Here it is. After lots of speculation and renders, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ in the flesh, in a photo published a few hours ago.
The photo was taken by a commuter allegedly traveling in a bus to or from Samsung’s headquarters in Suwon, Korea, and posted by redditor Hissick27.
It clearly shows the S10+ — all screen except for the small double-camera punchole on the top right corner. With the phone already in full production gearing up to its February 20 introduction, it is almost certain this is the real thing.
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Redditor ActuallyWorkOnBixby — who claims to be a Samsung employee who works at the Suwon campus — has some insight comments about both the photo and the phone itself:
“He has the security case on (flip cover, folded corner on left),” the redditor said in the r/Samsung thread, “but he removed the security software that puts [a] watermark/employee+deviceId on screen. Lot[s] of trouble for that.”
The alleged Samsung employee claims to have another Galaxy S10+ and offered lots of comments about the phone, from the order of the icons in the status bar to how the hole feels.
It feels good...
The phone feels good, he says, “lighter than Note 9 but about the same size.” The employee claims he or she doesn’t notice the hole at all, “though [he hasn’t] tried many games/videos since the security watermark makes that annoying.”
He adds that OneUI feels polished and “pretty darn fast,” which we already supposed looking at the videos and the new faster processor inside.
...but just another incremental step
The hairy but is that this S10+ user feels like it is just another incremental step, not a revolutionary one: “Like the last few generations of everybody's phones, the differences aren’t HUGE” [his/her emphasis]. Which, given all what we know and the photos, seem certainly the case. It seems Samsung’s CEO DJ Koh claims that the phone changes will be “very significant” were “significantly” exaggerated.
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Fingerprint ID works great...
The alleged Samsung employee gives more insight about some of the phone’s features. The fingerprint reader is “cool [...] though face recog[nition] is usually faster.” The fingerprint reader is hard to find, though, and the “UI doesn’t guide you to it from the lockscreen.”
...so does facial ID
The facial id is not based on iris scan, “at least it is not in the software build I have.” But apparently it is working better than the previous generation and other Android phones, “more comparable to [Apple’s] FaceID. Not sure if [the] hardware (front camera + sensor) or [the] software [is] responsible.”
More comments
Answering further questions, the redditor says there is a “setting for increasing touch sensitivity in general for screen protectors” but it is unclear how protectors affect the fingerprint reader.
The redditor offered some insight on the development of Bixby, Samsung’s replacement to Google Assistant: “No Bixby changes in current build vs Note 9 [...] Team focus is new capsules from developer sdk, Galaxy Home readiness, continuous improvement in voice recognition, and response. But no major changes.”
Oh, and as for the icons: on the left the phone displays the clock. On the right, there are the icons for Bluetooth, ringer, Wi-Fi, network bars, battery percentage, battery icon, and then the hole finishing the row.
TL;DR:
Feels good, camera holes are not annoying [yet], fingerprint and facial ID works great, but it doesn’t feel revolutionary, just another incremental step up.
