There’s a privacy mode that lets you protect items such as specific photos, audio recordings and files from snoops. You can see why Samsung was itching to add this capability: Its whole Galaxy S marketing blitz revolves around its phones doing things iPhones can’t, so it would have been embarrassing if the S5 lacked an answer to one of the 5s’s flagship technologies.īesides letting you unlock your phone, the S5’s fingerprint scanner is also used for a couple of features Touch ID doesn’t support right now. Based on technology from Synaptics, it promises to let you secure your phone with your fingerprint or thumbprint–you can register up to three of them–like Apple’s Touch ID does for the iPhone 5s. As long as I kept my hand super-steady and there wasn’t too much in the way of background noise, it worked.Īlso new in the hardware department is a fingerprint scanner. You press your fingertip up against the camera flash for a few seconds to get a reading. It’s still basic compared to the apps that come with wristbands such as Jawbone’s Up, but it does add the ability to read your heart rate, using a new hardware capability. One Samsung app that did survive is S Health, a fitness assistant that lets you track your workouts, walks, calorie intake and the like. They’re there if you want them, and out of your way if you don’t. It also chopped out some of the existing ones, offering them instead as optional free downloads. This time around, the company didn’t just avoid the temptation to add even more S apps. In the past, Samsung has had a tendency to fill its phones to the brim with its own apps-S Note, S Translate, S This, S That–which let them do a lot of stuff right out of the box, though not always all that well. (Apologies, but I didn’t dunk my iPhone–which makes no similar claim–for the sake of comparison.) Less Apps, More Filling After I removed it and toweled it off, it was fine. With it in place, I left the phone lounging in a tub of water for 20 minutes. The main clue that the S5 is meant to weather the elements is the tiny door that protects the USB port it’s easy to flick on and off, and if you forgot to nudge it back into place, you’ll get an on-screen reminder. Its IP67 rating means that it’s designed to survive being submerged in up to one meter of liquid for up to half an hour. And although you might think that the pop-off back would leave the S5 more vulnerable to the elements than a sealed-up phone, this is also the first Galaxy S to tout a water- and dust-resistant design. The removable plastic back does have a couple of significant virtues: You can swap in a spare battery or pop a memory card into the MicroSD slot for affordable storage expansion.
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