It’s been a good year for smartphones, which some major changes popping out of the woodwork and surprising all of us. Looking at the top row of smartphones to land on the market in 2015, there’s a definite trend taking place. Join us for a look back at the best of the best in 2015 and see if you can spot what it is. Hint: It rhymes with Ham-Bung. I’m not sure what a ham-bung is but it probably has something to do with bacon-flavoured beer. On with the show.
This was our best-reviewed phone for the year of 2015. That’s not to say that it was the best phone we saw all year (you’ll see in January what I mean) but it was certainly the most powerful. But only just, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ only just edges out its predecessors, the Galaxy S6 Edge and the Galaxy S6 proper, thanks to a hardware upgrade that wasn’t present towards the beginning of 2015. In all honesty, there’s not much difference between those three phones, which is why the next one on the list is the…
When the S6 Edge dropped onto Stuff’s collective desk, we called it Samsung’s best phone to date. That assessment still isn’t wrong, at the time it was the company’s most innovative, powerful and attractive phone. No plastic casing, all the power in the world, a screen with so many pixels that your eyes couldn’t see them all… the Galaxy S6 Edge arrived with everything. Except, you know, a removable battery and a microSD slot, something that we’re still hoping Samsung gets around to tweaking in the next round of flagships. Speaking of flagships…
Samsung’s proper flagship (though, for how long?), the Galaxy S6, also tested well. It arrived containing all of the updates that we saw in the Edge and Edge+, though with a smaller display and none of the screen trickery that the other handsets bore witness to. So it was a traditional Samsung handset, except that it was all glass, didn’t have a removable battery, had an amazing camera, that sort of thing. So it was only traditional in terms of its form factor really… Huh. Anyway, the Galaxy S6 packed a lot of power into a phone while still being normal enough that you could give it to the technologically challenged and expect them to do okay.
What? We had to break the streak at some point and Samsung didn’t release that many brilliant handsets. LG only really had one dog in this fight and the South Korean company taught this pooch to take photographs. The G4 was in the running for scoring its hat-trick, after topping Stuff‘s charts for two years running, but the change of focus from powerful all-rounder to a battery-wielding camera specialist dropped LG’s flagship out of the running. It’s still an excellent handset but someone else brought better hardware to this party. Never mind, there’s always next year.
Weirdly enough, Stuff didn’t get around to putting the final iPhone 6s or 6s Plus reviews online this year but in the print magazine we just didn’t shut up about it. In fact, we’ve got a long-term test of the iPhone 6s in the December issue, which is on-shelf now. With that little ad-break over, the iPhone 6s family was a substantial enough upgrade to make it worth your cash in every area but one – it still looks the same as the iPhone 6. Aw. But if you were after more power or a bigger camera or, you know, the smooth Apple performance, then the 6s was the update to get. There were a couple of battery issues but that’s been fixed with that delightful little add-on Apple has for you to use…
