Reinventing the Galaxy

Not just a spec bump, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are better than ever. The Galaxy S7 Edge gets an additional Editor’s Choice because of the exceptional Edge Panel, with all the improvements of the S7 and more.

Portrait of Tammy Strobel
Not just a spec bump, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are better than ever. The Galaxy S7 Edge gets an additional Editor’s Choice because of the exceptional Edge Panel, with all the improvements of the S7 and more.
My Reading Room

Despite how similar the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge may appear next to their predecessors, the Korean electronics giant actually brought something new to the table again. While it may look similar to Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge at first glance, Samsung actually made a host of changes making the S7 pair tangibly better.

Both the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are constructed in 3D glass that covers the front and back, together with metallic sides with chamfered edges. Effectively, this is not visually different from the S6 and S6 Edge when viewing from the front. However, looking from the rear shows that both the S7 and S7 Edge manage to hide their metallic sides. The new phones also feel entirely different in the hand. The 3D glass (Corning Gorilla Glass 4, no less) is melded to meet the curved metal alloy, creating a seamless, uniform look and feel as you run the fingers from the front, to the metallic rim, then to the back.

The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge also benefits from other physical improvements unrelated to appearance. They now come with IP68 rating, making them waterproof again, and better than the Galaxy S5’s IP67 rating. The new flagships have a flap-less design, thanks to the phones being sealed internally, with a waterproof Micro USB 2.0 port. Our favorite change is none other than their significantly reduced camera bump on the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, which now sits just 0.46mm above the rear surface of the phone.

The display on the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a 5.1-inch Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440 pixels resolution) Super AMOLED screen at 577 pixels per inch. The Galaxy S7 Edge sits at 5.5-inch with the Edge Screen that curves down the sides. The Always-On Display (AOD) that shows the SAMSUNGtime/date, even when your phone is idle and locked. If you’re conflicted over trading precious battery for something that takes less than a second to summon, AOD can be toggled off. That said, in less than three hours, we grew accustomed to having our time/date displayed at our convenience – only to be left wondering where the time/date went after switching back to our real-life smartphones.

Samsung’s familiar TouchWiz interface is the front-end of the Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) OS phone. They retain the child-like design language of the interface, but uses new rounded edges for icons and generous use of gradient-like effects in their bright color palette of choice. This is a welcome change from their old square-ish app icons.

Samsung brought back expandable storage to the S7 and S7 Edge – with microSD support up to 200GB. If you don’t need the bonus storage space though, the hybrid card tray supports two nano-SIM cards instead.

Game Launcher is a new gamer-friendly box on your Home screen that keeps all your game apps in one manageable place. The power-saving options lets you save precious battery juice when gaming (ideal for smartphone games that are still playable without mesmerizing graphics), and it choose whether you want to have alerts coming in while you play. This makes all the difference between experiencing no interruptions in the middle of a tournament, or if you’re just killing time while waiting for somebody to contact you.

What makes gaming even better is the set of Game Tools built into the phone. Game Tools hides itself well, becoming a tiny translucent button that can be re-positioned when you’re in any game app, and tapping it will give you a decent panel of control over your gaming sessions.

The Galaxy S7 Edge has an improved Edge UX with more shortcuts and panels, buffing its functionality to make it less of a party trick. You get to customize the order of the Edge panels on top of tweaking the contents within each panel itself. For example, you can get a shortcut on the new Tasks Edge that lets you e-mail a designated person, eliminating the number of steps taken.

The width of the Edge panel is now at 550 pixels, nearly double in size of the S6 Edge+’s aspect ratio of 260 pixels. This increase in panel space is reflected in Apps Edge, where you get to store two rows of apps instead of just one. Finally, Samsung released its Edge Panel SDK for third parties to make new panels for S7 Edge users, granting the potential of getting more functionality out of the once-gimmicky feature.

Singapore variants of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge get a 64-bit octa-core Exynos 8890 processor. Within the Exynos 8890 is a CPU combination of four Cortex-M1 cores (clocked at 2.3GHz) and four Cortex-A53 cores (clocked at 1.6GHz), together with a Mali T880 MP12 GPU (currently the highest performing GPU within the Mali family). Per Samsung’s claim, the upgraded processors in these phones gives them 30 percent faster CPU speed, along with 60 percent faster GPU speed when compared to the Note 5 and S6 Edge+.

The S7 and S7 Edge’s rear camera may have a smaller megapixel resolution, but just as powerful thanks to its bigger photosites and Dual Pixel technology.
The S7 and S7 Edge’s rear camera may have a smaller megapixel resolution, but just as powerful thanks to its bigger photosites and Dual Pixel technology.
New Edge UX on the Galaxy S7 Edge lets you put two rows of apps, instead of one.
New Edge UX on the Galaxy S7 Edge lets you put two rows of apps, instead of one.
The Galaxy S7 understands its lighting conditions very well. Despite the glaring sunlight which contrasts against the dark interior of the restaurant, the Galaxy S7 manages to bring out detail and vibrancy in the darker areas.
The Galaxy S7 understands its lighting conditions very well. Despite the glaring sunlight which contrasts against the dark interior of the restaurant, the Galaxy S7 manages to bring out detail and vibrancy in the darker areas.

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge now use a 12-megapixel rear camera with a brighter F1.7 aperture on the lens with Smart OIS (image stabilization), moving away from their predecessor’s 16-megapixel, F1.9 aperture rear camera. The camera’s image sensor however, has larger photosites at 1.4μm each, while the older S6 had photosites that were 1.12μm in size, allowing the S7 and S7 Edge to capture 56% more light.

The S7 pair are one of the first smartphones to have Dual Pixel sensor for their rear cameras. Traditional smartphone cameras use 0.78 percent of a pixel for phase detection autofocus, but the S7 and S7 Edge uses 100 percent of the pixel to do so. This grants the new phones significantly faster autofocus speeds. Each pixel on the Dual Pixel sensor also comes with two photodiodes that capture light independently, enhancing detection in the dark. During our test shoot, we find that the S7 had an autofocus that’s so fast that we weren’t even sure if it was activated yet.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 sports an embedded 3,000mAh battery, while the Galaxy S7 Edge has its battery capacity at 3,600mAh. They outperformed most of the other phones in our battery benchmark as the 5.1-inch Galaxy S7 clocked in a good 40 minutes more than the Huawei Nexus 6P, which had a larger 3,450mAh battery paired with its 5.7-inch Quad HD display.

Given the amount of effort that went into making the Samsung Galaxy line-up exciting once more, we’d still say Samsung has it in them to stay relevant to the demands of novelty, balanced against practicality. Now, it’s a matter of seeing how the other flagships of 2016 will perform. Until then, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones are certainly one of the best Samsung phones you can lay hands on – especially if you’re upgrading from a version that came before the S6 or S6 Edge.

The bright signboard against the dark road was a good test of the Galaxy S7’s ability to handle contrast at night. While the phone’s camera was able to emphasize shadows and reproduce colors well, it loses some detail above the signboard.
The bright signboard against the dark road was a good test of the Galaxy S7’s ability to handle contrast at night. While the phone’s camera was able to emphasize shadows and reproduce colors well, it loses some detail above the signboard.