Hands-on Impressions Of The Samsung Galaxy S5 Fingerprint Scanner, Heart Rate Monitor And More

Hands-on impressions of the Samsung Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner, heart rate monitor and more

BY Valerie Richardson

Valerie Richardson

Valerie is a 26 year old tech writer based in London, UK. She has prior experience working with major media conglomerates. She’s also a lover of all things tech — well, basically anything with a d...

All Articles by Valerie Richardson

Published 25 Feb 2014

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While the Samsung Galaxy S5 announcement was feature packed, the Korean manufacturer couldn’t share details on all aspects of the smartphone. So, following our first round-up of hands-on videos of the Galaxy S5, here’s another compilation of videos showing off in details all the key features of the latest Samsung flagship.

Fingerprint Scanner

Samsung’s implementation of the fingerprint sensor isn’t radically different from Apple’s Touch ID sensor. However, there are some noticeable distinctions in the way Samsung has worked around this technology. Instead of placing their finger on the home button, users will have to start swiping from the bottom of the display as you can see in this video demo from Slash Gear. It’s a worthwhile feature to have with the ability to program up to 8 separate fingers.

Heart Rate/Pulse Monitor

The Galaxy S5 is also embedded with a heart rate monitor beneath the camera sensor which is capable of checking your pulse. You can find the exact implementation of this feature in the demo video from Phone Arena.

Camera

Samsung is hyping the inclusion of a very superior camera sensor with the Galaxy S5, which is capable of better autofocus and quicker response times compared to conventional mobile cameras. While these demo devices are mostly pre-production units, the camera performance certainly looks promising.

Benchmarks

It’s natural for a smartphone to receive the benchmarks treatment as soon as it is launched and the Galaxy S5 was no different. The folks at Phone Arena decided to put it to the test on AnTuTu, GFXBench, Quadrant and Basemark X with flourishing results.

Ultra Power Saving Mode

One of the crucial features demonstrated by Samsung yesterday was the inclusion of the Ultra Power Saving mode, which allows the Galaxy S5 to run up to a day on standby with just 10% of juice left. That feature has been put to the test as well.

Storage

While the entry level Galaxy S5 comes with 16GB of internal storage, little did we know that actual usable storage is a notch over 8GB as spotted by Android Central. So this means, the smartphone uses in excess of 6-7GB just for the ROM and Samsung specific apps, which explains why Samsung packs its smartphones with a microSD card slot.