[REVIEW] Samsung Galaxy S7 edge – The edge of perfection

Performance

Under the hood, the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge has exactly the same hardware as the Galaxy S7 barring the larger curved screen and slightly larger battery. For Malaysia, the S7 edge comes with Samsung’s own Exynos 8890 processor that comes with four cores running at 2.6GHz and another four running at 1.9GHz. Paired with this is a hefty 4GB RAM and 32GB of onboard storage that you can augment via the microSD card. The variant for Malaysia also has the enviable benefit of having a hybrid dual SIM card slot so you can either opt for popping in two SIM cards or one SIM and a microSD card slot.

Under the hood, the S7 edge runs Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 overlaid with a revamped version of TouchWiz UI and their KNOX 2.6 security partition baked in. The new UI is significantly slimmer with much less bloatware loaded in. On the Google front it has all the usual apps. For productivity, the phone  has Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, NoneNote, Skype and OneDrive preinstalled by default. The S7 Edge also has the bonus of including a free 100GB of storage for two years on One Drive and the aforementioned free six months subscription on iFlix.

In terms of Samsung centric apps, the phone sports the Samsung Gear pairing app to pair with their Gear S2 smartwatch, Samsung’s home-brewed MILK music streaming app and their mySamsung app that lets you manage all your Samsung devices and get them registered for warranty claims and the like. Their improved S Health app also makes an appearance on the S7 once more with all the usual health and fitness tracking features with several improvements as it is now able to track stress levels too on top of your heart rate and steps taken through the day.

The most interesting addition to TouchWiz on this outing is what they dub a Game Launcher. This app floats about in the background, acting as a shortcut to all the games on your phone. Once you’re in a game, it floats about as a little icon in the corner. Tap on it and you can tweak a bunch of handy settings like disabling phone alerts when gaming, minimising the game in the background if you have more important things to do, take a screenshot and, best of all, help capture a gameplay video along with live audio commentary. If you’re a mobile gamer and aim to stream your gameplay videos, this is one of the easiest ways to do so.

When put to the test in the field, the S7 edge’s QHD Super AMOLED display is a thing of beauty with thrillingly deep blacks, lusciously vibrant colours and delightfully pin-sharp text and superb responsiveness onscreen even under bright daylight conditions. Viewing angles are excellent with the curved edges of the screen now providing an additional amount of functionality. Basically, there’s a little nub on the edge of the screen that you can swipe to reveal the edge menus. From there, you can customise the edge menu bar to show all manner of shortcuts to your favourite apps, not necessarily those that came with the phone, create and access a speed dial list of your most commonly called contacts, act as a weather forecast shortcut or as a mobile to-do list. If you so choose, the display has an ‘always-on’ mode that offers a monochrome depiction of the data and time. According to Samsung, this has minimal drain on the battery and in practice, this has proven to be the case with negligible drain when left on overnight and through the day.

When put to the test, the S7 Edge performed admirably with exceptionally smooth performance in whatever task it was put to be it browsing the web, streaming movies and, of course, gaming with the Exynos processor taking everything thrown at it like a champ. It handled Freeblade at maximum settings along with Hitman Sniper without a hitch and silky smooth framerates for both games with nary a drop in performance while remaining cool as a cucumber through all but the most intensive gaming. The only quibble on what is otherwise a sterling device is the middling mono speaker at the base of the phone though it’s relatively loud with decent clarity and is otherwise serviceable for gaming, music and movie watching duties. The provided headphones offer surprisingly decent audio quality for a bundled pair though it feels somewhat uncomfortable with extended use after several hours. The S7 edge also  has the ability to tweak equaliser settings so you can modify the audio signature to fit your listening preferences. With a suitably equipped third party pair of buds and some tweaking on the equaliser settings, the phone served up a suitably warm rendition of the Eagle’s ‘Hotel California’ and Aerosmith’s ‘Jaded’.

Camera

While the camera megapixel wars are still raging, the S7 edge has instead gone for a camera with a lower megapixel count than its predecessor at 12-MP though it integrates an amazing array of improvements to render some of the best snaps that we’ve ever seen on a smartphone and then some.

The F/1.7 aperture offers delicious imaging possibilities especially under low light while the optical image stablisation and Dual Pixel tech inside the phone works like what it says on the tin, delivering swift, accurate autofocus and some of the most pleasing, colour accurate, crisp and rich snaps with amazingly detailed shots in both brightly light and low light scenarios. Low light shots that would have turned out as smudged up Lovecraftian nightmares on other phones turned out to be not only viewable but pleasantly so to boot on the S7 edge. Even the most inept casual snapper should be able to serve up some good stills with the S7 edge’s rear camera.

A manual mode is on offer for those who know their stuff and you’re able to access all the usual settings via a series of sliders.

Manual mode aside, the S7 edge has the usual array of modes including a panoramic mode to take swathes of the landscape and, of note for Instagrammers and the Facebook-obsessed, a ‘Food mode’ that ensures more pleasant looking food shots.

Firing up the camera is simply a matter of double clicking the home button, allowing you to be  snapping away in seconds rather than having to fiddle about through the menus. Videos, thanks to the built-in OIS are lush, well-lit and silky smooth footage in 4K. It’s otherwise unapparent, easily adjusting for casual hand jitter unless you’re completely smashed. The front facing selfie cam also delivers pleasingly good selfies and panoramic group shots too with the ‘selfie flash’ helping out in lower lit situations. As it stands, the S7 edge’s rear camera is immensely powerful and extremely competent, able to deliver fantastic snaps. Check out the snaps below which were taken with Auto settings and HDR on Auto mode.