Worst to best - The Samsung Galaxy S series, ranked - Android
Samsung’s Galaxy S series made its debut on June 4, 2010, and since then it’s become the phone line most people think of when Android is mentioned.
Not all phones are created equal though, so to mark a decade of Galaxy S devices we thought it would be a fun idea to rank each generation in order from worst to best. We tried to balance the critical and commercial reception with the actual importance of each phone(s), the features and specs on offer, and our own gut feelings.
Related: Best Samsung Galaxy deals
It goes without saying that this is all for a bit of fun, your opinions may vary! It’s also worth remembering that many of these phones are among the best the smartphone world has ever seen — being the worst of the very best is still pretty great. With all that said, be sure to vote for your favorite Galaxy S series in the poll below and give us your own rankings in the comments!
For a more detailed look at the history of Galaxy S phones, be sure to read our retrospective here.
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2015’s Galaxy S6 was a notable release for a couple of reasons. It marked the range’s first foray into the glass design territory popularized by the iPhone. It also saw Samsung match Apple in terms of pricing strategy, having generally been cheaper than the iPhone until this point. But the Galaxy S6 takes the wooden spoon in our rankings because it cut or compromised so many features seen on the Galaxy S5 in order to achieve this design. That meant no IP rating, no removable battery, no microSD support, and a much smaller battery.
The phone that started it all, the Samsung Galaxy S (or Galaxy S1) seems laughable now when you check out the specs. A 1Ghz single-core chipset, 512MB of RAM, a 4-inch 480 x 800 screen. But this was pretty much as good as it got in the early days of Android, and it really was early. The biggest downsides were the uninspired design, gaudy software, and lack of a camera flash.
Between the early nature of Android at the time and a general lack of polish, the Samsung Galaxy S1 fell just shy of greatness. Samsung’s second attempt in 2011, on the other hand, delivered one of the best Android phones to date. The Galaxy S2 offered a sturdy design, removable battery, an OLED screen, and brisk internals. An accomplished, important step in Samsung’s ascent to the top of the Android world, the only reason it isn’t higher on this list is that Samsung US and its network partners created so many variants (Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch, anyone?) that finding a true Galaxy S2 (the GT-I9100) was an almost Sisyphean task.
The Galaxy S4 wasn’t just Samsung’s most popular Galaxy S series phone, it’s also the best selling Android phone of all time. But it also felt like the moment where Samsung jumped the shark. The main culprit here was TouchWiz, as Samsung usher in a ton of bloatware and took an “everything and the kitchen sink as well” approach to its own software additions. Do you really need page scrolling via a head tilt? Or the ability to create a 5.1 surround sound system with six phones? That’s not to say that it didn’t have any interesting software additions, like “bothies” (yes, way before Nokia) and Drama Shot, but be honest, did you ever use even these novel features more than once?
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