Sunday, February 28, 2016

Samsung Galaxy S7 review

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is cheaper than the Galaxy S7 Edge, available to pre-order from Samsung now at £569 and £639 respectively. Those who pre-order before 5 March will get their handset on 8 March ahead of the 11 March official on sale date, and will get a free Samsung Gear VR headset. You can also pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge from UK mobile operators Vodafone, EE, Three, O2 and The Carphone Warehouse.

The Carphone Warehouse is already reporting record sales for preorders of the Samsung Galaxy S7 over the Samsung Galaxy S6. It says that within the first 48 hours of launch it saw a 200 percent increase in preorders over preorders of the S6 in the same period following its own 2015 launch. Also see: Best Samsung Galaxy S7 deals. But before you rush out and buy the Samsung Galaxy S7, note that Samsung phones are notorious for rapidly dropping in price in the few months following their launch.

Design:

Over the years, the Galaxy S-series has changed a fair amount with each new generation on the design front - enough that you can tell between them reasonably easy. Not so with the Galaxy S7, which looks very much like the Galaxy S6. Also see: Best smartphones 2016. That may sound negative, but the S6 was one of the most desirable phones of 2015, with its gorgeous sleek looks combining metal and glass rather nicely.

Although it looks the same at a glance, Samsung has made some tweaks to the design of the Galaxy S7, some of which will be very important to its users. Samsung dropped the waterproofing of the Galaxy S5 on the Galaxy S6 model, but it's back for the S7 with an IP68 rating. It didn't work so well on the S5 due to the removable rear cover and clumsy flap over the USB port, but those worries are gone. The rating means it's been tested to 1.5m of water for 30 minutes.

  Samsung Galaxy S7 review

That's really the main design change, but Samsung has also made the camera bump smaller. It's more of a hardware change than a design one, but we're pleased to inform you that Samsung has reinstated the MicroSD card slot, so expandable storage (up to 200GB) is once again a feature. It's something that was high up on the request list from Samsung fans, and it makes it a stronger rival to the MicroSD-less iPhone.

What Samsung hasn't changed is the way the back of the phone easily gets marked and grubby, which is a shame. The glass back also means that the Galaxy S7 remains a slippery customer, and will likely slide off a sofa arm without a case. The back is now curved like the Galaxy Note 5, but the phone is a bit thicker than before at 7.7mm (compared to 6.8mm). It seems the firm might have made the phone thicker to reduce the camera bump and make more room for a larger battery.

At launch the Galaxy S7 is available in just Black Onyx and Platinum Gold colours, while the S7 Edge is also available in a smart Silver Titanium option - however, we saw a regular S7 in that silver colour as you can see in our photos. Following the launch of the S7 we've since learned that Samsung has implemented a water cooling system a bit like a PC's. There's a heat-conducting copper tube "containing a liquid that vaporizes at high temperatures and then condenses at low temperatures," said Senior Vice President of product strategy, Justin Denison.

Specification:

  • Android 6.0 Marshmallow
  • 5.1in Quad HD IPS (1440x2560)
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor
  • 4GB RAM
  • 32GB storage
  • Micro-SD card slot (up to 200GB)
  • 12Mp rear camera with f/1.7
  • 5Mp front camera
  • 11ac dual-band Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO
  • Bluetooth 4.2
  • GPS
  • NFC
  • Heart rate monitor
  • Fingerprint scanner
  • 4G LTE
  • Micro-USB
  • 3000mAh non-removable battery
  • IP68
  • 142x70x7.9mm
  • 152g
Despite Sony launching the Xperia Z5 Premium as the world's first 4K smartphone, Samsung has resisted following suit with the Galaxy S7. The new phone has a 5.1in SuperAMOLED screen with a Quad HD resolution (1440x2560) and we're more than fine with that. A 576ppi pixel density is seriously crispy, colours are popping and viewing angles are great - exactly what we'd expect from a flagship from Samsung. 

One of our favorite new features in the Galaxy S7 is how it handles auto-brightness, and both the S7 and S7 Edge include a new feature called Personalized Automatic Brightness Control. This remembers your preferences at various levels of ambient light, then ties those settings to the current reading from its ambient light sensor. As is typical since the S6, if you want something more unusual, the Galaxy S7 edge provides a dual-edge display which not only looks a lot fancier but also provides some additional functionality.

It's also larger at 5.5in so there may not be an S7 edge+.Going toe-to-toe with the LG G5, the S7 also has an always on-screen so you'll get the time, date and notifications all the time. Samsung is using tech which started life on the Gear smartwatches and though it sounds like a battery drain, the proximity sensor will shut the display off when the phone is in your pocket and it will also switch off at night.

Taking a trip to the engine room, there's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor in charge with 4GB of RAM to back it up. That matches up with the LG G5, one of the S7's key rivals for 2016. There's also an Exynos 8890 version of the Galaxy S7 for some markets. Also see: What's the fastest smartphone 2016? The regular storage option remains at 32GB which is the same as the Galaxy S6. Luckily you don't need to worry too much about which one you choose because of the welcome return of the Micro-SD card slot which can take up to 200GB memory cards.

It seems likely that most consumers will simply opt for the cheapest and smallest model. Also see: How to add storage to Android and How to move to SD card. The Galaxy S7 matches up with the LG G5 on the connectivity front with 11ac dual-band Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC, an infrared port and Cat 9 LTE. As we've come to expect it has a fingerprint scanner inside the home button and the heart-rate monitor remains but the IR blaster for controlling The big news is that Samsung has decided not to use the new reversible USB Type-C port on the S7, instead sticking with Micro-USB.

The battery is still non-removable which will anger some but the phone does feature wireless charging, though. As per rumors prior to the launch, Samsung has dropped the camera resolution from 16- down to 12Mp for the Galaxy S7. It might seem like a downgrade but with an f/1.7 aperture Samsung says the camera allows more light. This plus a larger pixel size supposedly means 95 percent more light (compared to what we don't know). The Galaxy S7 we spent time with at MWC had the Exynos 8890 processor.

It's an eight-core chip built on the 14nm manufacturing process. Four of those chips run at up to 2.3GHz, and four are clocked at a more battery-saving 1.5GHz. We didn't have the opportunity to run benchmarks, but PhoneArena did (you can see their results here). In the AnTuTu speed benchmark the Galaxy S7 was second only the also new LG G5 with a whopping score of 116,668 points. That is a seriously good result, as you would expect from a brand-new flagship from Samsung.

Software:

Almost every Android smartphone launching in 2016 will come with version 6.0 Marshmallow which is the latest edition – launched on the Nexus 5X and 6P. The Galaxy S7 comes preloaded with Google's mobile OS. As usual, the firm adds its TouchWiz user interface which may or may not be good thing, depending on your opinion of it. The Galaxy S7, as you can see, comes with Microsoft apps pre-installed.

We get along with TouchWiz better these days since Samsung trimmed it down in terms of bloatware and simplified the styling throughout. It no longer feels necessary to install an alternative launcher or make other changes. New features are, in part, for the edge version only with added functionality. The always on-screen is a software feature which we mentioned earlier and the S7 also offers better gaming with support for the Vulkan API - users can reduce frame rate to save battery and record gaming. Knox v2.6 for enterprises has also been improved.

Conclusion:

It's difficult for any company to follow-up on a huge success with something even better, and Samsung has tried to achieve this by bringing back features from the S5 that it knows will go down well with fans. It's played it safe somewhat, and that's especially obvious when you compare it to the LG G5. We've no doubt this is a fantastic smartphone, but Galaxy S6 owners will unlikely be in a rush to upgrade.

No comments:

Post a Comment