Blogging the S5, Part 2: Its best feature

The handset market is crowded with new phones coming out almost every week. Flagship phones, though are rarer, with major models from Samsung, HTC and Apple coming closer to annually. At the rarefied end where these three compete over every millimeter, pixel and novelty, the new Samsung Galaxy S5’s HD screen stands out.

Not to gush, but the just-launched S5 feels like a palm-filling HDTV. Holding it up in a store at arm’s length against a wall filled with 50-inch televisions, it fits right in with colors as saturated, bright and clear as the TVs with the same level of contrast and true blacks.

The S5’s display will feel large in anyone’s hands. It measures 5.1-inch (diagonally, of course) with 1920×1080 pixels and 432 pixels per inch. It’s stunning and Samsung knows it is. They have models in most stores set to a self-demo that even newbies can tap through. It includes some Blu-Ray quality movie footage that will impress even fans of the famous “Retina Display,” which, of course, comes only on smaller screens with a substantially lower pixel per inch count on handsets made by another company.

The cost, of course, will be borne in battery life, so Samsung beefed up its power supply with a 2,800 mAH removable. The company claims double-digit run times when web-surfing and movie watching (officially, Samsung says 10 hours of web browsing or up to 12 hours of HD movie watching, but other testers are finding 8 hours to be a more realistic real-life estimate).

So if you’re not looking to upgrade, you might not want to play with the S5 demo models at Radio Shack, Target or Best Buy. That’s because holding your current phone’s beside their demo unit will almost certainly create a brief and unnecessary bit of screen-envy.