Samsung Galaxy S6 vs. iPhone 6 Review: Specs, Design, Opinions

Mar 20, 2015 05:11 PM EDT

While Apple's iPhone 6 has been enjoying impressive sales numbers since its launch in September, Samsung's Galaxy S6 will be coming out on April 10 as a worthy competitor. But can the Galaxy S6 put a dent in the iPhone 6's top market share? Let's compare.

Design

Both phones are exactly 6.9mm thick and both sport aluminum frames, but the S6 is rumored to also contain graphene in its design. This will be the first time that Samsung uses an all-metal frame to better compete with Apple, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out with consumers.

Display

The Galaxy S6's 5.1-inch screen features 1440 x 2560 Quad HD Super AMOLED pixel density (577 ppi) while the iPhone 6 only has a 4.7-inch 1334 x 750 resolution (326 ppi), but the larger iPhone 6 Plus is where it's at with a 5.5-inch screen at 1920 x 1080 resolution (401 ppi).

So it seems that the pixel resolution of the S6 is better than both models of the iPhone 6, and the curved-screen Edge version of the S6 will be an interesting element in Samsung's favor.

Internal Specs

The iPhone 6 is in a league of its own as far as specs go because Apple's iOS software requires far less RAM to run than the Android system found in the Samsung phone, but with that in mind, we can see that the iPhone 6 has significantly lower specs on paper.

The Apple A8 dual-core processor, rated at 1.4 GHz, is not as impressive as Samsung's Exynos 7420 which is said to be very similar to the popular Snapdragon 810 chip from Qualcomm, but without all the heating issues. 

The iPhone 6's 1 GB of DDR3 RAM is nothing compared to the S6's 3 GB of DDR4 RAM, but both phones can be upgradable to 128 GB of storage, with the Apple product starting lower with 16 GB as an option.

Battery

Powering the iPhone is an 1810 mAh battery, which seems almost like a typo when compared to the S6's 2,550 mAh. The Samsung battery is said to be 30% more efficient than that of its previous S model, but the Apple product's battery is said to last for 14 hours, even at such a small size.

Camera

This is another category where the Apple product is significantly lower than that of Samsung with an 8-megapixel rear camera versus the S6's 16-megapixel. But both camera are capable of recording 1080p HD video at 60 frames per second. Other features like optical image stabilization (on the S6 and iPhone 6 Plus) make the camera actually a bit more comparable.

Software

This is where the biggest difference is between the two. Apple's own iOS mobile operating system is worlds apart from the Galaxy S6's Android 5.0 Lollipop, and this is usually the top reason why anyone would choose one over the other. Specs and performance numbers aside, its the OS preference that will decide which of these two phones you'll buy, but the Android share of the market is drastically increasing as many die-hard Apple fans are realizing that Google's OS isn't really that bad. Just don't try to make sense out of how software upgrades work on Android.