Samsung Galaxy S7

[XFRFred]

Just had a play around with the S7 Edge at the Carphonewarehouse. My god it's quick.
The camera is something else too. The focus speed is incredible and near on the same speed as me trying to focus between near and far.
It's very quick to focus and to take pictures, that are not blurry.
The screen is bright and vibrant and given the size of the screen, it doesn't feel cumbersome. I compared it to the LG G2, which i'm currently using, and the S7 is slimmer, although wider and taller. It's lighter too.
One has been pre-ordered in gold, looking forward to the Gear VR too

[Ste1987]

XFRFred said:

Just had a play around with the S7 Edge at the Carphonewarehouse. My god it's quick.
The camera is something else too. The focus speed is incredible and near on the same speed as me trying to focus between near and far.
It's very quick to focus and to take pictures, that are not blurry.
The screen is bright and vibrant and given the size of the screen, it doesn't feel cumbersome. I compared it to the LG G2, which i'm currently using, and the S7 is slimmer, although wider and taller. It's lighter too.
One has been pre-ordered in gold, looking forward to the Gear VR too

Nice one! Really looking forward to getting mine now

[MuffDaddy]

I've been playing with one for a while now. Really impressed with the screen and camera. Just waiting to get my hands on the 360 camera.

Disclaimer, I get paid by Samsung.

[XFRFred]

MuffDaddy said:

I've been playing with one for a while now. Really impressed with the screen and camera. Just waiting to get my hands on the 360 camera.

Disclaimer, I get paid by Samsung.

Lucky bugger
Would have been nice if the silver titanium S7 Edge with 64GB was available for pre order

[lionelf]

XFRFred said:

MuffDaddy said:

I've been playing with one for a while now. Really impressed with the screen and camera. Just waiting to get my hands on the 360 camera.

Disclaimer, I get paid by Samsung.

Lucky bugger
Would have been nice if the silver titanium S7 Edge with 64GB was available for pre order

Agreed - I'd have snapped a silver one up. Instead I've had to pre-order the black one. I really fancied the Gold one but too many people started taking the p*ss with camp jokes about blokes with Gold phones so have settled for boring old black...again.

[XFRFred]

lionelf said:

Agreed - I'd have snapped a silver one up. Instead I've had to pre-order the black one. I really fancied the Gold one but too many people started taking the p*ss with camp jokes about blokes with Gold phones so have settled for boring old black...again.

In a weird way, it looks more like a silver.
Doesn't matter though, i'm going to be putting it in a case. I have a tendency to drop phones.

[BOBTEE]

The girlfriend and I have S5s nearing the end of their O2 contract, not sure we can bear to give O2 any more money so we're gonna jump ship to another carrier.

Are there any downsides to going sim free and buying direct from Samsung? Considering going to three.

Ta

[rgw2012]

I've just upgraded with O2 as I found them to be no worse than Voda, Virgin or EE - thay all have issues so they are all much of a muchness to me. Pre ordered the S7 Edge in black as I had a play with one in Carphone Warehouse and it was just perfect in my eyes. I had a Note 3 and was thinking of going to the Note 4 but once I played with the S7 Edge I was sold. Roll on March 8th

[Luke.]

[redacted]

[Luke.]

No problem. I ordered mine from ibuygou.com

Got my last phone from them an no problems at all.

Though just seen Xiaomi have had over 14 million registrations for the phone, whatever that means, so no idea how long it'll be til I actually get it..

[Luke.]

By the way, also on Three - the network and 4G works perfectly with my current Xiaomi Redmi Note 2. (Talking of which that was another bargain at £120 and only marginally slower than my old S6.)

Edited by Luke. on Monday 29th February 10:11

[neenaw]

I'm looking to move away from iPhones now that I'm due a new handset and the S7 looks like it fits the bill for what I'll be needing.

How have others found it moving away from Apple to Android? I'm still using an iPad and a Macbook Pro so it looks like I'll have to move my calendar etc across to Google to retail the syncing between devices but other than that should it be fairly painless?

[robsa]

XFRFred said:

Lucky bugger
Would have been nice if the silver titanium S7 Edge with 64GB was available for pre order

There is no S7 Edge with 64GB now in most of the world I don't think. AFAIK Korea is the only country who may get 64GB. But of course it does have the SD slot now... This phone has the potential to be something really special. I have a 64GB Gold S6 and I love it, but the battery is crap and I'm annoyed that it's not waterproof - I'm often working outside and in the rain you get condensation and it can damage a phone.

Just look at the improvements on the S7:

An even better screen too, which is just crazy; Samsung are just masters of the AMOLED screen and I don't think anyone would disagree with the fact that they are the best smartphone screens in the world quite comfortably right now. Not sure what the 'always on' will be like though.

Bigger battery - Samsung actually make the phone 1mm *thicker* and put a bigger battery in! Unheard of! I have heard rumours of amazing battery life, but I guess we will just have to wait and see if they turn out to be true.

better camera - again, this is nuts! The S6 camera is so good, I can't wait to see what the S7 one is capable of. I mean, an f1.7 lens! That is seriously nuts. And 1.55µm sensor pixels too - the S6 is 1.12µm so it will have nearly double the amount of light hitting the sensor pixels. Can't wait to try it out! And they are releasing add-on lenses too (wide angle, telephoto and fisheye maybe?) Also it protrudes less from the back

And it has wireless fast charge, another criticism I had of the S6 - wireless charging is crap partly due to the slowness of charging. So if the S7 is kept topped up on a wireless mat too then wireless charging may actually become useful (when my S6 gets to full charge on my Samsung wireless charge pad it turns off, so if you do it before you go to bed, for instance, by the time you wake up it's back down to 88% again - very annoying!).

Improved fingerprint reader, and improved camera startup and response time from the double tap, another thing that is really useful.

The only thing that I can see with the S7 as a (slight) weakness is the fact it still only has the one external speaker. And given all the rest of the stuff, I would happily trade a merely acceptable external speaker for all the other improvements. But it still has the aptX codec for bluetooth headphones; my Sony SBH80s sound brilliant on my S6, be interesting to find out if they have made any improvements to the DSP on the S7.

It really does look like the S7 could be approaching a perfect smartphone right now? It sounds like Samsung have actually listened to their customers and the smartphone/tech press and made loads of intelligent and useful upgrades, whilst introducing no crap, faddy features.

I'm so tempted to chop in my S6 for a silver S7 Edge!

[robsa]

neenaw said:

I'm looking to move away from iPhones now that I'm due a new handset and the S7 looks like it fits the bill for what I'll be needing.

How have others found it moving away from Apple to Android? I'm still using an iPad and a Macbook Pro so it looks like I'll have to move my calendar etc across to Google to retail the syncing between devices but other than that should it be fairly painless?

My last iPhone was an iPhone 4, so quite a while ago; it took me a fairly long time to get my head around Android after iOS. I nearly took my Android phone back 2 or 3 times because of 'how crap' android was compared to iOS. But after a month or two I realised it wasn't crap at all, just different and I had to get used to it. I still use a MacBook as a laptop, but I don't think I could go back to the closed ecosystem of iOS now personally.

The S7 has Marshmallow on it, which is a very well developed OS now. I would say the S7, if the reviews live up to the phone's specs, is going to put a huge amount of pressure on Apple with the iPhone 7 because it is just so good - it has no obvious weak areas at all.

[lionelf]

My only gripe about the spec is that you can't make the sd card the default storage device for your pictures etc...you'll still have to transfer them to it.

They should have made the external storage adoptable by now.

[Ste1987]

lionelf said:

My only gripe about the spec is that you can't make the sd card the default storage device for your pictures etc...you'll still have to transfer them to it.

They should have made the external storage adoptable by now.

If you're referring to the camera, you can set the default storage in the settings.

[robsa]

lionelf said:

My only gripe about the spec is that you can't make the sd card the default storage device for your pictures etc...you'll still have to transfer them to it.

They should have made the external storage adoptable by now.

Of course you can make the SD default for photos etc. in the usual way. What I think you might mean is Samsung haven't enabled 'adoptable' storage for SD card, supposedly because they think users will screw their phones up if they are given it. Adoptable storage is a new feature of Marshmallow and basically integrates the SD card into the phones main memory so it all looks like one contiguous block (as opposed to the split we see now with phones with SD cards). This means you can properly install apps onto the SD card (not the crappy half-arsed method they do now) but if you take the SD card out it can potentially corrupt your OS. Also, you need to get the fastest SD card as the S7 uses UFS 2.0 internally. So by making the SD card adoptable it could slow the phone down a bit during access. It also means you can't remove and swap SD cards.

I expect Samsung will bow to pressure and enable it eventually, it's ridiculous of them not to.

[Zippee]

Pre-ordered mine with Voda on Friday in black with the free VR headset thingy - looking forward to getting it in a couple of weeks

[NordicCrankShaft]

They had one in the local phone shop on display yesterday. I wasn't actually that impressed with the appearance, I thought the S6 Edge+ was a nicer phone. The camera was cracking though!

[Zato]

Bit rubbish Europe will not get the SD820. Seen some benchmarks and the LG G5 trounces the S7 Euro cpu.