The Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Review, Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTSoftware UX
As is always the case, there’s a perpetual debate over the role of the OEM when it comes to Android devices. For better or worse, Samsung seems to believe that they need to add their own framework and UI over Android. To some extent, I suspect that most users are going to find stock Android to be rather spartan out of the box, so it does make sense for OEMs like Samsung to continue adding their own custom applications and frameworks to help differentiate themselves from the competition.
With the Galaxy S5, it was evident that Samsung had dramatically changed their design direction for TouchWiz, but I would argue that their design aesthetic still wasn’t quite perfect, and performance wasn’t completely there either. With the Galaxy S6, Samsung had gotten closer to the mark in some ways, but the continued use of excessively neon colors just made parts of the UI feel off at times, and performance still wasn’t perfect.
With the Galaxy S7, performance has improved noticeably, but it’s really hard for me to say whether this is because Samsung has improved their codebase, or if a faster SoC is just making it harder to notice areas in need of optimization. At any rate, while the Galaxy S7 isn’t perfectly smooth - dropping frames now and then - it is sufficiently performant that you’re not going to find distracting lag.
The default theme of the Galaxy S7 continues to feel pretty similar to the Galaxy S6, so for the most part things are acceptable here, but the use of color is still a bit excessive as a number of icons still use neon colors rather than more neutral pastel colors. Of course, the theme store now has a number of Material Design themes, which greatly improve the situation. I installed one pretty much immediately, which helps make the device feel a lot better in everyday use. However, I’m still of the opinion that this is something that a user shouldn’t need to do out of the box, so this is an area where Samsung can improve.
The other features that Samsung touted for the Galaxy S7 are interesting, but I’m not really sure they’re all that well executed. Always-On Display is nice to have, but for some reason it's quite reluctant to turn off the display when the ambient light sensor and proximity sensor are covered. As a result I turned it off as it’s clearly going to be contributing to idle battery drain in situations where it shouldn’t.
I also found that the fingerprint scanner is pretty much identical to the one in the Galaxy S6, which isn’t entirely surprising as both identify themselves as a Synaptics fingerprint scanner. Both still seem to be quite sensitive to the initial training period and in my experience won’t really work all that well if you don’t cover your entire fingerprint effectively during that period.
Other than this, TouchWiz doesn’t really stand out in any way as of now. Of course, Samsung Pay will be interesting for me to try as I still regularly run into terminals that don’t support NFC in any shape or form, but I haven’t really been able to spend much time testing Samsung Pay yet. I don’t really find TouchWiz to be a bad thing at this point, but I’m not really sure it’s a good thing either. With a serious emphasis on optimization and a major aesthetic overhaul, it’s entirely possible that I could find myself saying quite differently in the near future, but for now if you found the Galaxy S6 and Note 5 OEM UIs to be usable you’ll find the Galaxy S7 to be usable as well.
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jjj - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
One last time , these apps due to the different core configs can change the rankings. The one that gets 20h could go to 12 and the one with 16 to 14h.That was the main point here.Because the vast majority of users have such apps, you can't reach relevant results without factoring them in.A phone can get good results in the current test and poor in actual usage.retrospooty - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
That is an extremely unlikely example. In real world usage, Octa cores have had very little difference in any area (performance or efficiency) vs. their quad core counterparts unless there is an issue with the ROM where it's simple bleeding power. Whatever though, if you feel so strongly about it, by all means, do some testing on various phones and submit to a few sites and see how worthwhile it is.jospoortvliet - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
I'm no fan of the hitching at the AND team but he has a point with the background tasks - an average modern phone has a lot of them and testing endurance with them all disabled isn't realistic. Moreover, indeed a dual core would probably perform worse with more background tasks than a quad-core or octacore as they can spread the load and keep their cores at an energy-efficient optimal speed.A repeatable, fixed background load would be good to have. Also hard to write, certainly across ios and Android due to their different capabilities and limitations with regards to background tasks. So I get why it hasn't been done and if jjj is up for writing a tool that does it I bet the anandtech team would take it... Yeah.
leexgx - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
the only thing i find with anandtech is battery tests is that they do not follow real world battery use (to get correct results divide it by about 2 or 2.5 and there is your real battery use, when you look at anandtech reviews, all other tests are good, most phones last around 4 hours Screen on time (max tends to be 4 hours but can be as low as 1.5 hours)the only exception to that rule tends to be the
Motorola RAZR MAXX phones (Low end CPU with 3200 battery),
CUBOT H1 1Ghz Quad core, 720p screen {basicly Samsung Note 2 spec} with Massive 5200 battery, (i own and love, and only costs £110 !!) still miss not having the HTC ONE stereo speakers but i take 8 hours over 2 hours (without having to use an external battery case that turns it into a brick)
and the Huawei Mate 8 (4000 battery)
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
GFXBench long term performance is currently not useful to anybody as it hits Vsync in the current T-Rex test. In the full review we'll have a proper test which will be of use for users.jjj - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Seems that you might be wrong Andrei. I am guessing you got the MI5 but that's 1080p and you forgot to factor that in? Here at 1440p you don't hit the 60FPS wall even in the first run.If the MI5 doesn't fall bellow 60FPS with the 1080p, it would be relatively good news, as it means less than 33%-ish throttling with a 1080p display and no heatpipe.
hansmuff - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
This German review posted some GFXbench results you might be interested in, however ofc their phone uses Exynos. Hard to say that Snapdragon would behave the same way, but it's also clear that having a heatpipe alone in the phone doesn't mean it won't throttle.. significantly at some points.http://www.computerbase.de/2016-03/samsung-galaxy-...
jjj - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Thanks a lot, ofc has nothing to do with SD820 but having this for the Exynos is nice too.Digitimes was claiming that only the SD820 models have the heatpipe, no clue if true or not, guess it's something else that has to be verified.
jjj - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
The Exynos models do have the heatpipe too.tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Is that what you do with your phone? Run continuous benchmarks all day?I understand we want an idea about throttling but using those benchmarks as proxy for expected performance won't get you that info about day to day usage.