Display
Next up is that display, and you should hardly be surprised by this lovely 5.1 inch panel.
Just like last year’s Galaxy S6, the 5.1 inch screen in the Galaxy S7 is one of the brightest and sharpest displays you’ll ever set eyes on, offering a Quad HD resolution of 2560×1440 and delivering 576 pixels per inch, making it one of the sharpest screens on the planet.
Forget the numbers, though, because they’re not as important as the impressions, and just like the S7 Edge, this is a screen that stands out.
Simply put, it’s pretty, vibrant, easy on the eyes, and one of the only screens that can be viewed under direct sunlight.
Performance
Performance is the next area, and Australians will be treated to a Samsung Exynos 8890 eight-core processor, just like in the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
It should come as no surprise that the S7 is pretty much spot on like the S7 Edge, and that means you don’t just get the same processor, but also the same compliment of memory, storage, liquid-cooled component, and operating system, though there is a tweak between them given that there is no edge screen.
That’s a minor thing, though, and doesn’t affect the performance side of things, which is actually pretty solid, offering a staggering benchmark and some pretty solid activity on the operational side of things.
Testing the S7 in action, we found one of the fastest Quadrant benchmarks we had ever seen, as well as little to no lag in everything we did, whether it was loading apps, multitasking and switching between programs, and generally just using the phone.
Samsung’s Galaxy S7 performed like a dream and never really let up.
Mobile performance was also pretty top notch, and while we didn’t quite achieve the limit of the Category 9 4G modem being used, we did find our speeds maxing out at 211Mbps, a speed which definitely manages to impress, and tells us that Category 6 speeds of around 300Mbps should be possible with no problem in Australia.
In-use
It’s pretty clear that Samsung has been learning how to refine Google’s Android over the past few years, and while we’ve seen Samsung’s overlay “TouchWiz” spread on pretty thick in various models, the variant you find on Aussie S7 and S7 Edge phones is the closest we’ve seen yet to the way Google prefers it, also known as “stock”.
Stock Android is very much the way Android geeks like it, and while companies like Oppo and Huawei go more for an iOS-inspired take — for the people that prefer a phone to feel like an iPhone even when it’s not made by Apple — Samsung’s TouchWiz is now like stock Android, but just different enough to be different.
You’ll find the typical assortment of widget-supporting home screens and an app drawer, while the dropdown notification bar at the very top of the screen can be edited to have your favourite power control options in there.
Samsung has thrown in a little more customisation in its latest TouchWiz implementation, and now you can change the grid size of your home screen, or even get rid of the whole home screen logic with Samsung Labs which will let you try out features Samsung is dabbling with, one of which is an iOS-styled implementation.
Even if you don’t like TouchWiz, you can always load your own launcher, but we found Samsung’s scaled back edition of its Android overlay was nicer than it has previously been, and closer to what Google believes Android should be like, even if it wasn’t really the same.
Camera
Past the interface, we can get stuck into the camera, and this is an area Samsung has been improving in leaps and bounds over the past few years.
And yet here on the Galaxy S7, it’s like we’ve made our way to an entirely different world.
Seriously, the camera on the Galaxy S7 is so good, people who call themselves “photographers” may want to consider a new walk-around body, because while it doesn’t quite have the length or reach to get shots from far back, it has just about everything else you’d want in a compact camera covered.
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