Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge: The Best 2016 Smartphone from Samsung

What's up guys, it's David here, and Samsung has officially unveiled the 5.1 inch galaxy s7. Along with the bigger 5.5 inch galaxy s7 edge. While the two devices look very similar to their predecessors, Samsung has added some great new features that make these new galaxies better than ever. In this video, we're gonna take a look at 10 of the best new features that come with Samsung's latest flagships. (you can see the samsung galaxy s7 edge full specification on smartphonerankings.com

One, design. The first thing we'll talk about is design, and to be honest, there isn't a whole lot of change in the way the s7 looks compared to the s6, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As the s6 was arguably one of the best looking phones in 2015. The galaxy s7 and s7 edge carry over the same premium glass and metal materials we saw in the s6, but this time the glass is slightly curved around the back of the s7, and around the back and front of the s7 edge. Samsung says these curves will result, in not only the phones being more comfortable to hold in the hand, but also make the phones a little bit easier to grip as well. Aside from that, the only other design changes worth noting are the bezels are now even thinner than they were on the s6, and the camera lens now protrudes just half a millimeter from the back marking a big improvement over the s6. You have four color options to choose from in what Samsung is calling black onyx, gold platinum, silver titanium, and a white pearl. So, overall a pretty good improvement on what was already a great design.

Two, water and dust resistance. While, the galaxy s5 had water and dust resistance, it came with the cost of a less than stellar design with plastic flaps you had to open and close every time you wanted to charge the phone. The s6, on the other hand, had the great design that the s5 lacked, but it came with the cost of not having water resistance. On the s7, you finally get the best of both worlds with the great design we talked about earlier complete with IP68 water and dust resistance allowing the s7 to be submerged in up to 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes at a time. Since the phone is sealed internally instead of externally, there are no annoying flaps that you'll ever have to worry about.

Three, performance. Samsung is claiming that the s7 CPU is 30 percent faster than the one on the s6 with a GPU being a whopping 60 percent faster. Now, these numbers could depend on which variant of the galaxy s7 Samsung was talking about. At some regions, like the U.S. will be getting an s7 with a qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip, while other regions will come equipped with Samsung's own Exynos 8 octa chip, but either way both variants will be packing four gigabits of RAM for better multi-tasking, and both variants will have a new liquid cooling system. Which should allow the processor to work harder for longer without having to throttle itself down. Translation, the s7 is going to be stupid fast, and promises to make for some very interesting PhoneBuff style speed tests.

Four, gaming. Speaking of performance, the s7 and s7 edge look to up your gaming experience being the first smartphones to feature the Vulkan API. Samsung says this next generation graphics API will help deliver a PC quality gaming experience on the galaxy s7, and to compliment it, the s7 will be coming with a new game launcher that lets you control things, like how much battery a game is using, whether or not you want to be interrupted by notifications while playing, the ability to lock the capacitive buttons to prevent accidentally backing out of a game, and even a screen capture mode to record your best gaming moments.

Five, hybrid sim card slot. One of the biggest complaints people had about the galaxy s6 was the fact that it didn't come with a micro-sd slot like previous galaxy s devices had, and thankfully, Samsung heard these complaints bringing back SD support on the s7 with a new hybrid sim slot that allows for either a dual sim setup or one sim and one micro SD card setup. That allows you to expand the 32 gigabits of internal storage by up to an additional 200 gigabits. An SD card on the s7 will work just like an SD card did on the s5 allowing you to store media and certain apps to the card. Unfortunately, the s7 won't support Android Marshmallow's new adoptable storage feature. Samsung's reasoning is that the feature could cause confusion for consumers since you can't just remove an adopted SD card, and put it into another device. It's a bit of a let down, but I do get where Samsung is coming from, and hopefully, there will be a work around available for us phone buffs.

Six, fast charging. The galaxy s6 supported fast charging, and the same will be true on the galaxy s7, but on the s7 you have support for fast wireless charging. Where a 15-watt wireless charging pad can charge the s7 faster wirelessly than a standard wire-charger could. Considering that slow charging speeds had been one of the knocks on wireless charging, this is a much welcomed feature.

Seven, always-on display. Samsung says that on average we check our phones over 150 times a day, so to make things a little bit more convenient, the galaxy s7 has an always on display that will let you see things like the time, the date, and any missed notifications without having to wake the screen, and thanks in part to the galaxy s7's energy efficient super amoled display, this feature won't have too much of an impact on battery life using up less than one percent of battery per hour. The always-on display can be customized to your liking with different clock styles and photos available for download. Making it one of those little features that I'm really looking forward to.

Eight, battery. The battery life on the galaxy s6 was okay. It certainly wasn't the best battery out there, and it wasn't the worst either, but with their new phones, Samsung looks to improve battery life by including a larger 3,000 milliamp battery on the galaxy s7, and a huge 3,600 milliamp battery on the s7 edge. The larger capacity along with new hardware and software optimizations should make the s7 last you easily throughout the day, maybe even two days in the case of the galaxy s7 edge.

Nine, edge panels. Both the galaxy s6 edge and the s6 edge plus featured edge panels that gave you quick and easy access to certain apps with a simple swipe from the edge of the screen, and the same could be done on the galaxy s7 edge, but the difference is on the s7 edge, the edge panel is bigger with the panel nearly doubling in size from 260 pixels on the s6 edge to 550 pixels on the s7 edge. This translates more information being displayed on the panels, which combined with the newly released edge panel SDK should make the edge panels on the s7 edge a lot more useful than they were on the s6.

Ten, camera. Samsung did something I never really expected them to do with the camera on the s7, and that is that they lowered the megapixel count down from 16 megapixels on the s6 to 12 megapixels on the s7. As you phone buffs already know by now, a higher megapixel count doesn't always translate into better quality, so Samsung finally stopped with the spec wars, and lowered the megapixel count on the phones in exchange for a larger sensor with larger pixels. The sensor can now open up to an F stop of 1.7. Which is larger than any other smartphone on the market, and the s7 is also the first smartphone to feature dual-pixel technology that will allow for crazy fast auto focus even in low light conditions. Combined, the 1.7 F stop and dual-pixels on the galaxy s7's camera lets in 95 percent more light than the galaxy s6's camera, which should translate into a brighter and sharper image. But we can't judge the s7's camera until we've put it through our tests. Based on the fact that the s6's camera was one of the best out there. The s7's camera looks like it will take it to the next level, and possibly be the best camera on a smartphone, period. Those are our top 10 best new features on the galaxy s7 and s7 edge. We have a bunch of coverage coming up on both devices, so be sure you subscribe to the channel, and enable those channel notifications, so you don't miss out on any of our new videos. Thank you for watching, and as always, I'll see you in the very next episode. (tech music)