Samsung Galaxy S6 vs Motorola Nexus 6: first look

The metal and glass Galaxy S6 is undoubtedly one of the most exciting Samsung smartphones to come out in recent years. With a design language better catered to adhere to what today's consumers view as a premium, high-class look, and some cutting-edge hardware under its hood – we are definitely intrugues by this handset and how it compares to other recent flagships. So here's a comparison with none other than Google's own vanilla Android-toting Nexus 6 flagship!

Design

The Galaxy S6 truly outshines the competitor from the get-go here – the gargantuan Motorola Nexus 6 just looks rather dull with its plastic back, matte finish, and lack of accents or detail, while the S6 looks and feels nice and premium. Sporting a much smaller 5.1" display means that the latter is smaller, thinner, and lighter than the 6"-housing Google phablet.

Display

Both handsets employ AMOLED tech for their screens, and both exhibit fairly accurate color reproduction. The Nexus 6 wins in size, as it sports the giant 6" display, while the Galaxy S6 sticks to the more conventional 5.1" diagonal. Otherwise, both phones deliver a pretty crisp picture, as they rock a 1440 x 2560 resolution, resulting in 493 PPI on the Nexus 6 and 577 PPI on the Galaxy S6.

Processor and memory

The Nexus 6 has Qualcomm's last 32-bit warrior – the Snapdragon 805 – under its hood, whereas the Galaxy S6 is the first Samsung flagship to sport a 64-bit chip – a homemade octa-core solution, built on a 14 nm process. What this should mean is more performance for less energy, compared to the SoC in the Nexus.

Samsung alsi employs a new UFS 2.0 technology for the flash storage in the Galaxy S6, which should make it 2.7 times faster than the currently used NAND flash. Additionally, the S6 sports 3GB of super-fast LPDDR4 RAM, allowing more room and speed for multitasking.

Interface

The Nexus 6 is a Google flagship and, naturally, rocks a clean, unmodified version of the Android operating system. Not being bogged down by reskins and additional processes means that the UI reacts lightning fast to user input, leaving the feel of snappiness that few phones are able to achieve. Plus, it allows you to gawk at Google's Material Design in all its glory.

Samsung, on the other hand, has its own TouchWiz reskin for the Android operating system, which has often been criticized for being too cluttered and too feature-packed, causing performance lags and user confusion. Well, the TW in the new Galaxy S6 flagships has been slimmed down and lightened, according to Samsung. We can definitely confirm that it looks cleaner, maybe feels snappier, but we've yet to put it through some extensive testing.

Camera

The Nexus 6 sports a 13 MP camera with F2.0 aperture. It has OIS, HDR, 4k video recording – everything that we would expect from a modern flagship's snapper – and it performs quite well when pitted against the competition.

The Galaxy S6 has a 16 MP sensor, which has a slightly wider F1.9 aperture, tracking auto-focus capabilities, and auto real-time HDR for both its snappers. We expect it to be at least slightly better than the Nexus 6, as the initial samples we took with the demo S6 on-site impressed with its contrast and depth of field capabilities, but we are yet to test the device extensively and draw our final conclusion.

Battery

The Nexus 6 has enough room in its gargantuan chassis to fit a 3,220 mAh battery, which lasted for about 7 hours and 53 minutes on our battery life test – a good result for a modern device. Now, Motorola is a member of the Wireless Power Consortium, which naturally means that the Nexus 6 supports wireless charging via the Qi standard.

The Galaxy S6 has a much smaller 2,550 mAh juicer, and we can't be sure how long it would last pushing the new QHD display – we only know that the new CPU is supposed to be an energy-saver, but can this be enough? Otherwise, one cool thing about Sammy's new flagship is the fact that it supports both the PMA and WPC standards, making it universal in terms of what wireless charging mat you will be using for it.

Expectations

The Galaxy S6 definitely feels like a superior device when pitted agains the Nexus 6, but considering all the next-gen hardware it packs – that's understandable. Of course, the new design materials are a definite win for Samsung, and we quite appreciate the fact that the company decided to go this way. The only thing left unresolved for now is how it would fare in terms of battery life and we can't wait to get a chance to test the S6 camera extensively in the near future.