Gadgetory

so the Galaxy s6 Samsung finally figured out design this is a big deal it's the first Samsung phone with beautiful curves and premium materials instead of those cheap and plasticky designs that the company used to crank out so here we are a year later and Samsung hasn't changed too much the new Galaxy s7 and s7 edge are radically different from last year's models and they look almost identical their refinements and progressions their iterations on what was already a good product that's really a good thing because the s6 was a good foam and Samsung has done enough here to make the galaxy s7 a great phone the standard galaxy s7 has undergone the fewest changes it's got the same sized screen same overall design largely looks indistinguishable from the galaxy s6 it's still glass and metal and there isn't a shred of plastic to be found it's a little bit softer and a little bit easier to hold and it's also slightly thicker with a more rounded back which makes it more comfortable in your hand but other than that it's pretty much the same phone but the s7 edge has undergone a number of changes that really make it head and shoulders better than its predecessor and smaller sibling well for starters it's got a larger 5.5 inch display still Super AMOLED still quad HD resolution still stunning to look at it also still has those curved sides on the front but now the back is a slight curve too which makes it way more comfortable to hold and easier to pick off of a flat surface now I don't want to get too crazy here but it really feels like the s7 edge might be the nicest phone I've ever held I have a lot of phones now let's talk about those curves Samsung's been putting curved screens on phones for a couple of years and well it's always felt like a bit of a gimmick but the s7 edge actually proves that there's a reason for those curves it allows for a larger display without making the phone huge in fact it's notably narrower than other phones with similar sized screens look at it next to an iPhone 6s plus or a Nexus 6p or the LG g4 or even Samsung's own note 5 in each case the s7 edge is a similar or same sized display but it's noticeably narrower and smaller in size that makes it easier to hold easier to use in one hand and easier to slip in your pocket without giving up that big screen finally those curves have a reason to exist both phones are also water-resistant this year and they can go under a meter and a half of water for up to 30 minutes at a time but the practical use here is that you don't have to worry about dropping it in the same course and coffee on it or getting caught out in the rain and the other big hardware difference is support from SD cards so if the 32 gigabytes of storage I comes with the phone isn't enough well you can easily expand it aside from that the hardware on the s7 is really familiar again these are refinements not overhauls and again that's a good thing because last year's phones were really nice and these ones are just better inside Samsung's made bigger improvements the phones are thicker this year because they have much bigger batteries 3000 milliamp hour on the s7 and a whopping thirty six hundred million power on the s7 edge which addresses the biggest complaint with last year's phone both phones have been able to get us through a day but they probably won't get you to to really if you're concerned with battery life the s7 edge is the one to go with you just can't argue with the size of that battery both also have fast charging and fast wireless charging so it's easy to top-up when you need to now the s6 wasn't slow by any means but it did get bogged down when you push it to the limit the s7 on the other hand doesn't have any performance issues that we can see it's got a new processor and four gigabytes of RAM that make everything from browsing the web to taking pictures to playing games a piece of cake and it doesn't get nearly as warm as last year's phone did either ok let's talk about the camera because the camera is a big deal and Samsung's making a big deal about the camera it's all new it's got lower resolution and a brighter lens and an all new sensor it's also really fast to launch and focus and that unsightly bump that's on the back the phone isn't nearly as bad this time around it digs great picks in all kinds of lighting situations but truth be told it's not hugely different from the s6 this camera it still produces yellowish images in low light and if you zoom in all the way there's a good amount of over sharpening happening so those are pretty minor complaints I had no problems trusting the s7 to take pics when I needed it to it was often very happy with the results so I mostly been raving about the s7 and the s7 edge so far and that's really because there's not a whole lot to complain about but if there is one thing you complain about its unsurprisingly with Samsung's software they both run Android 6.0 marshmallow and they have Samsung's TouchWiz interface which is still ugly but it's probably the best it's ever looked you can still theme it pretty easily if you want something closer to stock Android to the Verizon models that we've been testing are loaded with crap where and the vast majority of is bad and not useful if you're really great Samsung stood up to carriers and stop them from loading up otherwise great phones with a bunch of useless apps but that hasn't happened here Samsung has added a couple of new software features like a bigger edge screen on the s7 edge it's twice as wide as before so it shows more information and you can do a little bit more with it than you could last year but it's still pretty gimmicky and I ended up turning it off most of the time both phones also have a new always-on display mode which lets you easily see the date and time or a month calendar or even a picture if you want without turning the screen on but it doesn't show me app notifications would be way more useful and it begs me to double tap the screen to fully wake it up which of course doesn't work it's like an always-on version of what Motorola and Google have done but with less practical utility but the overall upside here is that while these software features kind of stink you can easily turn them off and pretend they never existed so that's where we're at with the s7 and the s7 edge they're really great phones not perfect but really great and perhaps the best Android phones you can buy right now they get the basics right great screens great cameras great performance reliable battery life and they have eye-catching designs of premium materials it turns out that a new design one year and refinement on the next is a great idea and you know what great ideas make great phones