A Very Good Phone
This is my first Smartphone, so this review is the thoughts of a novice to Smartphones, but has used cellphones for almost eighteen years now. My thoughts of the Samsung S5 Active are:
5 stars for the design, value, easy of use, and the wealth of functions this phone has. Love the feel, and layout of the controls, and the fact phone is designed to be water proof if all ports/covers are properly closed and secured. Even though this phone out of the box is built like a tank, I encased it in a OutterBox Defender case for even more protection.
4.5 stars for the camera. Photos taken with the S5 Active are very good if you take your time and wait for the camera to acquire proper focus, while holding the camera very still. Colors and saturation are very good without any user enhancements.
3 stars for the volume and sound. I didn't purchase this phone to be a boom box for playing music, or for people to hear my conversations from ten feet away. When listening through the built in earphone to a conversation I would like to have a greater amount of volume. With my previous flip phone I could never use the volume at max as it was to loud. My S5 at full volume is a little low for me. Needs a boost, or tweak in this function. I will rate the speaker function below.
2.5 stars for the Battery. If I leave home at 6:45am with a 100% charge, I will normally return around 7:00pm with approximately 15%-25% remaining battery life. That normal day for me includes between three and ten voice calls normally lasting less than two minutes each, perhaps two to five text messages, looking at the app "MyRadar" to check local weather conditions perhaps two to three times a day, and spending five to ten minutes a day while on my lunch break, looking at world news and current events on the Internet. Form some people this may be great, but I'm used to charging may phone and having two to four days of battery life if I needed it without charging. I see why people are constantly looking for charging outlets now, especially if really using a smartphone a lot.
1 star for the speaker phone. I've off and on had problems with people hearing me when on the speaker. I've tried all kinds of tricks to get through this annoying problem. Turning off 'Noise Reduction' seemed to help with both ear phone and speaker phone communications. Shutting the phone down, removing the battery, and sim card, letting it sit like that for ten minutes, then doing a reset by holding the Power/Up Volume/and Home buttons at the same time to get to the Android operating system to clear the cache memory, and then rebooting, will also work for awhile. Not sure why if I make a call on the speaker at times people can't hear me, but turning the speaker off works. To me it should not effect the microphone operation unless boosting it's range when going to speaker mode, and changing the volume of the speakers. Not sure if this problem is with the phone hardware, or operating system, but it is annoying.
Overall I love this phone, and would say it is 'Perfect' if it not for the operation while using the speaker mode.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
