up; back in 2017. Just for my own curiousity because I didn't expect that to happen. Though thrilled to bits that it did.

Another curious thing. On my S8+ my apps were shown as 17.2gb. But the exact same apps now registered as 9.2gb on my S10+. No apps were lost and, in fact, 2 apps have been added which had been deleted by me in error. A difference of 8gb for the same number of apps I find odd. But again, I'm sure one of our tech geniuses can come up with an explanation.

Streaming

To give you an idea what streaming a show using the full width of the S10+ in landscape is like, please take a look at the photo below:

Only Mobdro actually stream programmes using the full width of the S10+, and my photo was from a CBS news broadcast through this app. Prime does give you the option of filling the width of the screen. But streaming through the various catch up services, only uses the present widescreen ratio which means black bars either side of the screen. I understand they are working on this, apparently. So hopefully it'll be sorted soon.

The phone is fast and powerful. Certainly faster than my S8+ when new and I thought that phone was fast. 

Security

Samsung no longer allow you to opt out of setting a password and using the fingerprint scanner as well. For me, at least, the password works better than the fingerprint scanner. Unless I want to stand on my head while getting my thumb in the correct position.

Not having ever used a password on my phone I find it more of a nuisance to be honest. Particularly when my phone's been on awhile but not used. I have to input my password to get into the phone again. A nuisance to me, as I've said. But I bet you will all shout at me that it's about time I password protected my phone 

Other features

As I don't take many photos, I cannot comment on the 3 cameras. I leave that again to an expert like @viridis whose photographs continue to wow us all.

I am grateful that Samsung have not gone the way of Apple and continue to provide a headphone jack. I don't know where I'd be without it. And my neighbours are certainly grateful that they don't have to listen to my particular taste in music, in the early hours of the morning, not to mention loud gunfire if I'm watching an action movie or Bosch on Prime.

Finally, in case you haven't guessed, I love my beautiful new Galaxy S10 Plus. Is it the greatest thing since sliced bread? No, of course, not. However, have Samsung excelled themselves with the S10+? You better believe it! I love this phone and am so pleased I got it. For me the future is Samsung. But, then, of course, I'm biased