Hands on: Samsung Galaxy S6 review

*We have the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge in, and our review will be live once we've had enough time to fully explore and test the handset and all its features. The handset only arrived in the UK on March 24, so please bear with us while we give it the time and attention it deserves.*

I've often wondered how a brand like Samsung could have messed up so badly in the smartphone space. When I saw the Galaxy S4, I sighed. When the Galaxy S5 rolled around, my shoulders sagged further.

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How could a brand with so many hyper-intelligent researchers and well-paid designers make something so bland yet complex time and again? Both phones packed amazing power in a boring case, with each element somehow negating the other.

This year though, following a reshuffle, things have changed. The Samsung Galaxy S6 is a thing of beauty, a complete redesign that really works, but blended with large swathes of power once again.

• Samsung Galaxy S6 release date: when you can get, how much it will cost and more

The key thing here though is, it appears that power is not there for the sake of it – each element has a purpose, to ensure the Galaxy S6 works well under the finger while finally being a phone you'd consider alongside an HTC or iPhone.

Let's not get too carried away though. TouchWiz is still on board, adding a cartoonish feel to things where other brands still feel more premium, but Samsung has refined this again (building on good work from the S5), removed a lot of the bloatware and cleaned up the icons.

It's easy to see the S6 is a great phone, and one Samsung sorely needed – but coming from so far back (its flagship device was barely a top 10 phone last year) it wasn't hard to improve dramatically.

This is an expensive phone though, with Samsung listing it for £600 off contract (although at least it's not up there with the £700 Galaxy S6 Edge) and contract prices tipping over £40 per month.

Design

Smartphones stopped needing more power a long, long time ago – arguably we could have called it quits with 2013's specs and spent the following months optimising them to allow days-long battery.

So with that race already run it became a battle for the best design, which meant that HTC suddenly rose to prominence once more, with a good-enough spec list sitting inside one of the best phones I've ever held.

Apple managed the same thing with the new iPhone 6, focusing on a premium metallic shell while getting the battery life just about tolerable.

All the while Samsung toiled in the background, promising that we'd start loving plastic at some point, showing that it's more robust and scuff-free and rugged… and it didn't work.

So Project Zero was born, a plan within Samsung to completely redesign its S6 model from the ground up. Plastic was out, waterproofing gone, and in their place a fusion of glass and metal.

Put simply: it's a much, much better phone, but again that's not hard when you've got the Galaxy S5 to improve upon. But the S6 does feel very well packaged, the combination of metal and Gorilla Glass 4 giving no hint of creak or give when pressed.

It does sound a little hollow when tapped on the back though, which does diminish the effect somewhat – however, at only 6.8mm thick, that's kind of understandable.

Samsung's gone bold with this design in more than one way. It's got rid of two of the staples that users have loved for years: the microSD slot has been removed and the battery is locked in.

The reasoning behind this is sound: Samsung tells me the former is to improve performance and speed (something the S5 struggled with terribly as it aged) and the latter is clearly to allow for a unibody design.

I'm behind the loss of the removable battery – after all, it's easier to carry a battery pack than shell out for a replacement power unit – but the microSD card disappearance is a shame.

I appreciate the quest for a better performance, and perhaps it will turn out to be up there with the iPhone when my full Galaxy S6 review comes out, but other Android phones seem to manage to tick along just fine with expandable storage.

And in testing so far, it's not been that much better than anything else. I have noticed a big uptick in terms of responsiveness under the finger, but there are still a few instances of waiting for stuff to happen baked into the TouchWiz - the multi-tasking menu, for instance.

Samsung is offering the S6 in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB flavours to compensate, but those latter options are pretty expensive.

I'm hugely impressed with the way Samsung has put this phone together though – it's managed the incredible feat of bringing the best screen on the market (the brand's words, although the combination of QHD resolution and a 5.1-inch display with Super AMOLED technology means I'm inclined to agree) in a package that's barely larger than the iPhone 6.

That means Samsung can offer a phone with a huge, crisp display while still being small enough to be considered alongside Apple's non-phablet and Sony's Xperia Z3 Compact – both phones that I'll point to when people ask 'I want a phone, but not one that's massive'.

Considering the options from Sony and Apple both have a 720p resolution, and Samsung's packed in four times as many pixels in the same footprint, and you can see why I'm impressed by Samsung's option.

Of course, this all comes at the expense of battery – after all, more pixels take more power, and the smaller package means there's less space for a battery (a 2550mAh pack is smaller than the 2800mAh seen in the Galaxy S5, which is a bit of a worry) and in early tests it doesn't seem like it's a brilliant performance in terms of the battery.

That said, we're only 48 hours in, so there's a lot more shaking out to do before I can fully confirm if this is a poor battery.

Samsung needed to sort out the build quality of the entire phone, but one of the big issues was with the home button, which was too soft to push.

The S6 has a really nice action now, with a lot of effort put into the satisfying click (useful for when you need to activate the camera, which I'll come onto later).

The phone is going to be unveiled in four colours at launch too, with a pleasant jewel-like exterior that changes colour slightly as the light hits it. It's got a nice translucent effect, which again adds to the more premium chassis.

I've been checking out the white option, and I really dislike it. On the desk, it looks just like the mundanely-designed Galaxy S5 range, where the build quality deserves so much more.

I think Samsung has sent out the 'White Pearl' colour simply because it wants to hide how much the S6 sucks in fingerprints and the white disguises that.