One Month With The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus

As one of the people who preordered the Galaxy s10 Plus you could say that I really wanted this phone. After toughing out the last few years with my Samsung galaxy s6 edge plus and watching everyone enjoy all these new features and almost bezel-less styled tall designed looking phones you could say I was starting to get a little jealous. Don't get me wrong though. The s6 edge plus was a dream come true the day I got it when it came out. It had 4k video capabilities and I had never seen a camera that good on a phone in my life, not to mention I could finally do slow motion which I had been wanting for some time. I thought I phone could not get any better as far as quality when I bought that one but boy was I wrong.

Not only did I want to preorder the phone because of my "new phone addiction" eating me up. I also wanted to grab a pair of those bad ass wireless galaxy ear buds that they were just giving away for free, I could not believe it. And with the new ability to wireless charge them on the back of the galaxy s10 plus I knew I just had to preorder to get them because lets face it. I am not going to take a chance on a pair of $130 dollar ear buds only to find out i don't like them. Also if I knew I was going to get the s10 plus I would have to be a idiot not to preorder it and get the free ear buds right?

My first impressions were probably at a good 7 out of 10 I would say. The screen just looked amazing, that was the first thing that stood out to me. With a near bezel-less design its impossible not to drool over the gorgeous image quality and full screen photos taking up the entire screen. Even with the little hole cut out in the top right I think it just makes it look even cooler and that is what is now setting all the new phones apart in the market. If you don't have a notch or a cut out at the top of your screen you are not one of the cool kids.

Another thing that I noticed is the sound quality and the volume this thing can reach. This has got to be one of the loudest phones I have ever used. I would love to see a decibel test compared to other phones to see where this thing lands on the scale. Even though the top speaker is the ear piece and the bottom speaker is on the bottom right of the device firing down, the overall sound seems to be a natural vibrant sound that can match some of the cheapest tiny blue tooth speakers I have seen out there... cough, cough, those shitty billboard speakers for 20 dollars at Staples, cough, cough.

I was able to remap the Bixby button right away with Samsung's own software in the phone through an app and connecting it to my computer to follow the instruction so I don't see what everyone is still fussing over as far as the whole Bixby button controversy goes. In fact it should not be called the Bixby button it should just be called and additional blank hardware button. You can change it to any app, assistant, or routine that you want so the possibilities are endless. You can also have it trigger different apps, assistants, or routines depending on how many times you press it and how you press it. I have it once for Google assistant, twice for Bixby, three times for auto start recording video in those situations that call for video asap, and I still have one more ability to program it to do something if i press it three times and hold down on the third press but I don't know what I want it to be yet.

The camera took me some getting use to coming from the s6 edge plus but if you are coming from a s7, s8, or especially a s9 it should be the same for you. But what I did notice in my 4 year leap into the future from the s6 is that you can no longer record video in Pro mode. I was unaware they did away with this feature. Some you all may have seen this change already in newer phones but I have not. I will now be forced to use a 3rd party app to control all aspects of my video recording but I was going to do that anyways because last year I got really into smart phone videography and I have been learning the ropes of video. If you want to see what gear I am using to record all my awesome footage with and get those super smooth shots check out my post here. I also recommend anyone that is serious about smartphone video to get the Filmic Pro app. It gives you total control over your phone just like shooting on a DSLR or mirror-less camera.

Other than the impressive speed improvements that I could tell and the enormous hard drive space on this phone that was pretty much all the things that really stood out to me. My s6 only had 32gb of storage so even with having the smallest hard drive space s10 at 120gb this is a massive improvement. No longer will I get that notification that asks you which apps you want to delete so that you can install a new app. I have over 100 apps installed so far and I have all my music and books plus other files backed up to my phone and I still am not out of space. Oh and before I forget, the SD card space. If you don't remember the Galaxy s6 was the year they removed the card slot so I was stuck for 4 years with only 32 gigs of space. This is no longer the case. On top of my 120 gigs of space I added a 32gb SD card for some extra room should I need it. Its nice to be able to pop out a card and plug it into my laptop again to do what I want with it. Samsung says that the card slot can support up to half a terabyte in the reader so that is another impressive upgrade I was glad to see. Not that I can afford a 500gb card right now after putting down $300 dollars just to get my s10 plus but I can dream cant I?

Overall I am loving this phone. I feel like I have joined the rest of the world and I am no longer using a 4 year old phone. Its funny how out of date these things feel after only 4 years isn't it?

Before I conclude my overall impression of this beast of a phone there is one thing that I have to note that happened to me last night. I was down to one percent on my phone before bed, i emailed a svg image file to myself and right after it sent the phone died and i placed it on my wireless charger. Soon as I did this the phone tried to restart. It got to the t-mobile screen, did its jingle then i saw the lock screen for 1 second and it started rebooting again. I thought that was weird and laid back down. I heard the t-mobile jingle again and then a minute later i heard it again, and then again, and again, and again, and again, over and over. The phone was stuck in a infinite loop and I did not know what to do. I let it die again and left it on my bed side table for the morning to deal with. I woke up this morning and looked it up if this was a known issue on the Internet and it was just not as serious as my situation. Other people had theirs rebooting randomly. mine wouldn't get past the boot up stage before it started rebooting all over again.

Now if I was not a tech savvy Android fan boy I would have been screwed but I knew just what to do. I had to look up the right combo of buttons to press for this model phone to boot up into recovery mode because its a newer phone and Samsung is a little different than the standard Android recovery boot key presses. I held down the Bixby button, Volume Up, and Power button. The phone tried to restart like it was but I kept pressing down until I saw the android guy flash and i let go of the buttons. I first tried to boot into safe mode but it never would boot up so I decided to just factory reset. I was not worried because I keep everything in the cloud and I make regular backups with my phone automatically with the default Samsung software.

After I factory reset it, it was like day one all over again. I just went through the setup steps and got the phone set back up. One thing to keep in mind is that I had 2 factor authentication on so I had to use one of my codes to get into my phone. I have them on a piece of paper in my wallet in case something like this happens but if you have it set up and you don't have your codes you can just log into your account on your laptop, desktop, tablet, or other phone and go to your Google account and view your 2 factor authentication codes to get one to use. Also Samsung wanted to know the last pin code I used to get into my phone but that was not an issue because it is my phone. These are the steps that prevent a thief or someone who finds your phone from being able to use your phone as their own. I got to say Google and Samsung do make me feel very safe in case something like that ever happens to me. Its impossible to get into one of those phones.

Back to my point about this being part of my impression of the phone. It seems to me that this is always something that happens to Android phones. Something glitches up and you got to reset the phone or force a hard reset or reboot on it. This phone is one month old, it should not be having this issue. From what I can tell I think Apple has a better record of their phones not having little glitches like this and this just shows me how Android is still less reliable when use on 3rd party hardware manufacturers as apposed to a company like Apple who makes both software and hardware so they can prevent things like this from happening, but I hate Apple, just saying.

Would I recommend this phone? Absolutely. I think what happened to my was just a fluke and I don't think it will happen again. This gorgeous phone is the best you can get at the time of this writing and I would definitely buy it again if I had to do it all over again.