The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge Review: Part 2
by Joshua Ho on July 5, 2016 8:00 AM ESTCharge Time
While charge time is no longer much of a concern in light of how OEMs have made it a major priority in the last few product cycles, I still wanted to go ahead and verify its effects. Testing this is done with the usual method of monitoring until power draw at the outlet reaches a value approaching 0 to try and eliminate inaccurate battery percent reporting as a problem.
Interestingly enough, the Galaxy S7 charges faster than the HTC 10 here even though both have similar power output on their AC adapters. I suspect that we’re actually seeing the differences between QC 2.0 and QC 3.0 here as the environment in San Jose recently has never gone below 80F when testing. At any rate, the delta between the Galaxy S6 and S7 in charge rate is effectively not worth talking about, which isn’t really a huge surprise.
Miscellaneous
The miscellaneous section of each review is really just a list of comments that are too short to justify a separate section, but something worth discussing regardless. The first of these subjects is sound quality. While I don’t really have the ability to test 3.5mm output properly, I can say that the speaker output of the Galaxy S7 is weak without question. Maximum volume is quite low, and even ignoring that the quality of the output is nothing special with emphasis on higher frequencies. I suspect this is just the cost of waterproofing at work here.
The fingerprint scanner remains a Synaptics design win, and it generally works quite well. I like it a lot but it isn’t particularly fast or reliable the way the iPhone 6s’ TouchID is. I would say that it’s better than the iPhone 6’s fingerprint scanner, and is comparable with the HTC 10’s fingerprint scanner. However I do favor the HTC 10 fingerprint scanner design as it’s faster to just place a finger to the fingerprint scanner rather than pressing a button and waiting to scan, but the delta here is basically not worth talking about.
Samsung Pay is actually, finally available. Weirdly enough the magstripe transmission still has applications as places like Safeway seem to have completely ignored the liability transfer and continued using magstripe-only readers. Places like Walmart don’t seem to have NFC enabled despite moving to EMV which is strange to say the least. For the US, Samsung Pay actually does provide value, and turns paying from your phone from an occasional experience to a common one. For now at least, Samsung Pay has some real value which is good to see.
I haven't seen any real issues with GPS on the Galaxy S7, as OEMs have been taking this sort of thing seriously for a while. I don't think anyone is really going to face issues with GPS at this point, but it's worth mentioning just to confirm that this is the case.
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Impulses - Thursday, July 7, 2016 - link
Eh... It's not like Samsung's focusing makes it a particularly great camera for shooting hardcore action (no smartphone within the current climate is gonna manage that)...So I'd actually argue that AF doesn't really take such top billing, in fact depending on what you're shooting it can be somewhat irrelevant. On a technical level it's super interesting tho.
The fact that they've got a dual pixel arrangement working at such a high level almost makes it puzzling that they haven't implemented it on a larger sensor and never tried carrying it over to their now dead camera division.
lilmoe - Thursday, July 7, 2016 - link
Yea, fanboys would have an argument like yours too... Tim Cook knows exactly how important the autofocus system is.Impulses - Thursday, July 7, 2016 - link
Not sure what brand I'm supposed to be a fan boy of, heh... I've never bought neither a Samsung nor an Apple phone, and probably never will unless Samsung drastically changes their software strategy or GPe comes back.My point was coming from a snobbish "I wouldn't use a phone for THAT" (vs a dedicated camera) pov. ;)
lilmoe - Friday, July 8, 2016 - link
Snob... Fanboy... All the same.Case in point, you don't need to be shooting fast action to realize the benefits of great autofocus. If you're taking pictures of your kids or buddies on a trip, then it means either getting the shot or not. If it's blurry, then all that snobby pixel peeping won't help you much.
FourEyedGeek - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
Judgemental dickwad.johnnohj - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Exactly, how much better was the performance on the browser benchmarks with the Snapdragon browser or the Samsung stock browser? Why didn't you include them?ikjadoon - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Snapdragon Browsers are great; I use one on my OPO and it's a huge boost in scrolling, page loading, and overall speed. Using Chrome vs Tugabrowser on my OPO is like using Firefox vs Chrome on my PC. It's not even close.But, they don't ship with the device. It's a 3rd-party app you have to download onto your phone.
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Samsung Browser...yeah, no idea why they didn't include that. That should've been in there. They test Safari on iPhones, why not test SB on Samsung phones?
kurahk7 - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Samsung sent everyone Verizon versions which until a couple months ago didn't support the Samsung browser. But since this review was so late, they should have included it and talked about the functionality of it.JoshHo - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
I tried shortly after the Samsung stock browser was made available and a number of our benchmarks wouldn't complete or performed worse than Chrome so I didn't include those results.asfletch - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Hmm that is odd. On my Note 4 Exynos, the Samsung Browser runs Jetstream, Vellamo, Kraken et al just fine, and way faster than Chrome (esp now Adblock Plus is officially available for it - so good). Feels far faster in use too, as mentioned in this review. Maybe it's the SD820 - could Andrei test the 8890 version with Samsung Browser please?