Full review: Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge – a great phone just got even better
If you can live with it being a fingerprint magnet, the Korean manufacturer’s latest premium Galaxy smartphone offers a generous display, smooth body and increased battery life
In terms of looks, the latest Samsung flagship smartphones are hardly head-turners, but on closer examination, the new Galaxy S7 Edge and S7 might just be what the brand’s avid fans have been waiting for.
READ MORE - Review: Samsung Galaxy S7 - great camera, outstanding battery life
Hardware
The S7 Edge is a well-designed smartphone. While it’s built on the earlier S6 Edge, subtle updates have made it all the more pleasing. The whole device appears rounder. Gone are the sharp edges that jut out like a bracket above the glass; instead, the glass almost melds into the metallic body as though it’s part of the chassis.
The camera on the back no longer protrudes like a hump and therefore no longer breaks the smooth, curvy aesthetic. However, the S7 Edge is a fingerprint magnet. It makes you embarrassed to want to show off your shiny curved phone to anyone without a good wipe down.
It seems mobile users have come to accept phones with displays of between 5 and 5.5 inches as a standard. The S7 Edge has a generous display size of 5.5 inches – identical to the iPhone 6 Plus series – but the phone itself is smaller than the latter.
The trade-off, as with most thin-bezelled phones (hello Galaxy Note 5) is that annoying accidental presses are easy to make.
The curved “edge” display is now in its second generation, and sadly it’s still not a pillar feature.
New to the S7 Edge (and soon to older Edge devices receiving the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system update) is the Edge Panel. When the phone is unlocked, from any screen or app, you can swipe in from the right edge to bring up panels of information. It occupies a larger area than the Edge Feeds and so naturally it can display more information. The panels could show news, weather, contacts and tasks. Some of these we’ve seen before, but the fact there’s now more space makes them all the more useful. Think of them as extended widgets. This is a great example of Samsung putting that extra memory and processing power to good use.