Samsung had its big Unpacked event in Barcelona this week, right before Mobile World Congress kicked off, and the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are officially real now instead of just leaked renders. Everybody and their cousin has already written the "here's the new Samsung phone" post, so I'm not going to do that here. What I want to talk about is the thing that's been bugging me since Sunday, which is that Samsung finally, completely, gave up on two features I've relied on for years: the removable battery and the microSD slot.
I know, I know. Cry me a river, right? Half the internet has spent the last few days telling people like me that we're dinosaurs who should just buy an external battery pack like everyone else in 2015. But hear me out for a second.
I've been carrying a Galaxy Note 3 since it came out, and for most of that time I've also carried two spare batteries in the little zip pocket of my bag. Theyre maybe $12 each off Amazon, they weigh basically nothing, and when my phone dies at 4pm during a full day of shooting photos and using GPS, I pop the back off, swap the battery, and I'm back to 100% in about eight seconds. No cable. No outlet. No waiting around next to a wall socket at a coffee shop looking pathetic. Just a battery in my pocket and a phone that opens up.
The S6 does away with that entirely. Glass front, glass back, aluminum frame running around the edge, it genuinely looks fantastic in photos, better built than anything Samsung has put out before, and I'll say that much without any sarcasm. But it's sealed. No back cover comes off. No battery you can pull out and replace. And the microSD slot is gone too, so whatever storage tier you buy is what you're stuck with for the life of the phone.
Samsung's pitch is that they added fast charging and built-in wireless charging to make up for it, and sure, that's something. Fast charging that gets you a big chunk of battery in under half an hour is genuinely useful. But it's not the same as swapping a battery in the field, and wireless charging still means you have to be near a charging pad, which most of us are not when we actually need the extra juice.
What gets me is that this was basically the last mainstream Android flagship holding out on this stuff. HTC gave up the removable battery ages ago. LG kept it around on the G series but nobody really used it as a selling point. Samsung was the holdout, the one company still making the case that plastic backs and pop off batteries were a feature and not a compromise. And now that argument is just gone. If you want a swappable battery on a proper flagship phone in 2015, I honestly dont know what you buy instead.
I get why they did it. The metal and glass thing sells better in a store, it photographs better, it feels more premium in your hand, and Apple's been making this argument successfully for years with the iPhone. Samsung's S5 got dinged constantly for feeling cheap and plasticky next to the iPhone 6, and clearly that criticism landed with somebody in Seoul. Fine. But I'd have taken a slightly thicker, slightly less pretty phone that let me carry a spare battery over this any day of the week.
From what I caught of the presentation, Samsung's saying the S6 and S6 Edge ship in a little over five weeks, sometime around April 10th, in whatever storage size you pick at purchase since there's no card slot to bail you out later. I'll probably still end up looking at one in person once they're in stores, because the screen and camera specs they showed off are legitimately impressive and I'm not made of stone. But my Note 3 and its two spare batteries aren't going anywhere just yet. Some of us like being boring and reliable over being thin.