Last year’s Samsung Galaxy S6 launch was a huge departure for a company that had begun to take for granted that its name was synonymous with Android. After years of doing pretty much anything it liked and still staying at the top of global sales charts, Samsung was starting to see signs that plastic phones with bloated software and thoughtless design weren’t going to cut it anymore, especially when the rest of the industry was beginning to ship phones that felt luxurious and slick.
Samsung, therefore, has multiple challenges when it comes to its Galaxy S7 family: the phones have to outdo their predecessors, appeal to purists without taking any steps backwards, and most importantly, feel like they’re worth spending a lot of money on when the next best options are good enough. We’re going to see whether or not the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge deliver on all these counts.
Look and feel
Samsung has differentiated the Galaxy S7 and its curved sibling a bit more than it did last year. Buyers of the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ ( Review | Pictures) might be a little miffed, since the S7 Edge effectively replaces it as well. The S7 Edge is certainly a handful, but it isn’t totally unmanageable. The biggest problem with it is that the glass is so slick and the metal edges so narrow that we didn’t always feel that we had a secure enough grip on it.
Specifications
Other than screen size and battery capacity, the Galaxy S7 siblings share a lot of the same guts. The Galaxy S7 has a 5.1-inch screen while the one on the S7 Edge measures 5.5 inches diagonally. Both are Super Amoled panels, and both have the same resolution of 1440x2560 pixels, or Quad-HD. While the smaller of the two has a 3000mAh battery, the bigger one has enough space to accommodate 3600mAh unit.
Software
While we were relieved to see Samsung scale back on its bloat with previous incarnations of TouchWiz, it still has a relatively heavy hand when it comes to Android skinning in the Marshmallow era. The homescreens are a little cluttered, but you can get rid of Samsung’s promotional Galaxy Essentials widget which offers apps and themes for download.