My initial reaction to holding the Galaxy S7 in my hand was, "Oh boy,
another iterative update from a Korean mega
corporation. How utterly uninteresting." But having spent the last couple of
weeks using the S7 as my daily driver, I
can confidently say that there won't be any spoilers here. Roll the intro.
The Arya headphones from Phoenix come complete with a cardioid clip mic and
acoustic chambers constructed entirely of Japanese pinewood. Click the link in
the video description to learn more. As dangerous as this may be to say, in
my mind, the S7 is about as good as we
will ever need from a quality of construction standpoint. Which isn't to
say we don't need an active skew for the people who throw their phones around. I
mean, sure, with carbon fiber, next generation glass, or other advanced
materials, slight improvements could be made and will be made to the overall fit
and finish, but I've never understood, for example, Apple's obsession with
thinner and lighter just because we can. And apparently, neither does Samsung.
The S7 is unapologetically thicker and
heavier than the iPhone 6s and doesn't suffer for it at all. I mean, the extra
heft to me makes it feel like a premium
piece of machinery. And frankly, I would make the argument that the extra
functionality enabled by the thickness increase, the micro SD expansion slot
that's next to the SIM slot on the top, the much larger 3000 mAh battery, and
the hardly noticeable bump over the lightning fast 12 megapixel optically
stabilized camera each individually make up for that size and
weight increase. And there are other things that I really like about it as
well. Can I be the first to say? I mean, okay, I'm probably not the first, but
can I say it anyway that the lock button and volume buttons are great. They're
not directly opposing each other, so it's easy to press one side without
mashing on the other side. And they're big and clicky enough that I can feel
them in my pocket, but not accidentally press them. I mean, I know I've harped
on this a lot in the past, but it's because it's a major annoyance for me.
And Samsung has proven now that it's really not that hard, Apple. With that
said, it's not perfect. Samsung opted for a microB USB port for the bottom
instead of a type-C port, though this is somewhat more forgivable thanks to the
S7's inclusion of wireless charging to maintain compatibility with the Gear VR.
and still hasn't managed to deliver a
speaker solution that doesn't require me to cup my hands around the bottom of the
device or plug in the 3 and 1/2 mm jack also found there in order to hear
anything. Moving around to the front, we've got a 5.1 in
2560x440 Corning Gorilla Glass 4 topped AMOLED display with a 5 megapixel f1.7
selfie camera that carries forward the S6's very solid low light performance
for a front cam and its wide-angle lens. The latter is a big advantage if you're
trying to get a large group into a shot with you in any sensible venue that's
banned selfie sticks without getting a wicked case of uh selfie ARM here. But
the flip side is I'm pretty sure this camera makes my nose look big. In terms
of inside guts, the S7 represents the best that Samsung can build. And I'll
explain that asterisk in a moment. So, it's got 4 gigs of LPDDR4 RAM, 32 or 64
gigs of onboard storage with that micro SD expansion slot I mentioned before.
Although, by the way, it can only be used as traditional mass storage. No
adoptable storage in spite of the Android Marshmallow OS. It's rocking
bajillion sensors, including a barometer and heart rate monitor. fast charging
for its non- removable 3000 mAh battery,
a significant capacity bump over the S6, by the way, and support for sexy new
Wave 2 AC wireless access points with multi-user MIMO, which theoretically
means lightning fast Wi-Fi like the iPhone 6S, but in practice means still
fast, but not as fast Wi-Fi. This test was done on a symmetric gigabit internet
connection. Now to the asterisk. Samsung
is shipping two versions of the S7. Either with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820
CPU with an Adreno 530 GPU or an Exynos
8890 CPU with a Mali T880 MP12 GPU
depending on the region. They are similar in speed, but different chipsets
may have different quirks when it comes to custom ROM installation or even apps.
Also notable is the fact that the camera sensor is being dual sourced similarly
to the S6. So you may get either a Sony
or a Samsung sensor. Not by region this
time, but rather it appears to be pure luck of the draw. Which I guess leads us
pretty well to the camera discussion. I
love the S7's camera. Sure, it's got
fewer megapixels than the S6, but they're larger for better lowlight
performance. And I absolutely love the
app. It launches nearly instantly with a double tap of the home button, which if
you're trying to capture the cute antics of kids or pets, is half the battle, and
autofocuses, then snaps a picture either with the on-creen buttons or with the
volume buttons, or even a metric whack of them in burst mode. By the way,
almost as fast. Photo and video capture
can be started from the same window. Photos taken while recording video are
again lightning fast and look really good. And unlike the iPhone 6S that I
was using with my roaming sim on my recent trip to New York while finishing
up this review, by the way, the S7 lets you under the hood with downloadable and
rearrangeable camera modes, including a pro mode that allows adjustments to
white balance, shutter speed, ISO, focus, and even a RAW shooting mode that
should tickle shutter bugs pink. While there are other phones with great
cameras out there, it's the usability that makes the S7 such a killer for me.
And now that all of this extra stuff in
Samsung's camera app actually works well
rather than being weird halfbaked add-ons like they always seemed to be in
the past. I think Apple finally needs to
respond. Which leads me to my thoughts on general usability and the experience
of switching to the S7 as my daily driver for the last couple of weeks.
TouchWiz is in my mind officially a
non-issue. Whether we're talking about split screen or their integrated phone
directory service that attempts to help you filter out useless spam, the things
that it adds no longer hurt the Android
experience in my eyes. And there isn't
really much that I care about that they
take away. Performance of the phone was without fault, and while frequently
switching between it and the iPhone 6S on my recent trip, I never felt like I
was missing a beat, which is high praise indeed. Snapdragon 810's thermal issues
don't seem to have made another appearance here, with the S7 only losing
about 10% of its performance after 10 minutes of continuous Geekbench 3 CPU
benchmarks. And it's not quite an A9, but it's still very solid. And the
screen, while guilty of some oversaturation, managed some fantastic
usability from nighttime to broad summer
daylight. If I had to give some feedback to Samsung, I would ask respectfully
that they give me the choice to use onscreen buttons instead of the hardware
ones. I find it hard to hold devices with capacitive buttons horizontally. I
bump back while reaching to the far left of my keyboard when I'm using it
one-handed. And I often find myself mashing the home button while taking the
S7 out of my pocket. Remember, the headphone jack is on the bottom. So,
that's the part of the phone that you're going to have to grab. I'd also love to,
while I'm giving feedback, have the fingerprint sensor on the lock button
instead of on the home button. It's amazing. I never realized what a great
idea this was until I started using the Xperia E5 Compact. I'd like the lock
button to take me to the notification screen and the home button to take me to
my main desktop when I have a smart lock Bluetooth device connection. And while
I'm at it, Motorola's ambient display
where you can actually interact and preview notifications is much better
than just being able to see the time, the date, and battery life. But with all
that feedback in mind, that's it. I made
it to the end of almost every day with 30% battery or more. And the S7 was such
a pleasure to use that I found myself browsing more, taking more pictures, and
taking more videos. And this is without mentioning that Samsung brought back
waterproofing. So, the S7 is a winner,
and it's overthrown my previous king, the Z5 Compact, by merit of its much
faster and better camera. The only thing
that the Z5 still drives me crazy with
even after the Marshmallow update. So, there it is. Seven generations in. You
finally got me, Samsung. You finally got
me. And you know what else has got me?
DR, makers of the matte black vinyl skin
that was featured in the B-roll for the Galaxy S7 throughout this video. and not
only looks good but also actually in the case of this phone improves the
functionality of the device because I was reading and watching other people's
reviews and everyone's going like oh yeah the F7 is so
slippery yeah not actually if you replace the backing with that matte one
or with one of the carbon fiber ones of which I actually have two examples here
this is a limited edition orange one they did a while ago and here is the
regular black carbon fiber that they usually send us. So, Dbrand skins in a
nutshell, they're affordable, they're easy to apply, they fit perfectly, and
they protect your device from incidental scrapes and scratches while making it
look better. And you're not stuck with matte black or carbon fiber or other
carbon fiber. You can actually choose any finish you want using their
configurator. And you can even mix and match if you want something different on
the front or the back. Or hey, maybe you just want something completely
psychedelic. They can do that, too. So, check them out at the link in the video
description. So, thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know
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