Samsung Galaxy S6 Active review

Phone or Device Usage
I run a landscaping company, and I use my Samsung Galaxy S6 Active as my main phone for both business and personal use. I've used a few different phones in the past for both of these roles, from Iphones to other Galaxy phones, and for my money, the Galaxy S6 Active beats them all by a longshot. I need to be able to take calls at any time, no matter what I'm doing, and not worry about accidentally damaging my phone, or getting it wet or dirty. Since most of the calls I take happen during times when my hands are both wet and dirty, and there's a good chance I may accidentally drop my phone, I needed a phone that could tolerate those conditions day in and day out, not just on rare occasions. The Galaxy S6 did all of that for me, plus a lot more. I also needed to be able to read text messages and reply to them, even at times when I'm busy doing something else at the same time. The Galaxy S6's intuitive voice controls for text messaging make all of that not only possible, but very easy to do; even for someone like me who is not the most tech savvy phone user out there. Finally I needed a phone that can handle heavy social media and data usage without quickly draining my battery or lagging the phone so bad that the screen freezes to the point of making the entire device unusable. I've experienced both of those problems many times in the past with other phones, and I'm very happy to say that the Galaxy S6 has solved both of those issues.


Likes

Dislikes
There's not much for me to personally dislike about this phone, but there's definitely areas where it perhaps lacks a bit compared to other phones. For starters, the case is plastic. This isn't an issue at all to me, but some phone purists I know insist that a plastic case is vastly inferior to a metal one. Again I don't personally understand the gripe, but it is what it is. One thing I think is fair for me to complain about when it comes to the Galaxy S6 Active is the lack of a fingerprint sensor on the home button. The regular Galaxy S6 (and even the Galaxy S5!) has this feature, so I can't possibly understand why Samsung decided to forego it in this iteration of it's flagship line of phones. It's not too much of a pain for me to use a pin or swipe pattern to unlock my Galaxy S6 Active, but using a simpler unlock method like a fingerprint scanner would definitely make my life just a little bit easier. By far though, my biggest complaint with this phone is the lack of removable micro SD card storage. You can get this phone with either 32 GB or 64 GB of internal storage, and THAT'S IT! Not a big deal for people migrating over from Iphone, but if you've used other Galaxy phones before, you know how awesome it is to be able to upgrade your storage to as big of an SD card as you can imagine. Come on Samsung! Why?

Suggestions
To piggyback on my last point about the no removable storage, the biggest and most obvious suggestion for improving this phone would be to add removable storage. Everything data-wise these days is getting bigger and bigger. From apps to photos to even basic web and social media browsing; it all eats up bigger and bigger chunks of data as time goes on. Topping this phone's storage out at only 64 GB is a huge handicap compared to others. Another big one would be for Samsung to release this phone for other carriers besides just AT&T. Many of my friends use other carriers such as Verizon or Sprint, yet even today Samsung has only released this phone through AT&T. Also the camera is pretty good, but it definitely could be improved. At only 16 megapixels, it doesn't compare very favorably to other phones on the market with much higher powered cameras on board. This is also true when it comes to the front facing camera. Lastly, the outer bezel of the case is very knobby, and not very easy to slide around in your pocket or even in your hand. I wouldn't mind sacrificing a few extra millimeters of width and height in order to make everything nice and smooth around the edges.