Announced this weekend were the new flagship smartphones from Samsung: The Galaxy S6 and its odder-looking sibling, the S6 Edge.

In what is generally considered the second most anticipated smartphone announcement of each year (after the Apple iPhone), Samsung's Galaxy S range was, for a long time, considered the king of the smartphone world, alongside the iPhone. It saw Samsung's mobile division grow from just one of a vast array of Android-wielding smartphone manufacturers to the top of the top. It has ridden on the success of this flagship line for many years. However, over the last couple of years, many have grown tiresome of this line, owing mostly to its lack of innovation and riding on its previous success. Samsung has changed very little in the series over the last three generations and the growing success of smaller, lesser-known rivals from across Asia have left Samsung in desperate need of re-acquiring that little spark that made the Galaxy S line so popular.

Enter the S6 and S6 Edge. Historically, Samsung has announced the latest addition to the flagship line around this time of year and then in the months that follow announce variations of it, from mini versions, to waterproof versions, to versions that focus more on the camera and so on. This time around, Samsung has thrown two new handsets on the table from the word go, the same in almost everything every aspect except one: the screen. We'll get to that later.

So with big competition this time round, not just from the likes of Apple, Sony, Motorola, LG, HTC and other key players, but also from relatively unknown quantities such as OnePlus, Xiaomi, Huawei and many others currently firing out top-end hardware at much lower costs as their more popular rivals, as well as continued decline in profits and market share for the first time in many years, Samsung really had to take things back to the drawing board and come up with something fresh not just in terms of performance, but also in the looks department; Samsung has changed very little about the look of the Galaxy S line in many years - still dwelling within a cheap-feeling plastic casing despite the £500+ price tag. So without any further ado, let's get to what Samsung have been up to over the past year of development and design.

The looks, thankfully for both Samsung and its customers, have finally had a full revamp. Gone is the horrible flimsy plastic and cheap-feeling metallic-painted plastic edges. Samsung has finally discovered solid metal and glass as build materials. In place of the plastic-made metal-wannabe edges, a solid metal chassis has now found its place. This brings a huge step up in the look and feel of the device and makes you feel like you've just spent £500 rather than £50. This is something Samsung tried out with a couple of other phones over the last 6 months; the Galaxy Alpha and the Note 4 - albeit they kept the plastic backs on these phones resulting in a half-baked effort. In place of said plastic backs on the S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung has gone with toughened 'Corning Gorilla Glass 4'. This adds substantial weight over its predecessors, but that's what happens when you make something out of premium materials. For Samsung-enthusiasts, holding an S5 and S6 in either hand is truly night and day. One looks and feels cheap, the other premium and expensive.

From a design perspective, Samsung deserves a pat on the back. The brand has finally managed to master the premium look after so many attempts. But it's not all about design. As well as looking the part, a top-end smartphone has to run accordingly so Samsung has been busy at work making some bigchanges 'under the hood'.

Now I'm going to get a bit technical here, but I'll try not to take it too far.

In place of the S5's quad-core processor, Samsung has decided two is better than one and thrown another one in, making it an octa-core processor (this means powerful - really powerful).

In place of the S5's 2GB of RAM, the S6 has 3GB (this means fast - really fast).

Samsung have moved away from Snapdragon and favoured Exynos for the chipset of this latest model (this means fast andpowerful but also spells possible trouble for Qualcomm, the company behind Snapdragon chipsets, but that's a story for another day).

The camera is the same in terms of megapixels (16), but as I've said before, megapixels only take you so far. Samsung have finally added 'optical image stabilization' - compensating for those times shaky-hands blur pictures as well as an additional 5 megapixel front-facing camera for those who love taking 'selfies'. Samsung have promised to "tone-down" their Touchwiz interface - this is the mask that covers the Google-made Android operating system on Samsung smartphones. Many complain it is ugly, overbearing and makes the phones slow and clunky. The fingerprint scanner, which garnered nothing but criticism on last year's S5 has been redesigned to work faster and more reliably. The screen has been moved up to 'Super HD', taking it from the  1080p resolution the majority of top-end smartphones currently sport to a 1440p one - making the display truly one of the sexiest-looking ones I've seen either on smartphone of TV.

There are a multitude of other changes within the new models, but I don't want to bore those the numbers will mean nothing to (that includes me for the most part).

That leads me to my final point. At the beginning of this piece, I mentioned there were two new models announced; the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge. These two models are almost identical in every way. The hardware inside is identical, as is the performance, speed and features. However, where the screen of the S6 ends just before it reaches the bezel on either side of the device, the S6 Edge continues a little, curving over the edge of the screen (truly mind-blowing work has gone into the naming of this model). This is something Samsung tested out on last year's Galaxy Note 4 Edge - albeit on that model it only curved over the right hand side of the phone, making it look rather lop-sided and useless for left-handed folk. The S6 Edge's screen curves over both sides and brings a whole new dimension to the traditional smartphone. It brings added functionality and shortcuts through a variety of gestures and swipes up, down and across the edge sections as well as bringing an almost immersive experience for gaming and video-watching. Whether this 'over-the-edge' screen will take off for Samsung is something we'll see over the coming months and year but it definitely adds a quirky, rather cool feature, whether it serves any truly useful purpose or not.

Both models will be available from April 10th - though I imagine at least to begin with that the standard S6 will be more readily-available.

Now we'll wait and see if all this revamping will be enough to bring Samsung's mobile division back into profit and back to the top of the game.