Samsung Galaxy S10+ review: Look no further

For many people, the world of smartphones has two players: Samsung Galaxy and Apple iPhone. And realistically, there isn't much chance of people switching between the two in any given upgrade cycle. Samsung dominates the non-iPhone market in any location around the world that has the purchasing power to afford $1000 smartphones; and even outperforms Apple in many others.

So it's no surprise the technology world stops and stares every time Samsung refreshes the Galaxy S line. No matter what the Galaxy S10 and S10+ brought to the table this year, it was going to be covered and analyzed to every extent possible.

Thankfully for us all, the Galaxy S10 is a great phone — due in no small part to the reality that it's mostly unchanged from last year's Galaxy S9 (and even the S8 before it). Samsung once again took its dominant position in hardware, display, specs and features and simply turned it all up another level for 2019. The result is a phone that's an easy buy for just about anyone.

1. The Good

3. Best-ever smartphone display
4. Top-end specs
5. Filled with useful hardware and software features
6. Fun triple camera
7. Headphone jack

The Bad

• Fingerprint sensor worse than last year
• Software requires tweaks and management
• Main camera doesn't match Pixel 3
• Charging speed behind the competition

Samsung has iterated on this same basic design concept since the Galaxy S6, slowly changing the proportions, stretching the edges and increasing the scale with each subsequent phone. It's been a successful one to be sure; it's more than a coincidence that just about every high-end smartphone has coalesced to look like the phones Samsung's been making since 2015

So you can't blame Samsung for keeping with what's worked so well. The Galaxy S10, and the larger Galaxy S10+ I've been using for this review, are brilliantly executed designs. The key theme of these phones is pure efficiency: getting as much hardware, as many specs, and as much capability into as compact of a body as possible. The GS10+ has the same effective screen real estate as the Note 9 from just a few months ago, yet is smaller in every dimension, 25 grams lighter, and has a larger battery.

Just as impressively, you get every feature that was here before. A microSD card slot sits next to the SIM. A headphone jack accompanies the USB-C port on the bottom. Stereo speakers give you a roughly 60/40 split between the bottom and top. It's such a treat to see Samsung still standardize on these core tenets.