The S7 Edge has a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED panel and its Quad HD (2560 x 1440) resolution gives them a pixel density of 535 PPI. The US, Japan and China will be getting the 2.2GHz quad-core, Snapdragon 820-powered chips with other markets due to get the 2.4GHz octa-core Exynos-equipped versions. 32GB and 64GB models are being launched. The S7 features a 3600mAh. battery. Samsung decided not to go with Type C, instead opting for Micro USB.
Verizon released an OTA update today for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge that adds some minor features and fixes several bugs. However, users have noticed that the update also installs a service called DT Ignite that allows carriers to quietly install bloatware. This addition went unmentioned in Verizon’s release notes, but fortunately is easy to disable.
For the past few years, since the Galaxy Note 4, Samsung has built special versions of its flagship phones with an ‘Edge’ screen. Initially, with the Galaxy Note Edge, the single, large curved secondary display was mostly there to show off what Samsung could build rather than being particularly useful. It was also huge.
Since then, the Korean tech giant has been working on developing it in to a useful feature. Now, thanks to third party support and an actual a decent implementation as far as functionality goes, the Edge screen on the Galaxy S7 Edge can be genuinely useful at times. Here’s how to use it…
We’re nearing the end of the first half of 2016, and that means a lot of new Android smartphones have been announced. Starting off the year was the Huawei Mate 8 and Honor 5X at CES in January, of course followed later by Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 edge as well as the LG G5 in February at Mobile World Congress. But which ones are the best buys? Keep reading to find out…
In contrast to Apple’s financial results for the first quarter of 2016, Samsung announced its official earnings for Q1 and saw a year-on-year 5.7% rise in revenue and 12% rise in profits thanks to the S7 series’ success.
Samsung has joined forces with The Weather Channel to launch a brand new weather app, designed specifically for the latest Galaxy handsets. The Weather Channel for Samsung has a whole host of really useful features and metrics, and will be available on the Galaxy Apps store for Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S7 Edge and Galaxy Note 5.
Samsung today announced it’s adding a new color to the Galaxy S7 and the S7 edge lineup – Pink Gold. The new color is now available in Korea, but will be making its way to other territories in the future.
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When the first developer preview of Android N was released a few weeks ago, one of the features we noticed first was the ability to adjust screen DPI. In essence, this display scaling feature allows users to change the size of icons and text across the entire user interface.
While they don’t run Android N yet, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge also have a similar feature baked in to their software. Until recently, the only way to access the option was to install Nova Launcher and add a quick-action ‘DisplayScalingActivity’ widget. Thanks to the most recent software update though (as noted by SamMobile), it’s now part of the display settings options.
HTC may have been given props over the past few years for things such as design, display and audio quality as well as the generally smooth performances of its high-end devices, but the company has often struggled trying to deliver a compelling camera experience.
While our very own review of the just announced 10 is in the making, the camera experts over at DxOMark have already put the 12MP shooter through its paces, and the results seem nothing short of excellent…
Having been on the market for a month, the analysts over at Counterpoint Technology Market Research crunched some numbers, and found that the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are outselling their predecessors fairly comfortably, despite the increasingly harsh competitive market.
Samsung today has announced its earnings guidance for the first quarter of 2016. The company says that it will likely beat expectations with an operating income of $5.7 billion (6.6 trillion won), versus analyst expectations of 4.43 trillion won. The company reported strong results thanks to the release earlier release of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. Samsung traditionally releases its new flagship devices in April, but this year released them in May.
9to5Google’s Cam Bunton had a less than stellar Samsung support experience with the otherwise great Galaxy S7 Edge in case you haven’t read. In order to improve its customer experience, however, the company is launching a major update to the Samsung+ support app that adds a remote assistance feature.
“Some men just want to watch the world burn” and apparently a few of them work at Slickwraps, the popular skins manufacturer. While I’m normally not a big fan of gadget destruction videos, there is something strangely beautiful about a Galaxy S7 Edge being squeezed by a 400 ton hydraulic press.
Each year, Apple releases an iPhone and Samsung releases its Galaxy S-series flagship. Most will argue that they normally represent the best phones available, and this year, it’s no different. But which of this year’s phones is the best overall?
The Galaxy S7 and its curved-screen sibling are fast phones. Incredibly fast. Despite the demanding QHD panels, 4GB of RAM paired with a snappy processor keep things consistently smooth. However, unlike last year’s entire Galaxy S6 family – which mounted the Samsung-made Exynos 7420 – for 2016 Samsung decided to restore some faith in Qualcomm, whose faulty Snapdragon 810 processor gave certain devices more than one issue last year. In the United States, in fact, both Galaxy S7s use a Snapdragon 820 SoC; a choice which of course needed to lead to some controversy…
“Be together, not the same” is the mantra Google has been spreading for quite some time now. It’s a good reflection of its intent and purpose; with 1.5 billion active users and a myriad of OEM partners contributing to its growth, the OS couldn’t ask for more diversity. Among Android enthusiasts, however, a vastly shared belief is that the stock, unadulterated, ‘vanilla’ experience delivered by Google is generally superior to basically any of the offerings brought to the table by third parties. This mainly stems from a bad history that saw manufacturers continuously deliver sub-par experiences and often lag far behind in the update cycle, not to mention the numerous design inconsistencies which added up to Google’s own often messy and unclear aesthetics. When Material Design was introduced back in 2014, however, a few things started to change.
For one, notoriously ill-designed UIs such as those from LG and Samsung (as well as from HTC, Sony, and most others) started to follow Google’s now precise and definite guidelines more closely, giving Android an overall sense of basic consistency at least across major instances. Samsung’s TouchWiz, in particular, got often criticized over the years because of its excessive bloatware and poor design choices, but with the massive hardware overhaul brought by the Galaxy S6 last year, software too got a considerable Lollipop-based facelift which went a little under the radar. The Galaxy S7 brought the whole thing one step further, and even coming from a long series of stock Android devices, I have to admit that my experience with TouchWiz wasn’t just not bad, but left me thinking of it as an outright smart, good-looking and overall well designed ‘skin’…
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The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge has been on the market for roughly a week, and in that first few days, we’ve been testing a number of third party cases to see which we think are the best. Thanks to the phone’s IP67 rating, we know the phone is already pretty well equipped to handle the elements, but a little extra protection from drops and scuffs is always a good thing.
Yesterday morning, at a relatively low key event without much fanfare and following the almost ritual avalanche of leaked schematics and what have you, Apple officially announced the iPhone SE. With a chassis virtually identical to that of the iPhone 5s – and 5 before it, for that matter – the smaller-sized iPhone came back in all of its four-inch glory, and not without raising eyebrows.
According to the company’s claims, however, about thirty million people bought a 4-inch iPhone last year, amounting to almost 8% of all Apple phones sold. Considering the massive marketing push made to advertise the four bigger-screened iPhones introduced in the past couple of years, that certainly is no small feat, indicating that there indeed still is interest for smaller devices, a market the Cupertino giant would be naive to ignore.
Sure, the much more variegated Android landscape has offered a few notable options in years past, but those were either afterthoughts, less powerful ‘mini’ versions of established flagships, or devices explicitly designed to be sub-par when compared to their siblings. The iPhone SE may lack 3D Touch and newer-generation Touch ID, but the rest of the package is clearly inspired by the iPhone 6s’ spec-sheet, and nothing says that this smaller sibling isn’t here to stay.
And that begs the question of how this is going to impact the Android landscape. Are Android manufacturers going to follow suit the coming years, or instead pray for the SE to be a one hit wonder (or a complete dud) – and thus something less to worry about?
Update: Samsung got in touch to say they’d read the article, and to assure me that steps are in place to improve its returns/exchange process for customers.
In respect of the other points raised we do empathise with your frustrations and can assure you that actions are underway and, in some cases, in place (the Samsung Shop is now able to offer exchange products for failures within the returns period) to ensure that we improve our service and support moving forward
It’s hard to imagine there was once a day when Android flagship phones performed noticeably worse than an iPhone. A few years ago, if there’s one thing Android OEMs were known for, it was pushing the most specced-out plastic phones possible. Most of the time, the specifications didn’t translate to a much better experience.
Despite more impressive-sounding specs, the Android flagships were noticeably slower than iPhones, their cameras were terrible and the fit and finish, or build quality was — quite frankly — woeful. It wasn’t true for every phone, but it was a prevailing theme.
A lot has changed over the past 4-5 years. Android phones have caught up with, and arguably, surpassed the iPhone. They have the best cameras, they’re fast, have useful tech like fast/wireless charging, big batteries, SD Card slots, waterproofing, crazy high def OLED displays and are somehow more affordable. What’s more, Apple’s cloud services which underpin its hardware leaves a lot to be desired, especially in staples like photo management, maps and messaging.
But there’s still one major area that Android manufacturers need to get their act together on: Customer Service.
In 2015, Samsung changed its approach to smartphones. Instead of just packing in the most powerful components in to a hideous plastic shell, the company actually gave a damn about design for once. It delivered the stunning glass and metal S6 and S6 Edge, but compromised maybe a little too much on some aspects. Most notably, the battery and lack of external storage.
This year, the manufacturer took what was great about last year’s phones and improved upon the compromises. What that means is that this year, the S7 Edge is easily one of the best phones on the market.
Months before the Galaxy S7 was officially announced, rumors surrounding the device predicted that some regions would get a model equipped with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon processor while other markets received an Exynos-powered version. Those rumors came to pass, and early benchmarks suggested that GPU performance was far better on the Snapdragon models than it was on the Exynos-equipped phones. In contradictory fashion, a couple of new comparison videos suggest those benchmark results were more than a little misleading.
Earlier this week we got our first peek inside the new Galaxy S7 as our friends over at iFixit did their normal teardown of the device. Today, the repair guide site gives us a look inside the device’s sibling with a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
There is no denying that Samsung put a lot of effort into the making of this year’s new flagship devices, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge. Despite having faced several difficulties regarding sales and profit margins, along other Android OEMs, the South Korean giant looks to be on the right track regarding numbers for the newest flagships.
Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung’s handsets business, mentioned during a press briefing that the company saw strong pre-order numbers for the Galaxy S7 phones, saying that they were ‘stronger than expected’…
The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge officially launch on March 11th, despite the fact that most pre-orders have already been sent and delivered to early adopters. With the launch date looming, two of the US’ biggest carriers have kicked off an incentive to buy the new phones from them and not the competition.
Customers buying a Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge from AT&T or T-Mobile can claim back the full retail price of a second phone. Here’s how: