Samsung Galaxy S5
Hardware
The Samsung Galaxy S5 upgrades the flagship layout with a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display featuring a 1920x1080 resolution in a standard 16:9 aspect ratio (~432 ppi). The panel leverages Samsung's "Diamond Pixel" matrix architecture, comes shielded by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and introduces an upgraded physical home button featuring a swipe-based fingerprint scanner flanked by capacitive Back and Recent Apps keys—the latter officially replacing the long-standing Menu key. The phone is housed in a polycarbonate chassis distinguished by a soft-touch, perforated "dimpled" rear cover and debuts IP67-certified dust and water resistance to the core flagship line, a feature requiring a silver plastic waterproof gasket flap over the bottom charging port. Launch colors include Charcoal Black, Shimmery White, Electric Blue, and Copper Gold, alongside specialized spin-offs like the rugged S5 Active and a premium South Korean Broadband LTE-A variant. Under the hood, silicon configurations remain divided by regional carrier connectivity. The North American and standard international LTE models run on a 28nm 2.5 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 (MSM8974-AC) processor paired with an Adreno 330 GPU, while international 3G variants utilize Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa 5422 big.LITTLE octa-core processor (four 1.9 GHz Cortex-A15 cores and four 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7 cores) with a Mali-T628 MP6 GPU. The baseline setup standardizes 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM (pushed to 3 GB on the South Korean LTE-A edition) with 16 GB or 32 GB of eMMC 5.0 internal storage, expandable up to 128 GB via microSD. Power is supplied by a user-removable 2800 mAh Lithium-Ion battery that supports optional Qi wireless charging via replacement backplates and features a drastic "Ultra Power Saving Mode" that turns the user interface grayscale and restricts background processes to dramatically extend standby time. Wired connectivity is uniquely anchored by a wide, dual-channel Micro-USB 3.0 port supporting MHL 2.1 for rapid file transfers and charging, while maintaining backward-compatibility with standard Micro-USB cables. Imaging is led by a 16 MP rear camera utilizing Samsung's inaugural in-house ISOCELL sensor technology, which isolated individual pixels with physical barriers to reduce electrical cross-talk and improve color fidelity under a 1/2.6" sensor size and f/2.2 aperture. The rear module introduces Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) for lock-on speeds as fast as 0.3 seconds, real-time HDR previewing, Selective Focus for software-simulated bokeh, and 4K UHD video recording at 30fps, paired with a 2.0 MP wide-angle front camera. Due to the phone's water-resistant seals, the previous generation's ambient temperature and humidity sensors were omitted; however, the S5 debuts a rear-mounted, optical heart rate sensor nestled directly beneath the camera lens alongside the LED flash to feed biometric data directly into the S Health ecosystem. Connectivity is filled out with an IR blaster on the top edge, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, NFC, GPS with GLONASS, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with 2x2 MIMO, which powered a specialized "Download Booster" that bound LTE and Wi-Fi connections together to accelerate large file downloads.