Fondled this bad boy in BB tonight, holy crap I'm completely blown away. The Note 5 was very decent, but nothing compared to the edge. I think the iPhone is without a doubt the nicest smartphone from a hardware point of view, but I gotta say when I put it next to the edge the iPhone looked quite clunky. I was so tempted to pre order one, but I had just bought a surface pro 3 for my front desk girl and wasn't in the mood to spend more.
My concerns at this point are
1) battery life. I've gotten used to the iPhone 6 plus which keeps impressing me with battery life. My old Note 4 was very nice also on KitKat, but went downhill badly with Lollipop but still was more than adequate for an entire day of heavy use.
2) Crappy hardware. 3 generations of Note series and nothing but hardware issues with all of them, ugh. You all know I'm no fan of iOS but man stuff just works out of the box and keeps working with no questions asked. I'm just fed up with bad GPS, WiFi which can't hand off between cellular, distorted earpiece sound, crappy speaker, wimpy power button I press constantly in my pocket, etc etc. But holy crap it was nice.
3) Touchwiz, can I go back to the lag? In all fairness it was lightning quick when I messed around with it at BB. I was VERY impressed with double touching the home button and the camera came up instantly, in every sense of the work instantly. It made me very hopeful, although my Note 4's were all pretty fast out of the box and eventually slow down with a couple days of use.
4) Holy crap it was slippery. I hate using cases and I refuse to use them, I usually put on a full body protector skin. Maybe a matte one will provide more grip, but I think this is a negative for the curved screen. It's doable on the regular edge because it fits in your hand, but with the plus it's a bit scary. Also it seems like you will activate the edge functions often, using it one handed and reaching across I kept activating it, although I'm sure you can move it.
At the end of the day I'm pretty sure I'm going to grab one and play around with it, swap it back and forth with my iPhone, although I'm bummed Samsung used micro sim instead of nano sim. Samsung really outdid themselves. I dig the edge functions. Edge contacts is cool, but deeply flawed because it doesn't accept GSM codes (but neither do iOS widgets).
One thing, I think Samsung is commuting suicide by pricing this more than the iPhone, no matter how nice it is. Samsung just doesn't' have the pedigree or loyalty to think they can price it like that. $914 for the ATT 64gb versus $849 for the 6 plus 64gb. Samsung should have undercut Apple by $50 and priced it at $800. It's a beautiful phone, but I wonder who outside of the Apple world will pay almost a thousand bucks for a phone, especially one which will depreciate very quickly.
a device that cost me €949 and I'm looking at €500 to sell it now. There are loads of Ad's for the Edge and hardly anyone making offers. Basically it's untenable for me to sell mine and pay another €400+ to get the plus. I can and will buy a Moto x Style for around that price.
