Think of it as the Galaxy S6…S. The Samsung Galaxy S7 ($672 for 32GB as tested on Verizon Wireless; $699.99 unlocked) looks so much like the Galaxy S6 that you’d be excused for thinking it’s not a major upgrade. Rather than reinvent the design like it did last year, Samsung has focused on performance improvements in the S7, restoring crowd-pleasing features that were missing from the S6 (like a microSD slot) and boosting battery life. It’s the best Android phone available in a truly one-handed form factor. That said, we’re giving our Editors’ Choice to the very similar Galaxy S7 Edge, which has more functionality and better battery life in a package that’s not much bigger.
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There’s been a lot of talk over the last year about how smartphones are getting boring—essentially, how they’ve plateaued in terms of changing our lives. I think the industry is just taking a breath before it goes crazy with virtual and augmented reality, which we’ve started to see with Samsung’s Gear VR.
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But smartphones are still our most personal computers. They’re our always-ready cameras with which we record our lives. They’re our cloud-based brains that Waze us around town or Google the answers to pressing questions. They’re our connections to our friends and family, via Facebook, or text message, or old-fashioned phone calls. They’re essential, used hundreds of times a day, and even an incremental improvement in how they work is still an improvement in our lives.
Here’s an incremental improvement, for instance. As someone who uses my phone on the subway a lot, I’ve been raging for years about phone size bloat—how smartphones are getting wider and wider, making them harder to use with one hand. I’m happy to say that the 2.74-inch S7 is actually narrower than the S6 (2.78 inches), making it the same width as the HTC One M9, and narrower than any other high-end Android phone I can think of. That will make the S7 the go-to device for anyone who thinks that high-end phones are just too big.
The Galaxy S7’s AMOLED screen is the same size (5.1 inches) and resolution (2,560 by 1440) as the S6’s screen, but as Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Labs points out in a detailed report, Samsung amped up the brightness quite a lot. The S6 already had an excellent, highly visible screen; the S7 is even better. Both phones put the iPhone 6s to shame.
Samsung has returned waterproofing to the Galaxy S7, without the need for the irritating port cover from the Galaxy S5. This time, it’s using a water-repellent coating inside the device. I washed and dried the phone, and even spilled hot coffee on it, with no issues. The phone is rated IP68, which means it’s fully submersible and dustproof.
Samsung Galaxy S7
From left to right: Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Galaxy S7, Apple iPhone 6s
But yes, otherwise, the S7 looks a lot like the S6, although its slightly more rounded back is just a touch thicker, to allow for a bigger battery. The bigger battery, in turn, gives the phone less of a protruding camera bump on the rear. At 5.36 ounces, it’s heavier, too (the S6 is 4.87 ounces). But it’s still a metal-and-glass unibody design, coming in black or gold, with a physical Home button that functions as a fingerprint sensor below the display. The sensor is the same as the one in the S6; very good, but it’ll miss an off-center touch. The phone also still uses traditional micro USB, not USB-C, for charging and accessories.
While the phone is about the same size as the Galaxy S6, many existing Galaxy S6 cases just barely won’t work on the Galaxy S7. It’s a real pity. When I slotted the S7 into an S6 case, I found the headphone jack was moved slightly to the right, so the hole for the jack on the case was in the wrong place.
Phone and Network Performance
Qualcomm is back. Last year was a bad one for the leading chip manufacturer, during which it put out some decent processors and one real disappointment, the Snapdragon 810. Well, the Snapdragon 820 is no 810. It has the finest modem in the business, and what’s looking like highly competitive app performance.
The Snapdragon 820’s X12 modem supports LTE download speeds up to 600Mbps and uploads up to 150Mbps, using technologies that help with every carrier. 4×4 MIMO will make for faster speeds on T-Mobile and Verizon, while 3×20 carrier aggregation becomes important on Sprint.
I couldn’t perform any tests that pushed the limits of LTE performance, but I could check Wi-Fi and weak signal conditions. The phone had no trouble with a 150Mbps symmetrical Wi-Fi connection. On Verizon’s network, the S7 did a better job holding onto LTE in poor signal conditions than the iPhone 6s, pulling out better data rates. My first day with the phone, I saw some odd behavior involving the phone not recovering or trading up to 4G LTE from dead zones, but that seemed to sort itself out after a few days.
The phone supports voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and Wi-Fi calling. The unlocked model supports all US carriers, even Verizon and Sprint. If you buy a model directly from a carrier, it will exclude certain frequency bands for each of the other three carriers. The phone will work on other carriers, but not as well as that carrier’s model or the unlocked unit. So if you buy a carrier unit, it’s best to treat it as a phone exclusively for that carrier. If you want to move it around, get the unlocked model. (We have tested the Galaxy S7 on Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile.)
Call quality is fine, but I wish it was a little better. The earpiece is plenty loud, and there’s no distortion; that’s not the problem. And noise cancellation is excellent. I suspect the issue is just Verizon’s voice codecs. With standard calling, voices sound a bit harsh with a trebly punch. On VoLTE, you get a more balanced sound without the harshness, but it’s not HD-level precise unless you’re calling another phone on your carrier.
Samsung Galaxy S7
Battery life on the sealed-in 3,000mAh cell is noticeably better than on the S6. I did more battery tests than usual on this phone, because the Galaxy S6 had an annoying habit of draining its battery really quickly in standby mode. Unfortunately, this behavior tended to appear only after a month or two, and I haven’t had the S7 for a month or two. But early signs are promising. The S7 got 9 hours in our video streaming rundown, as compared with 7 hours, 13 minutes for the S6. In standby mode without heavy CPU usage, the S7 drained 11 percent of its battery in eight hours. Not bad. Intense usage killed it in about 6.5 hours, which isn’t too bad either.
The phone supports both fast charging and dual-standard wireless charging. Using the included fast charger, we got the phone from zero to fully charged in around 90 minutes.
Android Performance
The Galaxy S7 runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Samsung’s skin over it, on a 2.15GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. It’s the first of several Snapdragon 820 phones we’ll see this year, most notably, the LG G5 will join it very soon.
The Snapdragon 820 benchmarks faster than any other chip we’ve seen in an Android phone. With Geekbench scores of 2,333 single-core and 5,330 multi-core, it beats the Galaxy S6 (1,440 single/4,811 multi) and the Galaxy Note 5 (1,472 single/5,020 multi) handily. GPU performance is also better, taking the GFXBench Manhattan test from 15 frames per second (fps) on the previous generation, to 25fps here.
Now, whether it’s faster than the iPhone is another question. The iPhone 6s still benchmarks faster in single-core mode than the Snapdragon 820 does, with a Geekbench score of 2,475, and it does much better with on-screen graphics frame rates because of its much lower resolution screen. The question of whether single-core performance or multi-core performance matters more is still intensely debated in programming circles.
What really matters is how the phone performs in practice. I like to use the controls of Asphalt 8 to check for responsiveness, and the S7 is as smooth as butter—as you’d expect. Apps launch quickly and there’s no lag. The S7, like the past two generations of Galaxy phones, also has dual-window or pop-up multitasking.
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Samsung has, once again, tried to lighten the burden of its Android skin. While the icons are still all restyled, Samsung ditched its Briefing screen to the left of the main home screen. It has also resisted the current, horrid trend to get rid of the app drawer in favor of a more iPhone-like interface.
One likable customization is the always-on screen, which floats the time, date, battery status, and basic notification information on the screen at all times; you can swap it out for a calendar or one of a few preset images. The always-on screen information is convenient, and doesn’t appear to consume much battery. And you can always turn it off if it’s not for you.
But there are a ton of bloatware applications, consuming a total of 9.17GB on our Verizon device. As Verizon only sells a 32GB model, that’s pretty rough. And bloatware apps can’t be deleted or moved to SD cards. The other carrier versions were also loaded up with bloatware.