In the mobile space 2016 was an interesting year, a lot of cool stuff happened, and some stuff not so cool - like the Galaxy Note 7 exploding all over the place. However, in terms of the "best" phones of the year, there weren't a great many options.
Of course from the Apple camp there was the iPhone 7 series; not bad, but fairly incremental, and the major overhaul is coming in 2017 by all accounts.
Outside of the iOS stable, Windows Phone appears to be dead, leaving Android to clean house. Even here, however, for genuinely excellent smartphones in 2016 it pretty much narrows down to the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 EDGE, the LG G5, the OnePlus 3T, and the Google Pixel and Pixel XL.
And it's worth pointing out that Samsung's Galaxy S7 duo and the LG G5 both launched earliest in the year - February - so are bascially the oldest phone's of the year and are STILL kicking pretty much everything else's ass bare the offerings from Google and OnePlus.
In the run-up to the big reveal, both Galaxy S7 devices proved possibly Samsung's worst-kept secret to date, not that this is meant as a slight against Samsung - pretty much every manufacturer is unable to keep things wrapped up tight these days and in-development products always leaks onto the web in abundance.
Consequently, once again much of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge design, and many of the features, are not a surprise to anyone who had been keeping an eye on things in the six months or so ahead of the launch.
As per the rumours, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge are not tremendously different design-wise from the Galaxy S6 series, and this is no bad thing because those devices were absolutely gorgeous, made from high-end materials, and offered a premium feel in the hand - in my opinion some of the best handsets Samsung has ever made. All good stuff.
But there are still some noteworthy differences and new features to make the Galaxy S7 edge stand out from its forebears.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Design & Display
No prizes here for guessing that the Galaxy S7 edge features Samsung's unique edge display design - that's where the display panel curves around the two longer sides of the phone using flexible OLED screen technology and contoured glass. It's a signature look, and a very attractive one at that, adding a bit of unusual visual interest to make the phone more than your typical smartphone slab.
However, get the Galaxy S7 edge alongside the Galaxy S7 and you'll notice another major difference - the phone's size. Last year's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge were more-or-less the same in terms of the physical device size and display size, with a few extra millimetres here and there to accommodate the display curvature.
That's all changed for 2016, with the Galaxy S7 edge being a significantly bigger model than the regular Galaxy S7 and packing a 5.5in display compared to the non-edge model's 5.1in screen.
The rumours of some additional curves to the Galaxy S7 edge back panel were true, although it's a very small, subtle change that could easily be missed - on the whole it's the spitting image of its predecessor, including the welcome use of glass and metal in the same places and a selection of similar metallic colour options.
Just as with the Galaxy S6 series, the build quality here is as superb as the visual design and it's a very robust feeling phone to get to grips with. Also worth noting is that the camera bump has been reduced quite significantly, although it's still not flush.
If you've been following the Galaxy S7 series rumours for a while you'll know that water and dust proofing was rumoured, but, as is often the case, there were some conflicting rumours saying it wasn't so. Fortunately, the naysayers were wrong, and the waterproofing that's been missing since the Galaxy S5 has made a welcome return here.
It's an IP68 certification, officially good for up to 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes, although this is really just a legal disclaimer more than anything. At the end of the day, we want waterproofing for rain, spills, and for those rare occasions where you drop your phone in a sink/toilet/river - and in all these scenarios it should be fine.
It's also worth mentioning the waterproofing has been achieved through coating of the components of the phone with protective layers, so there are no port covers or rubber grommets to contend with.
The display itself is Samsung's usual high end Super AMOLED with a QHD resolution (2560 x 1440 pixels), that's the same resolution as the smaller Galaxy S6 edge display, though naturally the larger screen size means a slightly lower pixel density than both last year's model and the non-edge Galaxy S7; the Galaxy S7 edge's pixel density is 543ppi.
Not that any of this is a problem of course, these are all high enough pixel densities to produce incredibly sharp picture quality, while the Super AMOLED provides the rich colour and contrast we've come to expect from Samsung flagships, as well as very good brightness, sunlight performance, and viewing angles.
A new feature for the Galaxy S7 edge is the always on display (or AOD, for short)...well, it's new for Samsung's flagship series, anyway - we have seen this elsewhere before though. Of course this doesn't mean the display is literally always on, at least not completely, but it does mean that you can pick some information to be displayed even when the phone is in its sleeping state in a low-power mode.
This utilises OLED tech's unique advantage - selectively powering only certain pixels. A shortlist of available display options for AOD includes calendar, clock, and notifications, although we suspect it probably has wider applications than that.
As if the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge display specs weren't impressive enough just on paper, prominent display testing and analysis source DisplayMate has published its in-depth examination of the screen technology in use on both handsets. The findings are pretty glowing, to say the very least, with DisplayMate delcaring Samsung's phones as having the brightest displays it has ever tested, together with the most accurate colour it has ever tested too!
"While the Galaxy S7 screen size and resolution remain the same as the Galaxy S6, its has been significantly improved for most display performance metrics. The most noticeable one is a Maximum Brightness that is 24% higher than the Galaxy S6, which is quite a significant improvement in high ambient light. The Contrast and Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light have also significantly improved," states the report.
"The display on the Galaxy S7 matches and even exceeds the performance of Galaxy Note 5 that we tested in 2015 and rated it as the Best Performing Smartphone Display that we had ever tested. This is a particularly significant enhancement because the 5.1 inch Galaxy S7 display is considerably smaller so the display components had to be scaled down by 20 percent in area from the larger 5.7 inch Galaxy Note 5, and then still deliver the same Maximum Brightness from the smaller pixels."
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Hardware & Battery
Another revived feature is the inclusion of a microSD card slot, which is great for multimedia collections. Samsung hasn't reintroduced a removable battery pack, however, as this is a unibody phone, but the cell has been bumped up from last year's 2600mAh to an impressive 3600mAh, just as rumours suggested. Obviously this will need testing, but a battery pack that size should offer very good performance, plus we've found the last few Samsung flagships have offered excellent battery life generally and even better with the excellent Super Power Saving mode.
The Galaxy S7 EDGE battery life is noticably better than its predecessor and easily one of the best battery performers from the current crop of flagships. For a start, it's a bigger cell than the Galaxy S6 EDGE at 3,600mAh instead of the old 2,600mAh. But it also seems plenty of optimisations have been made, with the phone clocking up a 17 hours and 48 minute result in our continuous video playback test. To put that in perspective, the Galaxy S6 EDGE result was 13 hours, so you get nearly five hours more life out of the Galaxy S7 EDGE - that's most of a working day!
Of course you've also got plenty of connectivity capabilities built-in, all that you might expect, including NFC, 4G LTE, and Wi-Fi. It has a microUSB port but it's not the new Type-C version.
Both storage options are pretty ample with the base model being 32GB going up to a full 64GB if you're splashing out. Certainly we can see the sense in the modern app and content market of ditching a 16GB lower-tier, but although the presence of 256GB of microSD support is a welcome one it's only really any good for multimedia as Samsung hasn't implemented Android Marshmallow's native Adoptive Storage feature - in other words it can't use cards for storing apps. While the flexibility is nice, we can't help but wonder why Samsung wouldn't either open up support for Adoptive Storage OR introduce a 128GB top-tier storage model above the 64GB one. Without either option, some power users may be in for a tricky time, but most users shouldn't have too much of a problem.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Processor
Samsung has pulled its usual trick of shipping different processor models in different regions - the Samsung Exynos and the Qualcomm Snapdragon. Officially the firm has said that CPU performance will be 30% faster than the Galaxy S6 series while the GPU has a 64% uplift. Samsung does have an interesting and rather PC-like solution to performance-related heat this time as well - the handset contains a heat pipe filled with water, and when the SoC heats up the water turns to vapour before being cooled via a heatsink. Smart.
Interestingly, Youtube channel JerryRigEverything has now released a video showing the Galaxy S7 edge being dismantled on camera - in case you were wondering what its insides looked like. As well as being quite cool generally, the video showcases the heat-pipe setup from around the 4:30 mark.
Having spent a bit of time with a few other high-end 2016 Android phones using similar processor setups, I can say that the Exynos 8890-based Galaxy S7 EDGE is definitely in a similar ballpark. In general operation things are silky smooth for navigating Android and hopping between apps, and even when playing intensive 3D games this phone definitely packs a punch. I can't say I noticed any latency issues or lag whatsoever, even when trying to deliberately push the device out of its comfort zone, although it must be said the back panel did heat up a fair bit.
Benchmarks tests do show that the Snapdragon 820 edition does ever-so-slightly outperform the Exynos hardware, in particular when it comes to graphics, but the main takeaway here is the difference between the two in most scenarios is a handful of frames-per-second; importantly not enough to be noticeable in actual real-world use.
A quick glance at most benchmarking test results and databases online shows that the Galaxy S7 EDGE Exynos model is still one of the top performing smartphones on the market, and I for one think this is reflected in actual operation. NOTHING seems to shake this handset, it just waltzes through whatever you throw at it effortlessly.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Camera
Typical of Samsung's flagship series both the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge feature the same camera setup and, again, the rumours were spot on here with a 12MP sensor. That's a lower megapixel rating than previous models, but this is entirely deliberate as Samsung, like many other Android OEMs, has focused on improving other areas of the camera hardware.
The sensor uses a higher-rated 1.4um pixels, up from the Galaxy S6, to help with noise reduction, alongside a very wide f/1.7 aperture (last year's was f/1.9 - lower ratings are wider and therefore preferable in allowing in more light), and super-fast dual-pixel phase detection.
- Sensor: 12MP, 1/2.6"
- Aperture: f/1.7
- Pixel Size: 1.4 µm
- Focal Length: 26mm
- Flash: Dual-LED
- Features: Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), dual-pixel phase detection autofocus, simultaneous video and still capture, touch focus, HDR (auto), face and smile detection, panoramic capture, motion panorama, wide angle selfie, "hyperlapse", motion photo
- Video: 4K, 1080p, 720p
- Secondary Specs (Sensor, Aperture, Focal Length): 5MP, f/1.7, 22mm
I've consistently been impressed by Samsung's camera setups for years now and with the Galaxy S7 this doesn't show any signs of changing. Yes, the sensor has a lower 12MP rating than the Galaxy S6's 16MP setup, but then again so does every major flagship on the market right now because, across the board, OEMs have finally twigged that more MP doesn't mean better image quality all on its own.
Thus, plenty of other aspects of the imaging setup have been tweaked instead, including a very large aperture, pixel, and sensor size, resulting in much sharper details and less noise. The Galaxy S6's imaging capabilities were already impressive, but this is even more so.
The dynamic range is very capable as you can see between the shaded roof area and the brightly illuminated street. I also remain very fond of Samsung's approach to photography which is similar to its displays, that is; it is not afraid of punchy colour saturation and contrast.
The result of this is really vibrant images, whether that's capturing a really bright blue sky on a sunny day, lush green vegetation, colourful flowers, or the crisp contrast on that statue head pictured below.
As you can see from this coffee bean shot, close-up work still gets plenty of detail and crispness. Capture speed is lightning quick thanks to the dual-pixel phase detection autofocus and this together with the detail-intensive sensor/aperture AND OIS means there's very little chance of picking up any blurriness.
The camera interface is nice and simple to use too. Just as with the last few generations of Samsung flagships, here again I am a big fan of the ease-of-use with Samsung's camera hardware and software. Too often there are mobile camera configurations which, while actually sometimes a bit more capable in terms of image fidelity, are frustratingly complex to actually get the best results.
I am far happier with Samsung's compromise, it makes me willing to actually use the camera and feel confident I will get good pictures from it, where with rivals, even if I know I can get a decent photo, I also know I will have to faff so much I rarely have the patience to even bother.
It must be said, that even these rival cameras which are technically better in terms of image quality (for example, Microsoft's high-end Lumia PureView models) are not very far ahead of the Galaxy S7 at all, while the Galaxy S7 is tons more fun to use and consistently able to produce images you're proud of.
For those who do want to fine-tune their photography the Galaxy S7 does include a "Pro" mode for manual control for key features like focus, brightness, ISO, exposure, and more.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Software
Of course the Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE runs Android Marshmallow with a new build of TouchWiz over the top of it, but with that said it doesn't seem massively different from the build currently rolling out to the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 EDGE.
As with that build, there are enhancements to the EDGE display functions, which now allow for gesture controls and a wider selection of apps to be used - there's also more room on the edge for more apps, shortcuts and info to be displayed.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Price & Availability
Major UK networks have pricing plan details for both the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge. The following network deals are for 24 month contracts for the 32GB Galaxy S7 edge and on all mentioned networks it can be purchased in either Black Onyx or Gold Platinum colour options.
EE - £9.99 Up-front and £54.99 per month
O2 - £9.99 Up-front and £51 per month
Vodafone - £9 Up-front and £56 per month
Three - £49 Up-front and £47 per month - Pre-order by March 6 to receive handset by March 8; three days earlier than general release on March 11.
Samsung Galaxy S7 EDGE Review: Conclusion
A tremendously pleasing smartphone to use. It's been a while since I test-drove something I didn't want to give back, but the Galaxy S7 EDGE fits into that category quite comfortably. It looks sharp, feels reassuringly expensive and robust in the hand, the camera experience is an absolute joy.
Performance is what you hope for from a flagship; it's fast, smooth and responsive, while the battery life is amongst the best available. The software is as close to stock Android as Samsung has ever come and as a result is one of the most hassle-free Samsung Galaxy devices I've used to date.
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