ISSUE 67 • ANDROID ADVISOR 133BUYING GUIDEThis is why all of the stock wallpapers Samsung
created for the S10+ have a clever bit of black
in the corner to cover up the hole. It’s the same
trickery Apple uses to cover up the notch on
the iPhone XS, and it speaks to the inherent
compromises of so-called all-screen phones.
I prefer a notch to the uncentred hole because
I dislike the indented status bar, but neither of the
solutions are very elegant. (Although some of the
wallpapers available are pretty darn creative.) Maybe
the future is in slide-out cameras or the complete
elimination of the selfie cam like Chinese companies
Xiaomi and Vivo are proposing. But for now, holes
and notches are just a fact of life. And the S10+ will
remind you of that every time you pick it up.
Hole complaints aside, the display on the Galaxy
S10+ is stunning. Samsung has always excelled at
displays, but out of the box the colours have always
been a bit too oversaturated for my taste. Well,
that’s not the case with the Dynamic AMOLED here.
Samsung’s colour gamut is clear, crisp, and remarkably
bright without requiring any adjustments, and colours
are realistic without looking too dull or muted.
The display also hides one of the S10+’s tricks:
an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, which uses sound
waves rather than light to read the whirls and loops
on your skin. Samsung’s fingerprint sensor has been
a bone of contention ever since it moved to the rear
of the phone precariously close to the cameras, and
it’s no less of an issue here. In the age of Face ID and
time-of-flight cameras, fingerprint scanning tech
feels antiquated, and the hit-or-miss nature of the