[Galaxy S6 Edge+ Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] apurva.giri:
Well, I'm not the one to judge what you should or shouldn't buy, however, I wouldn't say its a downgrade in anyway. For further clarification, let me take a few examples of the things people have been complaining about:-

Lower Battery Life

-You might say it has a 200-300 mAh lesser than any competitive device or even older Note devices. However, there is a good reason for that too. The new AMOLED is highly optimized for less power consumption compared to older Note devices. GS6 Edge and Edge+/N5 packs the same Quad HD resolution, hence the screen consumption will be same even though the screen size is bigger since the PPI is reduced in Edge+/N5 (which is again irrelevant to naked eye).

-The 14nm processor is way more power efficient than the older processors used in Note series.

- The non inclusion of SD Card also positively affects the battery life, check google for more info (we will come to the negative side later)

- The LPDDR4 RAM in newer smartphones have double the efficiency (data rate) with considerably less power consumption.

Even though I do not disagree that inclusion of bigger battery with some compromise over thickness would have been better, however, the battery (even though sounds less on paper) is equivalent (if not more) to what we used to get in old note series.

Missing SD Card

This seems to be one of the biggest worries for most of the folks, and they do have a valid reason for that. However, if we talk about why the SD Card hasn't been included, I can tell you its definitely not because SD Card is not supported with UFS2.0. The real reason is due to UFS2.0 being too fast (atleast 3 times of eMMC 5.1 ). When coupled with an SD Card, just imagine the user experience when half the app is running from UFS2.0 while its cache/data is stored in SD Card, that might actually lead to lags. This is the same reason for Apple not supporting SD Cards too (they don't use UFS2.0 though). Although its not the perfect replacement, however, you can pick some cheap sandisk otg flash drives for like 10-15 bux or may be wifi flash drives for like 30-40 bux. At least that's what I use.

Removable Battery

I think they did it to make create that unibody design and give it the premium look. I know it might not be what we were looking for in Note series, however, I do remember the days of the past (like 2 years back) when Samsung was criticized for their cheap plastic models compared to metallic HTCs. Well, guess what, they heard us. Even I miss this one. I'm looking forward to pick one MobilePal QI enabled power bank which retails at around 38 bux. I know we can't carry another bulky device with us all the time, but samsung didn't leave us with much choice in this area.

Missing IR Blaster

I still couldn't figure out what made them get rid of this. I was so much looking forward to this one and this is probably the only thing I would miss on my upcoming flagship. Can't do much here either...

Overall, I do not think Samsung has released a downgrade to its predecessors. The inclusion of amazing hardware [14nm fastest processor, UFS2.0, DDR4 RAM, Fast Wireless Charging, LTE Cat9, Optimized S-PEN, etc] bundled with its fair and unique software does put it above any other flagships in the market ( if we do not consider the price range ). Again, this is not for the sake of any argument, its just as per my analysis. Please feel free to correct me if I've mentioned anything wrong.