Display
Next up is the screen, and this is an area that Samsung knows all too well, building TVs and displays for quite some time, with quite a lot of research in OLED and AMOLED technology.
As expected, Samsung’s S7 Edge relies on Super AMOLED — Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode — much like Samsung’s phones have for years now, and just like in last year’s flagships, you’re also seeing a screen delivering on Quad HD resolution, or that of 2560 x 1440 pixels for those playing at home.
The screen size has changed a bit, with a 5.5 inch model on the Galaxy S7 Edge, and when you do the math and put these numbers into a blender, you find out that this creates a density of 534 pixels per inch (ppi), roughly 200 ppi higher than Apple’s iPhone 6S, and almost a hundred ppi higher than Apple’s similarly sized iPhone 6S Plus.
What does this mean to the human eye?
Not much, and once you go over 300 pixels per inch, it more or less becomes a pointless contest, except to say the screens are all bloody sharp, and Samsung’s S7 Edge screen even more so.
Take the phone out in the bright Aussie sun — or the bright sun in any part of the world — and just like we saw on the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 back in 2014, the phone grabs power from a reserve and pushes the screen past its maximum controlled brightness to a level where you’ll be able to actually see what you’re doing.
The screen is also curved which helps make it feel like there are no edges and you’re merely gripping the sides of the display. It’s not quite true, but it works, and about the only time it becomes a problem is when icon and shortcut touching doesn’t get detected.
Finally, Samsung has included Corning’s scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass 4 on both sides, the front and the back.
Let’s just get this clear: this is scratch-resistant glass, not drop or shatter-proof glass. If you drop this phone and the screen breaks, the glass is not at fault, and there’s only so much a curved glass screen can do to accomodate corner drops.
That being said, if you keep it in your pocket with other items — keys, rocks, sharp objects — or have very sharp and long nails, the phone should look a little nicer than other devices that don’t have Gorilla Glass 4.
Performance
With the design and display out of the way, it’s time to get into how the S7 Edge performs, and in Australia, we’ll be experiencing a slightly different hardware mix to what some other parts of the world are receiving.
The processor found in the Aussie S7 Edge is one of Samsung’s own units, the Exynos 8890, which is an eight-core chip that continues some of the work left by the S6 series last year.
Like the processor in the S6, the benchmarks on Samsung’s 8890 are stellar, producing speeds that are 20,000 points higher than what we saw last year, while the inclusion of 4GB RAM keeps apps moving along nicely.
When testing a phone, we usually find spots of lag or slowdowns here and there, but the week we’ve spent with the Galaxy S7 Edge has shown very little, if any at all.
In essence, the Galaxy S7 Edge just flies.
Mobile data performance is equally impressive, with Samsung’s latest phones adding to the choice of Category 9 LTE devices in this country, of which Samsung is still the only supplier of (at the time this was published).
For those unaware of what this jargon translates to, we’re talking about the maximum download and upload speed you can get when connecting to a 4G network, and with a Category 9 modem inside the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, you could theoretically see speeds as high as 450Mbps down and 50Mbps up, though on our tests through Telstra’s 4GX network in Sydney’s CBD, we saw as low as 40Mbps and as high as 154Mbps.
Yikes, now that’s fast, and is a description you could probably repeat a lot when describing the S7 Edge.
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