Samsung Galaxy S6 vs. Apple iPhone 6: Fight of the Flagship Phones

Samsung stole the show at Mobile World Congress with the announcement of its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S6. Along with the equally captivating Galaxy S6 Edge, Samsung managed to drum up the kind of excitement you might associate with its chief rival, Apple. It's only natural, then, to wonder how the new Galaxy S6 stacks up against the six-month-old iPhone 6 . We've compared specs in the table below to help you decide.

Arguably the greatest new feature in the Galaxy S6 is one you can't really illustrate in a comparison table, and that's build quality. Simply put, the Galaxy S6 is Samsung's first flagship phone that actually looks like it can go toe-to-toe with Apple based on build. Samsung has finally done away with chintzy plastic in favor of metal and glass, for a look that's vaguely reminiscent of the iPhone 4 (in my humble opinion, the best-designed iPhone ever). I can't stress enough how much of an upgrade this is. And I'm sorry if you recently bought a Galaxy S5, because you're going to want this phone. I'm still a big fan of the sleek, unibody iPhone 6 design, but I have to call this one a tie.

Where Samsung takes an early lead, however, is in the display department. The Galaxy S6 features a 5.1-inch display, with eye-poppingly sharp 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution. That works out to an ultra-dense 577 pixels per inch. The iPhone 6, by comparison, has a 4.7-inch display with 1,334-by-750 resolution, for 326 pixels per inch. Although I haven't yet seen the Galaxy S6 display in person, the numbers here speak for themselves. And you don't have to deal with a lot more phone in your pocket in order to gain that larger, sharper display. The GS6 measures 5.65 by 2.78 by 0.27 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.87 ounces, making it only slightly larger than the iPhone 6, which clocks in at 5.44 by 2.64 by 0.27 inches and 4.55 ounces.

Other specs are more difficult to evaluate without having the phones side by side for testing. The iPhone 6, for instance, still manages to take some of the best smartphone pictures on the market with an 8-megapixel sensor. Samsung is doubling that to 16 megapixels for the Galaxy S6, but we'll need to shoot some test shots to see how it performs. The S6 can natively record video in 4K resolution, an improvement over the iPhone, which requires an unofficial app. One thing I'm not crazy about, though, is the camera bump on the back for the S6, compared with the completely smooth frame of the iPhone 6.

Hardware performance is something we'll have to wait to evaluate as well. Apple uses a custom 64-bit A8 chip for the iPhone 6. And this time around, Samsung is doing much the same, using its own processor for the Galaxy S6. We hear that it's a Exynos 7 chip, but we'll have to run our fleet of benchmark tests to see how it stands up against the iPhone 6, as well as devices powered by Qualcomm's latest processors.

Interestingly, Samsung has done away with the microSD card slot here, and the Galaxy S6 comes in 32, 64, and 128GB variants, the same as the iPhone 6. Other specs are similar as well, including LTE support as well as 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi in both devices. So display aside, this is a tough fight to call, at least on paper.

Full disclosure: I'm an iPhone user. But this is the first Galaxy device that's made me reconsider. What do you think? Will you be making the jump? I'm waiting to get my hands on one in our labs before making a decision, but let us know your first impressions in the comments below.