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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10120/the-samsung-galaxy-s7-review
The Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Review, Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 8, 2016 9:00 AM EST![](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/10120/Carousel_678x452.jpg)
For some time now, Samsung has been the dominant player in the Android space, especially at the high end of the market. From the Galaxy S2 onwards, Samsung has been able to ride the wave of the smartphone industry’s growth without much disruption. Samsung has also shown a pretty impressive ability to adapt to changes in the market as seen by their dramatic departure in materials from the Galaxy S5 generation to the Galaxy S6 generation. While the Galaxy S6 was ultimately one of the best phones you could get that year, at least a few design decisions like the loss of removable battery and microSD slot were generally considered to be a step back relative to previous devices.
Throughout their reign of dominance Samsung has always been able to stay on top, however their competition is never too far behind. To that end, it’s probably obvious now that the Galaxy S7 family represents an attempt to improve on the Galaxy S6’s perceived faults, while building upon its perceived strengths. In order to start discussing these changes, we can start by looking at the basic specs and design of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge.
Samsung Galaxy S Family | |||||
Samsung Galaxy S7 | Samsung Galaxy S7 edge | Samsung Galaxy S6 | Samsung Galaxy S6 edge | ||
SoC | Snapdragon 820 (US, China, Japan) 2x Kryo @ 2.15GHz 2x Kryo @ 1.6GHz Adreno 530 Exynos 8890 (Rest of World) 4x A53 @ 1.58GHz 4x Exynos M1 @ 2.28-2.60GHz Mali T880MP12 @ 650MHz |
Exynos 7420 4x Cortex-A57 @ 2.1GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.5GHz Mali T760MP8 |
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RAM | 4GB LPDDR4-3600 | 3GB LPDDR4-3100 | |||
NAND | 32/64GB NAND (UFS) + microSD |
32/64/128GB NAND (UFS) | |||
Display | 5.1” 1440p SAMOLED |
5.5" 1440p SAMOLED Dual Edge |
5.1” 1440p SAMOLED |
5.1” 1440p SAMOLED Dual Edge |
|
Network | S820: Qualcomm X12 Integrated 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 12/13) |
2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 6) | |||
Dimensions | 142.4 x 69.6 x 7.9 mm, 152 grams | 150.9 x 72.6 x 7.7 mm, 157 grams | 143.4 x 70.5 x 6.8mm max, 138 grams | 142.1 x 70.1 x 7.0mm max, 132 grams | |
Camera | Rear Camera w/OIS 12MP (4032 x 3024) Sony IMX260 f/1.7, object tracking AF |
Rear Camera w/OIS 16MP (5132 x 2988) Sony IMX240 / Samsung S5K2P2 f/1.9, object tracking AF |
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Front Facing 5MP, f/1.7 |
Front Facing 5MP , f/1.9 |
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Battery | 3000mAh (11.55 WHr) | 3600mAh (13.86 WHr) | 2550 mAh (9.81 WHr) | 2600 mAh (10.01 WHr) | |
Launch OS | Android 6 w/TouchWiz | Android 5 w/TouchWiz | |||
Connectivity | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2x2 MU-MIMO + BT 4.2, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, NFC |
2x2 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.1 (BCM4358), USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, NFC |
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Wireless Charging | Yes, Fast Charging | WPC 1.1 (4.6W) & PMA 1.0 (4.2W) |
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Fingerprint Sensor | Touch | Touch | |||
SIM Size | NanoSIM | NanoSIM | |||
Launch Price (No Contract) |
$650+ USD | $750+ USD | $650+ USD |
$750+ USD |
One of the other major changes in terms of design this time around is electing to go with a significantly larger battery than before. Compared to most other aspects of smartphone technology, battery technology is a more mature field and improves as a slower pace, so the tradeoffs made here result in a thicker device and increased weight relative to the Galaxy S6. However, as we’ll soon see Samsung has made a number of changes in the industrial design which help to mitigate these issues.
Meanwhile, with the Galaxy S7 generation, Samsung has further blurred the line between the Galaxy S lineup and the Galaxy note. The Galaxy S7 edge is a 5.5-inch device - fully into the phablet territory - and only 0.2 inches smaller than the 5.7" Galaxy Note5. This means that the two Galaxy S7 phones are now more significantly differentiated than with the Galaxy S6 generation, where the difference amounted to the dual-edge display and a slightly larger battery. Now the Galaxy S7 edge is larger, ever so slightly heavier, and contains a battery with 20% more capacity than it's base Galaxy S7 brethren.
The final change of note in the Galaxy S7/S7 edge is the camera. With the Galaxy S6 review it was hard to avoid wondering why Samsung didn’t bother to integrate a camera with larger pixel size to improve low light performance, especially when camera was such a significant part of the Galaxy S6 design story with the noticeable camera hump. For the Galaxy S7, Samsung has gone ahead and done just this: the pixel size is now 1.4 micron which should significantly increase the number of situations where the image quality is limited by shot noise rather than image sensor noise. And to top things off the camera hump has now been almost entirely eliminated.
On a quick housekeeping note before we dive in, as we've had less than a week to look at the Galaxy S7, we're dividing up our review into two parts. Today we'll focus on the basics: performance, battery life, design, and the display. Part 2 will go deeper, looking into the Snapdragon 820 SoC in fuller detail, and coupling that with Wi-Fi performance, camera performance, and more.
Design
Now that we’ve gone over the high level changes of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, we can start talking about the design of the device. While the Galaxy S6 was an enormous departure from what we were used to seeing from Samsung, the Galaxy S7 is really more an evolution of the Galaxy S6 design. As previously mentioned, it is noticeably thicker and heavier than the Galaxy S6. However, to offset this increase in thickness Samsung has integrated the curved 3D glass of the Galaxy Note5 into the design of the Galaxy S7.
The result of this change is that the Galaxy S7 arguably feels much better in the hand than the Galaxy S6. While I didn’t really have huge issues with the ergonomics of the Galaxy S6, it definitely felt a bit blocky relative to something like the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro and didn’t quite fit in the hand as nicely. The weight increase is noticeable, but not really the end of the world.
The thickness does result in a noticeably reduced camera hump, but on a personal level I never really cared about the camera hump in the Galaxy S6, so I’m not sure I care about the reduction in the camera hump here. I would actually argue that a camera hump is preferable to a camera cover lens that is perfectly coplanar to the back of the phone, as it means that the camera lens isn’t contacting whatever surface I’ve set it down on. While sapphire cover lenses go a very long way to eliminating the potential for scratching a cover lens, there’s also the potential for oil to smear on the camera’s cover lens so I would actually prefer having a camera hump.
The other noticeable change here is the re-introduction of 2.5D curved glass on the edges of the display. I’m not quite sure why Samsung tends to remove and re-introduce this design element seemingly on and off, but it does help with improving the feel of edge swipes at the cost of complicating some things like screen protectors and glass lens durability. Honestly speaking, I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes either way, but it does remove another edge present in the design.
Other than these changes, the design is almost unchanged. The power button remains on the right side of the device and is well-positioned ergonomically. The volume buttons are pretty much in the same place on the left side as well. The 3.5mm jack, micro-USB port, and single speaker are all on the bottom of the device. The only notable deletion in terms of design elements here would be the loss of the IR port on top of the device, which was removed from Galaxy devices starting with the Note5.
Battery Life
Battery life remains one of the most important aspects of any mobile device. After all, you can’t really call something mobile if it has to spend most of its time connected to an AC adapter. As a result, battery life testing is one of the most critical aspects of our testing, and it’s something that we spend quite a lot of time discussing internally.
Before diving into our results, I want to start things off talking about testing methodologies. This year we're implementing an overhaul of our web browsing test for battery life, with the Galaxy S7 review being our first chance to deploy it. As far as our long-standing 2013 test goes, at a high level our 2013 test was relatively simple in the sense that it simply loaded a web page, then started a timer to wait a certain period of time before loading the next page. And after nearly 3 years it was time for it to evolve.
Internally, we’ve been discussing reasonable measures to push our web browsing test in new directions to both better represent real-world workloads in addition to ensuring that we’re testing more than just display power. For at least a few devices, it had already become quite evident that our old test was almost purely display-bound to such an extent that even video playback was more power intensive. Other issues that were raised both internally and externally included the fact that the test would not test aspects like CPU governor boosts upon touching the display, and that our test almost entirely ignored things like 2D drawing and display pipeline efficiency.
In recognition of these issues, we’ve spent the past few months working on a new test. In addition to new webpages that are exact copies of many popular websites today to better represent modern, real-world workloads, we’ve added a major scrolling component to this battery life test. The use of scrolling should add an extra element of GPU compositing, in addition to providing a CPU workload that is not purely race to sleep from a UI perspective. Unfortunately, while it would be quite interesting to also test the power impact of touch-based CPU boost, due to issues with reproducing such a test reliably we’ve elected to avoid doing such things.
However, we don’t take these changes lightly. While we’ve validated the workload for several devices, it’s important to emphasize that these results could change in the future as much of this data is preliminary. For the second part of the review I’ll be sure to revisit these results with an expanded dataset. Of course, other than the workload the device setup has been held constant across these tests by equalizing brightness to 200 nits and disabling all background sync to the best of my ability.
As we can see in the results, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge both do impressively well. One of the more interesting comparison points here would be against the latest devices like the Huawei Mate 8, which has the Kirin 950.
Our previous test was relatively display-bound so differences in SoC efficiency were often difficult to discern and often masked entirely, but here we can see an enormous spread that is almost entirely due to SoC efficiency. The Huawei Mate 8, which under our previous test seemed to be only slightly above the iPhone 6s Plus, has gained a noticeable lead in this test as the Kirin 950’s CPU efficiency is ahead the competition at this time, although it’s important to keep in mind that CPU efficiency is not the only relevant metric for an SoC.
Interestingly enough, the Galaxy S7’s battery life is almost directly scaling with battery size relative to the Galaxy S6. As we’ll see in the display section, the Galaxy S7’s display is pretty much identical to the Galaxy Note5 and S6, so it looks like the efficiency gains from the Galaxy S6 to the S7 are small if you look at the Snapdragon 820 variant.
Of course, the big question that I’m sure a lot of people are thinking is how the Galaxy S7 and the Snapdragon 820 compare to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Unfortunately, due to timing constraints we weren’t able to get data for the smaller iPhone 6s, but looking at the iPhone 6s Plus relative to the Galaxy S7 edge it’s pretty obvious that there is a power efficiency gap between the two in this test. Despite the enormous difference in battery size - the Galaxy S7 edge has a battery that is 33% larger than the iPhone 6s Plus - the difference in battery life between the iPhone and Galaxy in this test is small, on the order of half an hour or 5-6%. This is balanced against a higher resolution (but AMOLED) display, which means we're looking at SoC efficiency compounded with a difference in display power.
In the interest of providing another data point and some validation of our testing results, I ran both devices through our old web browsing test to see what the results would be for something that should be display-bound. Here, it’s obvious that the Galaxy S7 edge holds a significant lead over the iPhone 6s Plus, although the use of a higher resolution display and an AMOLED display in a high-APL test means that the GS7e is using more power in this test as well. However, when you take these results with our new web browsing test, it becomes evident that a difference in power efficiency is growing as the load on the SoC grows. Similarly, despite the Galaxy S7 being neck and neck with the Huawei Mate 8 in our older test, it loses the lead in our new web browsing test.
Of course, I have caution that all of the data that we’re gathering for the web browsing test is still subject to change, but given the interesting data that it provides it’s important for us to include these results, as we’re reasonably confident that these results are accurate.
Overall though, it’s clear that the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge will have solid battery life, even if device efficiency isn’t quite on par with the very best that we’ve seen so far. An improvement of 15% is going to be noticeable if you upgrade from the Galaxy S6, and anyone upgrading from a phone with an SoC older than the Snapdragon 800/801 generation will see huge improvements here.
SoC Performance
While we’re ready to move on to newer benchmarks for 2016, our system performance benchmarks from 2015 are still going to provide a pretty good idea for what to expect from the Galaxy S7 and Snapdragon 820 by extension. For those that are unfamiliar with what the Snapdragon 820 is, I’d reference our previous articles on the Snapdragon 820.
In essence, we’re looking at a 2x2 CPU configuration with 2.15 GHz Kryo cores for the performance cluster, and 1.6 GHz Kryo cores for the efficiency cluster. Binding the two clusters together are some power aware scheduling at the kernel level and a custom interconnect to handle coherency between the two clusters. Memory is also improved relative to the Snapdragon 810, with a bump to LPDDR4-1866 over the former's LPDDR4-1600. Of course, there's a lot more to talk about here, but for now we can simply look at how the Snapdragon 820 compares in our benchmarks.
Update: As we've had a few questions on the subject, I just want to clarify browser testing. Samsung's stock browser was not included with our Verizon-branded sample phone, nor is it possible to install it at this time. As a result we are unable to test the performance of Samsung's browser. The Verge reports that this is a Verizon decision and that all Verizon phones will be shipping like this; so for these phones Chrome is the de-facto stock browser.
Starting off with our web benchmarks, we can see that in the time since our initial testing of the Snapdragon 820 MDP there have been some major improvements to how well Chrome is optimized for Kryo. As a result we're seeing results that are almost comparable to Snapdragon Browser in Chrome.
Overall then the Galaxy S7 and its Snapdragon 820 SoC won't top the charts on web benchmarks - Apple still holds an edge here - however the Galaxy S7 puts up a solid fight. The one drawback here is that the Mate 8 and its Cortex A72 CPU seems to have the edge over the Galaxy S7.
In Basemark OS II the combination of a better GPU, better NAND, and better single thread CPU performance seems to be enough for the Galaxy S7 to approach the iPhone 6s Plus in overall performance. While the system benchmark shows that Kryo isn't quite going toe to toe with Twister, the Adreno 530 helps to narrow the gap in the graphics test.
In PCMark, we can see that the Galaxy S7 is mostly comparable to the Galaxy S6. However major improvements in areas like GPU performance help to give it an overall advantage relative to the Galaxy S6 in the photo editing test. Given that this is basically a test of API-level performance, it's likely that Samsung's frameworks and governor settings lead to mostly similar performance in these tests.
Overall, the Snapdragon 820 appears to provide a pretty healthy bump in performance over almost every SoC seen in 2015, although it's hard to declare a clear winner when comparing it to Apple's A9 or Huawei's Kirin 950. If you glanced at the battery life graphs and the performance graphs above it's pretty obvious that Qualcomm has made some enormous strides here. While not quite going from zero to hero, Qualcomm has come close, and that definitely deserves some credit.
NAND Performance
If you think about the memory hierarchy, while RAM and cache are important, at the end of the day the most important aspect is the base storage. Even if you have infinite RAM and cache, if your storage is sufficiently slow the user experience is going to be painful for at least the first time you have to load something.
In order to test this, we use our standard test of AndroBench with 4 KB and 256 KB reads and writes for random and sequential tests. I went ahead and did some digging around to figure out exactly what it is we’re testing in the Galaxy S7, and it turns out that while the Galaxy S7 storage solution is similar to what’s in the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, it isn’t quite the same. The Galaxy S7 UFS storage identifies itself as the KLUBG4G1CE-B0B1, which looks to be in the same family and appears to have been released at pretty much the same time as the Galaxy S6 storage solution, but the model number isn’t quite the same.
Looking at the performance results, we can also see that the Galaxy S7 is pretty similar to the Galaxy S6 in storage performance at a high level. Interestingly enough despite using full disk encryption on the Galaxy S7, we don’t really see a noticeable degradation in performance relative to the Galaxy S6 which is good to see considering the number of Android devices that do have noticeable performance effects when enabling FDE.
GPU Performance
On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 is equipped with the Adreno 530 clocked at 624 MHz. In order to see how it performs, we ran it through our standard 2015 suite. In the future, we should be able to discuss how the Galaxy S7 performs in the context of our new benchmark suite as we test more devices on our new suite to determine relative performance.
At a high level, GPU performance appears to be mostly unchanged when comparing the Galaxy S7 to the Snapdragon 820 MDP. Performance in general is quite favorable assuming that the render resolution doesn't exceed 2560x1440.
Overall, the Adreno 530 is clearly one of the best GPUs you can get in a mobile device today. The Kirin 950's GPU really falls short in comparison. One could argue that turbo frequencies in a GPU don't make a lot of sense, but given that mobile gaming workloads can be quite bursty in nature and that gaming sessions tend to be quite short I would argue that having a GPU that can achieve significant levels of overdrive performance makes a lot of sense. The A9 is comparable if you consider the resolution of iOS devices, but when looking at the off-screen results the Adreno 530 pulls away. Of course, the real question now is how the Adreno 530 compares to the Exynos 8890's GPU in the international Galaxy S7, but that's a question that will have to be left for another day.
Display
As always, the display of any mobile device is a critical part of the overall user experience. A poor display in any way is often going to sour the entire experience.
On a personal note, there are a number of mobile devices that I’ve used over the course of the previous year that frankly just weren’t good enough for me to use as a daily driver because the display just wasn’t good enough. My laptop is quite closely calibrated to sRGB and it’s used to edit all of my device photos, so I’ve really come to appreciate a device that has sufficiently accurate color that I can actually use a phone or tablet as a reference monitor of sorts to verify that images look the way I want them to.
In order to test this critical portion of the user experience, we turn to our standard test suite which uses SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5, a custom workflow for testing basic metrics like brightness, contrast, and calibration accuracy, and X-Rite’s i1Pro2 and i1DisplayPro.
Starting off with a microscope's view of the Galaxy S7's display, it looks like Samsung has elected to keep most aspects of the display constant when comparing the Galaxy S6 and S7. At a high level, the display is the same 5.1” display size that we’ve seen for a few generations now, and the 1440p resolution is shared with previous devices. Samsung continues to use their diamond PenTile layout, but it’s hard for me to say whether there’s been an adjustment to the size of the emitters as the microscope I have on hand isn’t quite sufficient for making such measurements. It’s likely that under the hood there are changes to the display driver IC in order to enable features like Always-On Display, but as we’ll soon see it’s rather unlikely that there are any generational changes in things like the emitter material or TFT backplane.
One of our first tests here is a pretty standard test of maximum luminance. Here, we see that the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge both are in the same general ballpark as the Galaxy Note5, which suggests that both devices are likely to be in the same generation of AMOLED panel. This brightness was achieved by using the auto-brightness mode, so it’s important to note that the max luminance in manual mode will be much lower. Of course, this brightness figure was determined with a full white display so reducing the APL will result in a higher maximum luminance as the power budget can we spent on fewer pixels which means that a higher duty cycle can be achieved in each pixel.
The next part of our testing is grayscale. As always, we target the industry standard of a 2.2 power gamma with 6504k white point. Relative to the Galaxy S6 and Note5, we see a pretty significant improvement in white point accuracy as it’s pretty much consistently quite close to a neutral white rather than a warmer color balance. Unfortunately though, in both review units I received the display has a noticeable green tint for many shades of grey, which seems to be somewhat of a perpetual problem with Samsung AMOLED displays. This really does affect quite a bit of the UI, as Material Design greys have this noticeable green tint to them that really makes things look off.
The same issue seems to not be present on the Galaxy S7 edge, which leads to a significant improvement overall in calibration quality for this portion of the testing, but both devices have a noticeably lower gamma than expected, which does have some effect on accuracy but for the most part can help to serve as a compensation mechanism for reflectance when dealing with ambient light. It’s likely that the green tint issue may only appear on a device to device basis, but to see that such issues haven’t been resolved for years is somewhat concerning given that phones costing hundreds of dollars less don’t seem to have the same problems.
The next portion of our testing is the standard saturation sweep test. Here, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge are basically perfect. It’s great to see that Samsung continues to provide their Basic color mode with a real focus on providing accurate color calibration for those that care about these things, and the user experience with getting to the right color calibration is pretty much as painless as it can be compared to some other devices where things like saturation curves, white balance, and other parts of a display calibration can only be adjusted using unitless sliders that basically require a spectrophotometer to actually use.
In our Gretag MacBeth ColorChecker test, we see that there are some issues with grayscale accuracy, but overall color accuracy remains quite good. In terms of overall display quality, I don’t really think there’s any meaningful improvement over the Galaxy S6, but that’s mostly because the Galaxy S6 set a ridiculously high bar for display quality.
However, I don’t believe that Samsung has run out of things to improve for future AMOLD displays. In addition to the grayscale problems mentioned earlier, Samsung clearly has not resolved issues with color shifting that occurs with viewing angle changes. LCDs definitely have more luminance degradation as you move away from the normal of the display plane, but at almost every angle change I can see whites get noticeably colder and interference patterns, in addition to a general color shift that is noticeably more than most LCDs used in high end smartphones and tablets. It’s obvious that this is a hard problem to solve due to uneven subpixel aging, but for things like tablets, laptops, and desktops color shifting is going to be a much more significant issue.
Software UX
As is always the case, there’s a perpetual debate over the role of the OEM when it comes to Android devices. For better or worse, Samsung seems to believe that they need to add their own framework and UI over Android. To some extent, I suspect that most users are going to find stock Android to be rather spartan out of the box, so it does make sense for OEMs like Samsung to continue adding their own custom applications and frameworks to help differentiate themselves from the competition.
With the Galaxy S5, it was evident that Samsung had dramatically changed their design direction for TouchWiz, but I would argue that their design aesthetic still wasn’t quite perfect, and performance wasn’t completely there either. With the Galaxy S6, Samsung had gotten closer to the mark in some ways, but the continued use of excessively neon colors just made parts of the UI feel off at times, and performance still wasn’t perfect.
With the Galaxy S7, performance has improved noticeably, but it’s really hard for me to say whether this is because Samsung has improved their codebase, or if a faster SoC is just making it harder to notice areas in need of optimization. At any rate, while the Galaxy S7 isn’t perfectly smooth - dropping frames now and then - it is sufficiently performant that you’re not going to find distracting lag.
The default theme of the Galaxy S7 continues to feel pretty similar to the Galaxy S6, so for the most part things are acceptable here, but the use of color is still a bit excessive as a number of icons still use neon colors rather than more neutral pastel colors. Of course, the theme store now has a number of Material Design themes, which greatly improve the situation. I installed one pretty much immediately, which helps make the device feel a lot better in everyday use. However, I’m still of the opinion that this is something that a user shouldn’t need to do out of the box, so this is an area where Samsung can improve.
The other features that Samsung touted for the Galaxy S7 are interesting, but I’m not really sure they’re all that well executed. Always-On Display is nice to have, but for some reason it's quite reluctant to turn off the display when the ambient light sensor and proximity sensor are covered. As a result I turned it off as it’s clearly going to be contributing to idle battery drain in situations where it shouldn’t.
I also found that the fingerprint scanner is pretty much identical to the one in the Galaxy S6, which isn’t entirely surprising as both identify themselves as a Synaptics fingerprint scanner. Both still seem to be quite sensitive to the initial training period and in my experience won’t really work all that well if you don’t cover your entire fingerprint effectively during that period.
Other than this, TouchWiz doesn’t really stand out in any way as of now. Of course, Samsung Pay will be interesting for me to try as I still regularly run into terminals that don’t support NFC in any shape or form, but I haven’t really been able to spend much time testing Samsung Pay yet. I don’t really find TouchWiz to be a bad thing at this point, but I’m not really sure it’s a good thing either. With a serious emphasis on optimization and a major aesthetic overhaul, it’s entirely possible that I could find myself saying quite differently in the near future, but for now if you found the Galaxy S6 and Note 5 OEM UIs to be usable you’ll find the Galaxy S7 to be usable as well.
Initial Conclusions
Even though we’re just barely scratching the surface of what we can test, the results we already have show quite a bit about the Samsung Galaxy S7. The Galaxy S line remains one of the most popular Android smartphones, and if history is any indication we can get a pretty good idea about what to expect for 2016 just by looking at the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge.
The first place we can start is design, and here we can see that the Galaxy S7 is decidedly an evolution of the Galaxy S6’s ID. However, pretty much every sharp edge has been rounded out to make the device more comfortable in the hand. The device has also been thickened in order to handle the larger battery and reduce the apparent z-height of the camera. The display size of the Galaxy S7 (non-edge) stays at 5.1 inches, and given how long Samsung has stuck to this display size it’s likely that they will be staying at this size for quite some time for their flagship.
In general, it feels like the industry has settled upon a display size somewhere between 5 to 5.5 inches for their flagship devices as going further probably won’t make a lot of sense for ergonomic reasons. I suspect Samsung and many other Android OEMs are settling into an Apple-like 2 year cadence for industrial and material design as replacement cycles lengthen, especially in the United States where subsidized phones have been almost entirely eliminated.
Meanwhile, though we haven’t had the time to run our full suite of battery life benchmarks, the data that we do have is quite interesting. At the very least, it looks like the Galaxy S7 will be a solid upgrade for those coming from the Galaxy S6 and earlier with a 15% bump in battery life or so. Anyone using a phone with an SoC not on a FinFET node will see even bigger gains to battery life, which is impressive to say the least. If you have any device with a Snapdragon 810 or 808 SoC, you’re definitely going to see major gains if you move to any device with a SoC fabricated on a FinFET node.
In terms of SoC performance, the Snapdragon 820 doesn't disappoint. In the time since testing the MDP it seems that between Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google, the trio has finally been able to optimize Snapdragon 820 for Chrome, so performance there is quite acceptable now and a pretty solid uplift over something like the Exynos 7420 or Snapdragon 810. GPU performance is also pretty much right where the Snapdragon 820 MDP was, so performance should be a good step above the A9's GT7600 GPU. Of course, we have yet to consider the power efficiency or sustainability of this performance, but turbo/overdrive performance is always relevant in the mobile space considering just how bursty almost every mobile workload is. It's pretty safe to say that Qualcomm has at least regained their footing in the SoC space, and with future SoCs they may well come to dominate the high end for performance and power once again. For now, it's looking like the race between Exynos 8890, Snapdragon 820, and Kirin 950 will be quite close.
For storage performance, to some extent it seems that the performance gains are relatively small, as the UFS 2.0 storage solutions on the Galaxy S6 and S7 are relatively similar. It’s interesting to see here that despite the now-mandatory use of FDE, the delta in performance between the Galaxy S6 and S7 in storage performance doesn’t seem to exist. This is welcome news as it wasn’t all that long ago that FDE for Android had a noticeable effect on storage performance.
On the display side, again we can see that the Galaxy S7 has a relatively similar display to the Galaxy S6. Calibration should be relatively good across the board, and AMOLED retains all of its traditional advantages including high contrast, support for wide color gamuts, low transition time, and improved power efficiency at lower average picture levels. Peak brightness is the only noticeable area where things seem to change, but I suspect that this will vary noticeably depending upon the unit. The one issue that I continue to notice here is that the edge display on the Galaxy S7 edge has a green tint at the edges, likely due to the diamond PenTile subpixel arrangement.
On the software side, Samsung’s TouchWiz UI continues to be more of the same when compared to the Galaxy Note5. The edge features continue to be somewhat interesting, but I continue to find myself thinking that there would be no difference if the same feature was implemented on the non-edge variant. Thankfully, the lag that I noticed last month in my initial hands-on time with the device seems to just have been a function of pre-release software, as the Galaxy S7 is relatively performant here. Although I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say that the Galaxy S7 is entirely free of lag. I suspect that Samsung has to balance power efficiency and responsiveness to some extent here, as while devices like the Nexus 5 can feel incredibly smooth and responsive there are very real knock-on effects in terms of practical battery life.
I’m also looking forward to testing features like Samsung Pay that are finally being deployed to the extent that I can use my personal credit card with Samsung Pay on my phone. However, out of the box TouchWiz still has some issues with an overly-neon theme, and in general things like Always-On Display already feel like they aren’t quite executed as well as they should be. I also noticed that the fingerprint scanner performance is strongly influenced by initial setup if I didn’t scan some areas on initial setup they never seemed to work very well unless I retrained the finger.
As for making a choice between the Galaxy S7 edge and Galaxy S7, there basically aren't any outside of size for the most part. There is the edge display, but by and large it feels like that's more of an aesthetic choice than a functional one. As we have seen you do get better battery life in the Galaxy S7 edge, but I don't feel like it makes sense to cross-shop the two. If you want one-handed usability, the Galaxy S7 is the only choice that makes sense. If you want a phablet, the Galaxy S7 edge is the only choice that makes sense.
Overall, I think the Galaxy S7 is looking to be one of the better devices of the year. Of course, there’s still a lot more to test, but the initial indications are already looking quite good. If you absolutely want the Galaxy S7 now, I don’t think there will be any major showstoppers present in this phone. However, if you’re looking to buy the best phone possible available this year I think it’s still too early to say where the chips will fall as Samsung's eager competitors have their own flagship phones right around the corner.