I tried to make a call to a website client of mine recently, and my phone — a Samsung Galaxy Core I8262 — spent what felt like half an hour thinking about what it was supposedly doing before locking up and rebooting. I am usually fairly patient with my technology but when a phone can’t do the one thing it’s actually designed for without spinning its wheels and throwing a fit, it’s time for it to go.

Strangely not put off Samsung in general, a cursory glance at their latest tech offerings had me ogling the Samsung Edge and the even newer Samsung Edge+. I ruled out the Edge+ straight away. It’s massive size would be far too big to handle in my dainty lady hands (this is bollocks: basically I couldn’t financially justify it) but the Edge had me intrigued. Boasting an octa-core 1.5GHz CPU and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM, the phone tops a variety of benchmarks. There’s no way that was going to freeze trying to make a phone call.

I found the phone cheapest on Simply Electronics who I’ve ordered through before and had no problems, but their delivery times are always super looong so if speed is your bag you want to go elsewhere.

When I finally got my shiny new phone — and shiny it is, with its aluminium and gorilla glass casing — I couldn’t believe how light it was compared to the old Galaxy Core I8262. I weighed it up in my hands against Gaz’s iPhone 6 and in my unscientific opinion it was lighter than that too.

I was a little worried about the lack of a microSD memory slot in the Edge but checking my old phone I realised that I’d used only 8GB of the space available on the 32GB card I’d put in that, so with 64GB space on the new one I think I’ll be set for a good while yet (I’m barely using that much space on my laptop!)

As a self-confessed selfie queen I was impressed to discover that the Edge has a 16 megapixel rear camera with some kind of image stabilisation magic and a super fast f/1.9 lens. I can’t blame my dodgy selfies on a bad camera any more: if I’m looking rough, it’s all on me.

Phone hardware aside, some of my favourite features are because of the improved OS. From basic UI improvements like adding 0-9 on the standard keyboard screen to stop me from having to flick back and forth if I’m e.g. entering in a password, to more iPhone-esque sorting under Apps allowing me to sort my apps into folders (and indeed it comes with some — like “Social” — pre-sorted). Can’t help but gratefully cheer for the A-Z sorting too: that appeals to the organisation nerd in me. I think Samsungs still come massively bloated — the first thing I did when I switched on the phone was disable a bunch of bundled apps — but apparently this has improved over other modern Samsungs.

I’ve not bowled over by the fancy wraparound edge-y screen, which seems more of a fad than something particularly useful, but I’ve only been playing with the phone for a few days so I could be converted yet.

All in, it’s a lovely phone experience, but given what I’m used to I’m sure virtually anything could have been an improvement.