Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge hands-on: First look at new metal handsets

"OMG it's finally here" is something you might say if you were 15 years old and had been waiting for Samsung to launch its new smartphone, the S6. Of course any switched-on teenager will have seen leak after leak about the S6 and its sister handset, the S6 Edge.

So, how do these two phones look and feel? Well, the Edge is utterly beautiful. As soon as Samsung showed it to us we were just blown away. Ignoring the fact that the edge has some special uses of its own, just the curve of the phone makes it incredibly special to use. It feels great in your hand, and it looks amazing - there's just no other phone like this on the market.

For one thing, the handsets are designed to be ultra-durable. When you're moving from plastic to glass and metal, that's pretty important. Samsung's process for making the glass on the Edge involves 800 degrees Celsius and 27 other secret steps to make sure the phone can survive day-to-day life.

The screens are beautiful too, with quad-HD resolutions of 1440x2560 on the S6 and 1440x2660 on the Edge. Samsung says these are the highest resolution displays on the market, and they certainly looked amazing when we played about with them.

The really good news for technology fans is that the S6 is as exciting as we had all been hoping. It's powerful, featuring an octa-core processor running four cores at 2.1GHz and four at 1.5GHz. There's new RAM too, which Samsung says is 88% faster than in the S5. Like last year's high-end phones, there's 3GB.

In terms of storage capacity you can have one of three capacities, either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB. Samsung has opted to remove the microSD card slot too, so you need to follow the same thinking as with an iPhone, and make sure that you pick a model with enough memory to see you through. That will annoy the die-hard Samsung users who picked the phone for the flexibility of a removable battery and extra storage options. It's not a bad decision overall though, as it allows the design of the phone to be much improved and to make the S6 and S6 Edge look spectacular.

Some people have raised questions about battery life too, with both the S6 Edge and S6 having reduced capacity power sources. The Edge has a 2600mAh battery while the S6 has 2550, which is down from 2800 in the S5. However, before anyone gets in a panic, the 14nm chipset Samsung uses could offer power savings of 35% from the previous generation.

For charging, there's also wireless built in. What's unique here is that Samsung has managed to make a phone which has both wireless standards built-in. That means you can use your phone in Starbucks or McDonalds, on their charging tables, without the need for any sort of adaptor.

The camera also gets an upgrade, but it's not more megapixels, it's a better lens that lets in 35% more light. That means that indoor shots and images in low light will be much less likely to suffer camera shake, and be blurred. The lens is now f/1.9 on both the front and back cameras, and features optical image stabilisation, which further reduces the potential for image shake.

Both phones have also had a huge simplification to the operating system. There is much less clutter, the default number of home screens is now just two, and Samsung says that it is reducing the time it takes to do stuff with the phone by 40%. That means Samsung should have one of the clearer operating systems on Android phones, perhaps even giving plain vanilla Android a run for its money.

On the S6 Edge, it's possible to customise key contacts with a colour. The idea here is that when you put your phone face-down on the table, the Edge will pulse their colour onto the surface, letting you know who is calling. If you don't want to speak to them, throw your finger over the heart rate monitor and the phone will go quiet.

Ultimately, the S6 feels like a great upgrade to the S5. It's also going to cost less and be the mass-market phone for this generation. The glass and metal make it feel far more special, and even better than Samsung superb A Series handsets too.

But it's the Edge that captivates our hearts. It may not offer a huge number of extra features, but it looks beautiful and you want to hold it, caress it and love it. When it's taken away from you at the end of a press briefing, you start to feel very sad indeed...