Could this be the phone of the year?

The new Samsung Galaxy S6 has been advertised to be the best flagship smartphone of 2015. It certainly has drawn attention with a new sleek design, boosted internals, and #SixAppeal marketing strategy.

The build is basically a glass and metal sandwich, with glass on the front and back and a metal band going around the edge.

This is a complete overhaul from the previous Galaxy smartphones – mostly plastic with some others being painted to look like metal. Now, it’s the real thing, and it looks and feels amazing at only 6.8 millimeters thin and really fitting in the hand.

Now does it really live up to the hype? Or the more important question, does it beat Apple’s iPhone 6?

Let’s start with the screen. It’s 5.1 inches across, with 577 pixels per inch (ppi). That doubles the 326 ppi of the iPhone. The colors of the display are very punchy with high contrast, and you can always see it, even in broad daylight. This is a huge bonus since you don’t have to do the hand-to-your-forehead-to-the-screen to block out the sun. The camera is absolutely outstanding, with a 16MP on the back, and a 5MP on the front. No colors are ever washed out, but some pictures are overexposed, as they can be with most cameras. If you ever need a quick shot, you can launch the camera in .7 seconds, by double tapping the home button.

This phone is fast, and I mean FAST. With an Exynos Octa-core processor, every app launches with amazing speed, and runs with almost zero lag. It runs the basics like Jelly Jump and the like, as any smartphone should be able to do, but it can also run the high-power, high-graphic games like Real Racing 3 and even Grand Theft Auto. Just scrolling through the homescreen used to be laggy with the old TouchWiz, but now with Android 5.1 Lollipop paired with the Galaxy S6, it’s seamless, as it should be.

The battery life is the weak point of this phone, but it still isn’t bad. I can usually get through the day with about 20% left, and that’s when I’m moderately playing games on a bus-ride home or a during a study hall. Even if it does happen to drain to about 10% when I get home, I can just put it on a charger, and with “Adaptive Fast Charging,” it will charge to 4 hours of battery life in about 20 minutes. A really cool feature it has, and one that I use often, is the wireless charging feature. Instead of plugging it in I just put it onto a “charging mat” and it’s good to go.

Another thing to mention is the Galaxy S6 Edge, which is the Galaxy S6 but with the left and right sides of the screen rounded to the edge of the phone. It looks pretty cool, but does not seem to have enough functionality to be worth the extra $100.

After having this phone for about a month and a half, I can say, “Yes, it IS better than the iPhone 6.” I will cut the iPhone some slack though, because it did come out back in September of 2014. I believe the only place where the iPhone wins is battery, which lasts about an hour longer than the Galaxy.