Samsung Galaxy S7 edge was launched few months back by Samsung and it is still one of the best flagship smartphone available in the market. We were trying our hands on Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge since long and we are sharing the hands-on review of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge for all Geeky Stuffs readers.
There are two versions of Galaxy S7 Edge available based on connectivity – single SIM version and dual SIM version. Depending on that, the memory card slot will either work as just memory card slot or also as a nano-SIM slot.
Both of these version are exactly same in terms of features and hardware specs, the only difference is in the type of memory card slot they are having. So, you can consider this very same review for Galaxy S7 Edge and Galaxy S7 Edge Duos both.
This detailed hands-on review of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is divided in different section covering features, specs and performance of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge separately.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes in a beautiful black retail box. The retail box of Galaxy S7 Edge contains the smartphone, USB cable, USB connector, a pair of earphones, SIM card tray ejector pin and a quick charger along with quick start guide and some user manuals.
Watch the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge unboxing video below.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a very beautiful and premium looking design. Galaxy S7 Edge sports a slim metal body with 7.7mm thickness. Galaxy S7 Edge is the most high-end Samsung smartphone and in its design and body clearly states that. One side of the screen is curved that let you access the Edge Screen.
The back panel is non-removable and comes with the Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. . The USB port is at the bottom along with the 3.5mm audio jack, microphone and a tiny speaker grill. At the top, there is a microphone again with the card slots.
There are three keys on the body of Galaxy S7 Edge – two volume rockers on the left and a power on/off key on the right side of the device. The Dual Pixel 12MP camera is given on the back along with the dual-LED flash and heart rate sensor. A shiny Samsung logo is given in the center of the back panel.
There are proximity sensor and 5MP camera on the front side. There are two capacitive keys provided along with the Home button that also works as the fingerprint scanner. But one drawback is that the Home button is mechanical, just touching it will not bring you to the Home screen.
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED screen having 1440 x 2560 pixels resolution which will give you approximately 534 PPI pixel density. So, you will get the sharp display and will not find any pixels on the screen. Even though the screen size is moderately big, the screen-to-body ratio is around 76% and it makes using the device with hand an easy job.
A new feature in Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is the Always On screen that is basically a copy of Lumia Glance Screen. It let you see the time, date and number of notifications waiting to be checked on the locked screen. It is a nice and productive feature for sure.
Screen of the Galaxy S7 Edge comes with Gorilla Glass 4 protection . The screen quality is really and it is bright enough to provide a nice sunlight readability and the viewing angles are also very good.
We performed the knife scratch test and key scratch test on the screen of Galaxy S7 Edge to check how good is the Gorilla Glass 4 screen protection. It performed great and came out of the test without getting a single scratch. You can watch the Galaxy S7 Edge knife scratch test video below.
But after awhile the glass on the back panel started getting some scratches. So even though both sides of Galaxy S7 Edge are claimed to have the same protective glass, the back side is somehow not good enough and gets scratches.
Also, the glass on the Home key or fingerprint scanner started getting smudgy within few days. So even though the design of the device looks great and flagship, the material used is somehow not that great. You can also see many people complaining the same in the Comments section of above scratch test video.
Galaxy S7 Edge is a 4G LTE device and sports the Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890 Octa-core processor. The processor is supported by 4GB of RAM and an Adreno 530 or Mali-T880 MP12 GPU. The one we got had the Exynos 8890 octa-core processor
Internal memory in Galaxy S7 Edge is 32GB or 64GB but it is expandable using the dedicated microSD card slot. You can use a memory card of up to 256GB to expand the memory. If you are having the Galaxy S7 Edge Duos then the memory card slot can be used as the second SIM slot. You also get the free 115GB of cloud storage from the pre-installed OneDrive app on your Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
Out of 32 GB, the user available memory is 24.3 GB and after booting up the device for the first time, the free RAM was just 1.6 GB. So it is pretty bad considering the fact 55% of RAM is pre-occupied. And even after closing all apps, we got only 1.9 GB RAM free.
It comes with lots of sensors including fingerprint scanner, accelerometer, proximity sensor, gyro, barometer, heart rate monitor, SpO2 and magnetic compass. All of them perform pretty good. And when it comes to performance, Galaxy S7 Edge scores really good because of its hardware. Galaxy S7 Edge comes with the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS on top of feature rich TouchWiz UI.
In our benchmarking tests, Galaxy S7 Edge scored pretty well because of its nice hardware specs and the real life performance is pretty much same as well. We played some heavy and high end games like FIFA 16, Asphalt 8 : Airborne etc. on our Galaxy S7 Edge and the performance was really nice without any lagging or frame drops of any kind.
Galaxy S7 Edge sports a Dual Pixel 12 MP primary camera with simultaneous 4K video recording and 9MP image capturing. There is a 5 MP camera on the front side to take selfies and video chatting. The front facing camera can also record 1080p full HD resolution videos. There is RAW support for taking images too.
The 12 MP primary camera is really good when it comes to image quality thanks to the combination of 1/2.5" sensor size, 1.4 µm pixel size, optical image stabilization and phase detection autofocus. The images coming out of the primary camera of are Galaxy S7 Edge having great amount of details, very less noise, good quality color rendering and nice sharpness too. The low light imaging is very nice as well.
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with the Motion Photo that again the copy of Lumia phone’s Living Images. It records a small video clip before capturing an image. You can do the 2160p video recording @30, 25 and 24 fps, 1080p video recording @ 60 fps and various 720p video recording up to 240 fps. The dual video recording feature is also provided but when you record videos at 60fps , you can’t take the image simultaneously.
There are lots of shooting modes provided like Selective Focus, Pro mode with manual controls, Panorama, Video Collage, Live Broadcast, Slow Motion, Virtual Shot, Hyperlapse and one dedicated Food mode for taking images of foodstuffs.
Pro mode let you select the shutter speed as high as 10 seconds, apply on-screen filters, manually control the focus, ISO etc. The slow motion video comes with audio and you can customize the slow motion as well whether you want a part of the video to be slow or just a very small fraction of the video in super slow motion for the dramatic effect. The audio gets slowed as well and it really sounds weird and funny.
The 5MP front-facing camera let you record 1080p resolution videos at 30fps. It comes with Auto HDR feature and let you make dual video calls as well. The images and videos both from the front camera provide nice output with good amount of details.
Overall, the cameras of Galaxy S7 Edge are really nice in terms of imaging and video recording both.
Galaxy S7 Edge is having a 5.5-inch screen with great display quality. The big screen and nice display provides a nice experience of watching videos and playing games on this device. The speaker is loud and clear considering its tiny size So if you are going to use Galaxy S7 Edge for playing games, watching videos or listen music on speakers, you will like it for sure. Unfortunately, there is no FM radio available in Galaxy S7 Edge.
When it comes to gaming, Galaxy S7 Edge performs brilliantly because of nice hardware specs. You will not feel any lagging or frame drops while playing high-end games. The touch sensitivity is smooth and very responsive to enjoy the games perfectly. Also the sensors like accelerometer, gyro etc. perform very well too while playing games.
The only problem we faced while playing games on our Galaxy S7 Edge is the heating issue. It heats up a lot while playing high-end games and also sometimes while charging the device or recording videos from camera.
When it comes to productivity, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes with lots of new and interesting productivity features. And Windows Phone users will be happy to know that this device comes pre-installed with a set of Microsoft’s productive apps like Word, OneDrive, Excel, PowerPoint and Skype.
The Smart Manager section let you free RAM, improve the battery performance, keep the device secure and clean internal storage by deleting junk files. There is S-Voice as the virtual assistant that works pretty good and also the S-Health app to keep track of your health and fitness. Always On Display helps in checking the status of the phone at glance.
But the most highlighted productivity feature is obviously the Edge Screen that you can access from the curved screen. It supports multiple screens, each dedicated to perform a particular task. Apps Edge screen provides quick access to Contact, Messages, Phone, Browser, Gallery, Clock, S Planner and Calculator from any screen.
Then there is Tasks Edge screen where you can access tools to perform a task. People Edge let you access your favorite contacts and perform tasks right from the Edge screen. You can even customize it and add or remove extra screens like Yahoo News screen, compass etc.
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a removable Li-Ion 3600 mAh battery. The battery performance is average and the phone survives a day on moderate usage. Because of the big screen with high resolution, resource hungry processor and TouchWiz UI, the battery performance is not so good. Ultra Power Saving mode is provided to improve battery life by reducing the features and hardware performance.
There is also Wireless charging (Qi-enabled) and Fast Charging feature provided to improve the user experience with the battery but there is no wireless charger provided and you will have to buy one if you want to use the wireless charging feature.
Also, the fast battery charging speed claimed i.e 60% in 30 minutes was never achieved. So if you are a heavy user, battery performance of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge will disappoint you.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is a flagship and great looking smartphone in every sense , thanks to the nice hardware, great design, good camera along with the set of nice sensor. The screen is brilliant, performance is nice and smooth along with the many productive features like Edge Screen, Microsoft Office app, Smart Manager etc.
The only drawbacks of Galaxy S7 Edge are the heating issue, poor battery performance and random scratches appearing all over the back panel. Still it is one of the best smartphone available in the market and if you can manage with few of the issues mentioned above, you should buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge for its performance and design. Specially when the special editions like Injustice Edition and Olympic Editions of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge are out.
There are two versions of Galaxy S7 Edge available based on connectivity – single SIM version and dual SIM version. Depending on that, the memory card slot will either work as just memory card slot or also as a nano-SIM slot.
Both of these version are exactly same in terms of features and hardware specs, the only difference is in the type of memory card slot they are having. So, you can consider this very same review for Galaxy S7 Edge and Galaxy S7 Edge Duos both.
This detailed hands-on review of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is divided in different section covering features, specs and performance of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge separately.
Samsung Galaxy S7 edge and Galaxy S7 edge Duos : Hands-on Review, Specs and Features
Retail Box and Unboxing
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes in a beautiful black retail box. The retail box of Galaxy S7 Edge contains the smartphone, USB cable, USB connector, a pair of earphones, SIM card tray ejector pin and a quick charger along with quick start guide and some user manuals.
Watch the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge unboxing video below.
Design
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a very beautiful and premium looking design. Galaxy S7 Edge sports a slim metal body with 7.7mm thickness. Galaxy S7 Edge is the most high-end Samsung smartphone and in its design and body clearly states that. One side of the screen is curved that let you access the Edge Screen.
The back panel is non-removable and comes with the Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. . The USB port is at the bottom along with the 3.5mm audio jack, microphone and a tiny speaker grill. At the top, there is a microphone again with the card slots.
There are three keys on the body of Galaxy S7 Edge – two volume rockers on the left and a power on/off key on the right side of the device. The Dual Pixel 12MP camera is given on the back along with the dual-LED flash and heart rate sensor. A shiny Samsung logo is given in the center of the back panel.
There are proximity sensor and 5MP camera on the front side. There are two capacitive keys provided along with the Home button that also works as the fingerprint scanner. But one drawback is that the Home button is mechanical, just touching it will not bring you to the Home screen.
Screen and Display
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED screen having 1440 x 2560 pixels resolution which will give you approximately 534 PPI pixel density. So, you will get the sharp display and will not find any pixels on the screen. Even though the screen size is moderately big, the screen-to-body ratio is around 76% and it makes using the device with hand an easy job.
A new feature in Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is the Always On screen that is basically a copy of Lumia Glance Screen. It let you see the time, date and number of notifications waiting to be checked on the locked screen. It is a nice and productive feature for sure.
Screen of the Galaxy S7 Edge comes with Gorilla Glass 4 protection . The screen quality is really and it is bright enough to provide a nice sunlight readability and the viewing angles are also very good.
We performed the knife scratch test and key scratch test on the screen of Galaxy S7 Edge to check how good is the Gorilla Glass 4 screen protection. It performed great and came out of the test without getting a single scratch. You can watch the Galaxy S7 Edge knife scratch test video below.
But after awhile the glass on the back panel started getting some scratches. So even though both sides of Galaxy S7 Edge are claimed to have the same protective glass, the back side is somehow not good enough and gets scratches.
Also, the glass on the Home key or fingerprint scanner started getting smudgy within few days. So even though the design of the device looks great and flagship, the material used is somehow not that great. You can also see many people complaining the same in the Comments section of above scratch test video.
Hardware Specs and OS
Galaxy S7 Edge is a 4G LTE device and sports the Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890 Octa-core processor. The processor is supported by 4GB of RAM and an Adreno 530 or Mali-T880 MP12 GPU. The one we got had the Exynos 8890 octa-core processor
Internal memory in Galaxy S7 Edge is 32GB or 64GB but it is expandable using the dedicated microSD card slot. You can use a memory card of up to 256GB to expand the memory. If you are having the Galaxy S7 Edge Duos then the memory card slot can be used as the second SIM slot. You also get the free 115GB of cloud storage from the pre-installed OneDrive app on your Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
Out of 32 GB, the user available memory is 24.3 GB and after booting up the device for the first time, the free RAM was just 1.6 GB. So it is pretty bad considering the fact 55% of RAM is pre-occupied. And even after closing all apps, we got only 1.9 GB RAM free.
It comes with lots of sensors including fingerprint scanner, accelerometer, proximity sensor, gyro, barometer, heart rate monitor, SpO2 and magnetic compass. All of them perform pretty good. And when it comes to performance, Galaxy S7 Edge scores really good because of its hardware. Galaxy S7 Edge comes with the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS on top of feature rich TouchWiz UI.
In our benchmarking tests, Galaxy S7 Edge scored pretty well because of its nice hardware specs and the real life performance is pretty much same as well. We played some heavy and high end games like FIFA 16, Asphalt 8 : Airborne etc. on our Galaxy S7 Edge and the performance was really nice without any lagging or frame drops of any kind.
Camera and Imaging
Galaxy S7 Edge sports a Dual Pixel 12 MP primary camera with simultaneous 4K video recording and 9MP image capturing. There is a 5 MP camera on the front side to take selfies and video chatting. The front facing camera can also record 1080p full HD resolution videos. There is RAW support for taking images too.
The 12 MP primary camera is really good when it comes to image quality thanks to the combination of 1/2.5" sensor size, 1.4 µm pixel size, optical image stabilization and phase detection autofocus. The images coming out of the primary camera of are Galaxy S7 Edge having great amount of details, very less noise, good quality color rendering and nice sharpness too. The low light imaging is very nice as well.
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with the Motion Photo that again the copy of Lumia phone’s Living Images. It records a small video clip before capturing an image. You can do the 2160p video recording @30, 25 and 24 fps, 1080p video recording @ 60 fps and various 720p video recording up to 240 fps. The dual video recording feature is also provided but when you record videos at 60fps , you can’t take the image simultaneously.
There are lots of shooting modes provided like Selective Focus, Pro mode with manual controls, Panorama, Video Collage, Live Broadcast, Slow Motion, Virtual Shot, Hyperlapse and one dedicated Food mode for taking images of foodstuffs.
Pro mode let you select the shutter speed as high as 10 seconds, apply on-screen filters, manually control the focus, ISO etc. The slow motion video comes with audio and you can customize the slow motion as well whether you want a part of the video to be slow or just a very small fraction of the video in super slow motion for the dramatic effect. The audio gets slowed as well and it really sounds weird and funny.
The 5MP front-facing camera let you record 1080p resolution videos at 30fps. It comes with Auto HDR feature and let you make dual video calls as well. The images and videos both from the front camera provide nice output with good amount of details.
Overall, the cameras of Galaxy S7 Edge are really nice in terms of imaging and video recording both.
Entertainment and Gaming
Galaxy S7 Edge is having a 5.5-inch screen with great display quality. The big screen and nice display provides a nice experience of watching videos and playing games on this device. The speaker is loud and clear considering its tiny size So if you are going to use Galaxy S7 Edge for playing games, watching videos or listen music on speakers, you will like it for sure. Unfortunately, there is no FM radio available in Galaxy S7 Edge.
When it comes to gaming, Galaxy S7 Edge performs brilliantly because of nice hardware specs. You will not feel any lagging or frame drops while playing high-end games. The touch sensitivity is smooth and very responsive to enjoy the games perfectly. Also the sensors like accelerometer, gyro etc. perform very well too while playing games.
The only problem we faced while playing games on our Galaxy S7 Edge is the heating issue. It heats up a lot while playing high-end games and also sometimes while charging the device or recording videos from camera.
Productivity
When it comes to productivity, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge comes with lots of new and interesting productivity features. And Windows Phone users will be happy to know that this device comes pre-installed with a set of Microsoft’s productive apps like Word, OneDrive, Excel, PowerPoint and Skype.
The Smart Manager section let you free RAM, improve the battery performance, keep the device secure and clean internal storage by deleting junk files. There is S-Voice as the virtual assistant that works pretty good and also the S-Health app to keep track of your health and fitness. Always On Display helps in checking the status of the phone at glance.
But the most highlighted productivity feature is obviously the Edge Screen that you can access from the curved screen. It supports multiple screens, each dedicated to perform a particular task. Apps Edge screen provides quick access to Contact, Messages, Phone, Browser, Gallery, Clock, S Planner and Calculator from any screen.
Then there is Tasks Edge screen where you can access tools to perform a task. People Edge let you access your favorite contacts and perform tasks right from the Edge screen. You can even customize it and add or remove extra screens like Yahoo News screen, compass etc.
Battery Performance
Galaxy S7 Edge comes with a removable Li-Ion 3600 mAh battery. The battery performance is average and the phone survives a day on moderate usage. Because of the big screen with high resolution, resource hungry processor and TouchWiz UI, the battery performance is not so good. Ultra Power Saving mode is provided to improve battery life by reducing the features and hardware performance.
There is also Wireless charging (Qi-enabled) and Fast Charging feature provided to improve the user experience with the battery but there is no wireless charger provided and you will have to buy one if you want to use the wireless charging feature.
Also, the fast battery charging speed claimed i.e 60% in 30 minutes was never achieved. So if you are a heavy user, battery performance of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge will disappoint you.
Conclusion
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is a flagship and great looking smartphone in every sense , thanks to the nice hardware, great design, good camera along with the set of nice sensor. The screen is brilliant, performance is nice and smooth along with the many productive features like Edge Screen, Microsoft Office app, Smart Manager etc.
The only drawbacks of Galaxy S7 Edge are the heating issue, poor battery performance and random scratches appearing all over the back panel. Still it is one of the best smartphone available in the market and if you can manage with few of the issues mentioned above, you should buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge for its performance and design. Specially when the special editions like Injustice Edition and Olympic Editions of Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge are out.