Samsung Galaxy S7 review, in depth: Samsung's new flagship is a fabulous handset

A step up over the S6 in every area imaginable, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is the best smartphone you can buy

Samsung has been at the top of the smartphone tree for some time now, but in 2015 it dropped the ball. Not in terms of the quality of its flagship phones - that remained typically brilliant - but in the way it attempted to market two top-end handsets with the same screen size at vastly different prices. This year, in 2016, with the Samsung Galaxy S7 it's changing that, with clear air between the 5.2in Samsung Galaxy S7 and its 5.5in sibling not only on price but also on screen size.

In short, Samsung - just like Apple does with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus - is giving its customers a clear choice. If you like your smartphones big, choose the 5.5in Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and pay a bit more; if you don't like having to stitch up holes in your pockets every few months, the smaller, slightly cheaper 5.1in Samsung Galaxy S7 I'm reviewing here is the way to go. Either way, you're getting the best smartphone on the market.

But you’re not going to do that because you’re here to find out more. You want to know exactly why it’s so fantastic. Why the design is better, the features more feature-y and the camera more capable than the compact you spent hundreds of pound on ten years ago. For more information about the Samsung Galaxy S7 head over to our sister site Know Your Mobile.There. I said it. You don’t even have to read the rest of the review if you don’t want to. You might as well go out and buy one right now if you want to save yourself the effort. It’s good, great even. Trust me.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: What’s new?

So, without further ado, here’s my review of the Samsung Galaxy S7. I’ll start with a closer look at the major changes, most of which are impossible to spot from a cursory physical inspection.

The first feature of note is storage expansion. Galaxy fans were in uproar about the lack of a microSD slot in last year’s models, so Samsung has brought back the feature here. It’s the sensible thing to do, and Samsung hasn’t compromised on the design of the phone to do it either. The microSD card is neatly hidden away next to the nano-SIM card in an elongated SIM drawer on the top edge, meaning there’s no unsightly second slot to muddy the phone’s clean lines.

The dust and water resistance is another nice feature making a comeback here that doesn’t impact on the look and feel of the phone. It’s an upgrade on the IP67 protection of the Samsung Galaxy S5, too, which was the last Samsung flagship to have the feature.

Technically, this means it’s possible to completely submerge the phone in up to 1.5 metres of water for up to 30 minutes, so you could use it to take pictures of hermit crabs in rock pools – if that’s what floats your boat.

I prefer to think of it as extra peace of mind. With the Galaxy S7, you don’t have to worry about getting your phone out when it’s raining, or putting it down on a beer-soaked table in the pub. From that perspective, it’s something that’s well worth having.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Specification and price

5.1in Super AMOLED display, Quad HD resolution, always on

Octa-core Samsung Exynos 8890 processor (2 x quad-core CPUs running at 2.3GHz and 1.6GHz)

32GB storage

microSD slot supporting up to 200GB

Android 6 Marshmallow

12-megapixel rear camera with f/1.7 aperture, dual-pixel phase-detect autofocus

Smaller camera “hump” protrudes only 0.46mm

IP68 dust- and water resistance

3,000mAh battery capacity

Price: £567 inc VAT, SIM free

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Display

Aside from those headline changes, though, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a mild update. The Samsung Galaxy S6 was, and still is, a very good smartphone, so this doesn’t represent too much of a problem.

The S7 has a 5.1in Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,560 – the same as last year’s Samsung Galaxy S6 – and it’s as sharp as sharp can be. You’d have to look at it with a microscope to see any of the pixels.

The quality of this new display is excellent. Samsung has long perfected the art of producing top-notch screens on its smartphones, somehow managing to tame the oversaturated colours typical of Super AMOLED technology, while delivering something that’s super-accurate and incredibly punchy all at once. That doesn’t change here.

Contrast is perfect, as you'd expect from a Super AMOLED-based panel. Since the individual pixels provide their own source of light, there’s nothing to leach through from behind and so you get inky, perfect black.

Colour quality is excellent. The phone has several different modes available to use, and it ships with the eye-catching Adaptive mode enabled. That’s the one I tested, and it delivers excellent figures.

With auto-brightness disabled, brightness peaks at 354cd/m2, which doesn’t look all that great. As with previous Samsung handsets, though, that all changes when you enable auto-brightness. On a bright sunny day, the screen is capable of peaking much higher – up to 470cd/m2 – so it should be perfectly readable in most conditions.

Colours are excellent. Samsung’s Adaptive mode does a great job of presenting eye-popping graphics without looking too unnatural and covers 100% of the sRGB colour space.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Design

Also unchanged is the glass-sandwich design and exotic, metallic finish that underpins it. In short, the S7 looks just as good as the S6 did last year – all shiny, flashy and glitzy glamour – and it looks just as awful once covered in greasy fingerprints. This is a phone you’ll be wiping on your shirt to keep clean – a lot.

Flip the phone over and look at the rear, however, and you’ll begin to see differences. First, the camera “hump” has been reduced in size, from around 1.6mm on last year’s model to 0.46mm here. It also has more rounded edges, meaning it’s less likely to catch on the edges of your pocket when you’re stowing it away, and it lies flatter when you pop it on a wireless charger, so it’s less likely to fail to charge.

Second, the vertical edges of the phone at the rear now curve up to meet the phone’s slim aluminium frame. If you keep up with all things smartphone-related, it’s just like the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, except without the stylus.

The rest of the design is fairly similar to the S6. The buttons and ports are all in the same place: the SIM card and microSD drawer are on the top edge, the volume buttons on the left, the power button on the right, and the 3.5mm audio, micro-USB port and speaker grille on the bottom.

The only other major difference is the screen’s new always-on capability. As with Motorola’s Moto Display, this shows useful information such as the time and recent notifications on the screen, even when the phone is on standby.

Unlike Motorola’s version, Samsung’s is switched on permanently, and you get a choice of what style of always-on screen is shown. There are seven different basic clock and notification views, ranging from basic digital displays to twin, world clock views. You get a choice of two different calendar views, and three images - a couple of the stars and planets, and another of stylised trees.

Having lived with the S7 for a while now, though, I’m not convinced of the usefulness of this feature. Although it’s nice to be able to see what time it is without tapping the screen or pressing the power button, the fact that it doesn’t show more detailed notifications is a big missed opportunity. Although you can see when you’ve missed a call or received a text message, you can’t see who the call or message was sent by. Come on, Samsung - I want more information.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: A faster, better camera

That’s a disappointment, but the camera is a different matter entirely. Behind that smaller camera hump, there’s been a dramatic change to the imaging sensor. Samsung has reduced the resolution from 16 megapixels to 12, and in the process changed the aspect ratio of images captured with it from 16:9 to a squarer 4:3.

You might think this would be a problem, but in the process (or perhaps as a result of the resolution reduction), Samsung has boosted the size of the pixels from 1.16um to 1.4um and brightened up the aperture to f/1.7.

This is brighter than any other rival smartphone and, on its own, delivers 25% more light to the sensor than last year’s S6. More light means faster shutter speeds and sharper pictures. It can also mean less noise, which should lead to cleaner, more detailed photographs.

That’s precisely what the Samsung Galaxy S7’s camera delivers. I took a series of shots in exactly the same conditions as the S6 and, upon examining the EXIF data, found the S7 tended to shoot with both a faster shutter speed and lower ISO sensitivity. That doesn’t make a huge difference for outdoor shots, but in low-light situations it means you’re far more likely to get sharp pictures, especially when your subject is moving.

On the downside, I found the colours weren’t quite as saturated as on photographs captured with the S6 and that the auto-exposure didn’t work quite as well, blowing some highlights out where the S6 didn’t.

The other big development on the camera front is that the sensor has an improved phase-detect autofocus system. It’s a “dual-pixel sensor” of the type first used by Canon in cameras such as the superb Canon EOS 70D and, predictably, Samsung is claiming it as a world first in smartphones.

Essentially, what this new system provides is the ability to use fast, accurate phase-detect autofocus on every pixel on the sensor, not just a small selection of them. Previously, hybrid phase detect pixels were used, and these were clustered around the centre of the sensor.

It's clearly a superior system. Samsung demonstrated this at the launch event for the phone by mounting an S6 and S7 next to each other at the end of a sealed box and moving a dimly lit photograph back and forth, forcing both cameras to refocus at exactly the same time. Predictably, the S7 focused quicker than the S6 – noticeably so – and it reflected that performance in real-world use. I never saw the S7 hunting for focus as the S6 occasionally would, another factor adding to the reliability of the Samsung Galaxy S7’s camera.

All told, the Samsung Galaxy S7 has a fantastic camera. Although it captures less detail than the S6’s snapper and the colours aren’t quite as good, it’s more reliable in a wider variety of situations and lighting conditions. For the vast majority of smartphone users, it’s the better camera and a worthwhile step forward.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Performance and battery life

There was some confusion surrounding the makeup of the internal components at the launch of the Galaxy S7. Some reports said it would have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, others said it would have some form of Samsung-brand processor, and Samsung itself wasn’t saying anything at all, instead claiming generic performance increases of 30% for the new CPU and 64% for the new GPU.

We now know that the UK version (reviewed here) will have an octa-core Samsung Exynos 8890. This will comprise a pair of quad-core CPUs, one running at 2.3GHz for demanding tasks, the other running at 1.6GHz for more lightweight jobs.

As for RAM and storage, the S7 has 4GB and 32GB respectively (with a 64GB version available in some markets). The big news, of course, is that the Samsung Galaxy S7 has expandable storage via a microSD slot in the SIM card tray. You won’t be able to pool this storage with the internal allocation due to the difference in performance, but it is possible to store photos and videos and to install compatible apps to the SD card.

Finally, we come to the phone’s new liquid-cooling system. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has a sealed “thermal spreader” inside, which uses evaporation and condensation to cool the phone more effectively than standard methods. The aim here is to reduce overheating and, therefore, CPU and GPU throttling. This means performance should be more reliably quick.

So how does all this go together to affect performance? You guessed it: it’s quite good.

It feels ultra-responsive, as you’d expect. Screen swipes, panning and zooming web pages and Google Maps, scrolling through image-heavy websites; everything feels buttery smooth and runs at hyperspeed. It’s so quick it almost feels like it’s getting ahead of itself at times.

And it’s just as impressive in the benchmarks. Here are a few charts to get you started:

The message from these figures is clear. The Samsung Galaxy S7 equipped with the Samsung Exynos 8890 SoC is as fast as any on the market today. It matches or beats the all-conquering iPhone 6s in most of the tests and stretchs out a lead over the rest of the competition.

It only comes a clear second best in one of the tests – the games-focused Manhattan onscreen test. The reason for this is because the onscreen test is run at native resolution, and with the iPhone 6s’ screen being a much lower resolution than the S7’s Quad HD, it’s hardly surprising it holds the advantage here.

There’s only one problem – and it’s a small one. Although most of the big-name titles I installed and tried out on the S7 ran smoothly at the highest of detail levels, there was one title that glitched and stuttered: Ketchapp’s endless running game, The Pit. I suspect this is a driver issue, however, that should be fixable in software as the issue isn’t widespread.

So performance is great. The big question when it comes to performance is whether the boost in speed – and that always-on screen – has had a negative impact on battery life. I’m happy to report that it doesn’t seem that way, and that’s most likely due to the S7’s large 3,000mAh battery.

In our video-rundown test, in fact, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a trooper. It lasted almost 18 hours in flight mode, playing back our test video file on loop with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2, a result that beats the S6, the iPhone 6s and all its major rivals by a distance.

In real-world use, however, this isn’t reflected in the way I expected. You can expect a day out of it with moderate use, but even with relatively little use I found myself having to reconnect the S7 to its charger well before the day-and-a-half mark.

Whether that’s due to the always-on screen – which isn’t accounted for in our test since the screen is always displaying video content – or some other factor isn’t clear. However, the S7 clearly isn’t the battery-life revelation we were all hoping for. If that’s important to you, you’re better off with the iPhone 6s Plus or Sony Xperia Z5.

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Software and gaming

However, it’s good to see that Samsung is taking the effort to make using the phone more efficient. As with many of its rivals, it has a highly effective Ultra power-saving mode, that cuts background tasks to a minimum and switches the screen to monochrome to save power. There's also a slightly less aggressive Power saving mode, which caps the phone's performance, limiting when the phone vibrates and restricting when it uses the GPS radio. It's worth noting that when either of these modes is enabled, the phone's swanky new Always on screen function is automatically disabled.

New for the S7, alongside the introduction of Android 6.0 Marshmallow as the base operating system, Samsung has also added a way to help you minimise battery consumption when you’re playing games. This is achieved primarily through the Game Launcher app, which lets you cap the frame rate to 30fps and reduce the resolution so you have fun without worrying about the battery going flat.

Normally, games will run at frame rates of up to 60fps, so this has the potential to save a significant chunk of power that's consumed while gaming.  

And generally, this seems to work well. Although the drop in frame rate and quality is noticeable when you enable the feature, it isn’t so bad that it affects your enjoyment. A slightly bigger issue is that the system as yet doesn’t recognise all games, so you might install your favourite only to find you can't save power on it after all.

Worse than this, however, is that some games it does recognise, it doesn’t play nicely with. With The Pit (once again the culprit), once I'd set the app to cap the frame rate, instead of dropping frames and maintaining game speed, gameplay actually went into slow motion, rendering it completely unplayable.

That isn’t the end of the Game Launcher’s features, however. It also gives users some handy in-game features, via Samsung’s floating Game Tools button. Tap this and a set of shortcuts pops up, overlaid on top of the game you’re playing. The button can be dragged around so it doesn’t get in the way, and it adds the ability to block out notifications for a distraction-free gaming session, take screenshots and record video, and disable the phone’s sensitive back and recent apps buttons.

All these are nice features to have, and they add to Samsung’s already-comprehensive TouchWiz Android overlay, which here runs on top of Android 6 Marshmallow.

Samsung hasn’t made any huge changes to this for the S7, beyond those already detailed and those enforced by the adoption of Android 6. There's Doze, of course, which allow the phone to save power when it's been left still on a surface - your bedside tablet, for instance. The permissions system is now more granular, with apps asking for access to the phone's resources as and when they need them, rather than in bulk on install. It's also worth noting that the new permissions system also allows you to disable individual permissions you may have granted previously.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow also introduces Now on Tap, a handy new search contextual facility that takes a screen shot, reads it, and generates intelligent search suggestion based on the content. This very clever, but in the months I've been using Marshmallow-based handsets, I haven't found it to be particularly useful.   

Aside from the goodies that Android 6 brings with it, however, TouchWiz remains a divisive build. Some people love the comprehensive set of features it delivers, but others bemoan the slightly childish and cartoonish nature of the UI, and there's no denying that Samsung takes its precious time to deliver Android updates. 

Samsung Galaxy S7 review: Verdict

There’s no doubt that the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a better phone than the S6 – its camera  and performance are both better; in some respects battery life is superior; and the return of storage expansion and disaster-proofing is a massive bonus.

Is it good enough to oust the superb Nexus 6P from the top of Alphr’s top smartphone chart? I’d say not quite, and that’s entirely due to the price.

As usual, Samsung is pricing the S7 at the upper end of the spectrum. It’s £569 inc VAT, and free handset contract deals start at around £40 per month. The Nexus 6P is more than £100 cheaper SIM-free and free phone contracts start at around £27 per month.

Although the Nexus 6P isn’t quite as good as the S7, it’s much better value for money, and for me that tips the balance – just – in its favour.

For those who want the best, however, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is undoubtedly the phone to buy for now. It’s fast, sleek, beautiful and capable. It's a wonderful handset you’ll love to own.