Samsung Galaxy S7 Review - ThioJoeTech

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys you're watching Theo Joe Tech and in this video I have a full review of the Samsung Galaxy S7 the latest Flagship from Samsung I've got quite a bit to say so let's take a look now first of all I do want to give a big thank you to AT&T for providing me with this phone toour review so full disclosure I did not buy this phone myself but it's not like they're paying me money to do the review they just gave it to me so I am allowed to say whatever I want about it you're going to hear what I do like what I don't like and everything in between so why don't we start off with the obvious what the phone looks like the first thing you'll notice is the 5.1 in Super AMOLED display it's a 1440p display and that is about 577 pixels per inch at that size so it is extremely sharp it's a great looking display right off the bat the AMOLED panel means it's going to have really nice Vivid colors and great contrast although it seems like it's extremely oversaturated in general though there are other screen modes you can select and change that are more color accurate and we can get into those later also on the front you're going to find the 5 megapixel front-facing camera which is pretty reasonable resolution for just capturing selfies for that purpose and also at the top you're going to find next to it the proximity sensor and the speaker of course then near the bottom you're going to find the tactile home button which does double as a fingerprint reader and the return and recent apps button are capacitive as opposed to the home button if I had to have a preference I'd probably say I would prefer that all the buttons were capacitive that's just what I'm used to but I guess that was a limitation to include the fingerprint reader so it's not really a big deal on the bottom we have a pretty standard setup we have a 3.5 mm Jack of course speaker microphone and a micro USB port I probably would have liked to see USB type-c but I guess they decided it wasn't widely adopted enough but they better have it next year I can tell you that I think it's inevitable at this point as for the speaker it's pretty decent not really anything to write home about but no complaints either on the right hand side is the power button which is actually pretty well placed for your thumb I like that design it was well thought out and on the other side we have the volume buttons and then at the top we have the nano SIM card tray as well as the micro SD card tray they're both in one so we do have expandable storage up to about 200 GB I think for SD so you can put all that in there as well moving on to the back things get a little bit more interesting the first thing you'll notice is the camera it's a 12 megapixel f1.7 camera so that's a really nice wide aperture and the pixel size is 1.4 microns on that sensor now for pixel size the bigger the pixel size the more light it's going to be able to let in on any camera so you're going to have less noise and better performance overall especially in low light comparing that to some other phones for example the iPhone 6s only has 1.22 microns the previous Galaxy S6 was only 1.12 microns and the LG G5 is only 1.1 microns but that is because it does have the larger 16 megapix resolution which will reduce pixel size and if you're curious a full-frame DSLR such as the 5D Mark II by Canon would have a pixel size of about 6.25 microns so obviously pixel size makes a big difference the camera also uses so-called dual pixel technology which is going to give you much faster autofocusing and I'm going to get more into the camera and that sort of stuff later on in the review next to the camera you can see a Flash and interestingly enough a heart rate sensor which can be used with the Samsung Health app and again I'll get into that a bit later some of the specs you can't see inside include a 3,000 mAh battery which is pretty good it's acceptable would like to see phone manufacturers putting in huge batteries but it is an improvement over the S6 last year we've also got 4 GB of RAM again definitely acceptable good amount and an increase over last year's model although I would like to see in general more smartphone manufacturers putting in way more RAM I think we can afford it it's about time internal storage is 32 GB but as I mentioned before there is an SD card slot for expandable up to 200 GB so you're going to have plenty of space now for CPU it's a little bit interesting there are actually two possibilities for which CPU you got depending on which model apparently the US got the Snapdragon 824 core CPU at 2.15 GHz while the international version got Samsung's own exos 8898 core CPU at 2.3 GHz now of course these are both very fast CPUs both topof the- line but some tests have shown that the exos CPU is going to outperform the 820 in certain situations from what I understand the reason behind these two different CPUs is that Samsung designed their exos CPU from the ground up specifically to work with GSM and LTE networks which are found all over the world however the US has a lot of CDMA networks and it doesn't play well with that so for the US version I guess they went with Qualcomm still it's pretty surprising they would go with two totally different CPUs and for what it's worth this phone that I'm reviewing has the Snapdragon 8 20 so it's just something to keep in mind if you have a choice between the international and US version just know that now finally before we get into performance one of the coolest features of this phone is that it is waterproof well water resistant technically it has an ip68 water resistance rating which means it can apparently survive 30 minutes underwater of up to 5 ft deep so that's pretty awesome if you spill something on it you don't have to worry you drop it in the toilet or even in a pool you don't really have to worry about that it can take all right so let's get into how this thing performs starting off with the camera for a phone it really does take good pictures it's nice and sharp at low ISO at least and even in the corners you're going to have very minimal Distortion which is nice it also has really good stabilization I think so you can get a pretty steady shot even at very long shutter speeds but what I really like about this phone especially is the camera app it's going to give you a lot of control that are really not available in many other phones specifically there's a pro mode that lets you adjust the iso shutter speed white bounce Focus that sort of thing you can also change autofocus mode between multi-point or Center Point and even change the light metering mode between Center weighted Matrix or spot meter what I like the best is that in the pr mode you can actually set it to Output a raw file in addition to jpeg which is a big deal to me if I'm taking a photo that I know I want to do post-processing with to make look better raw files are essential especially on a camera phone where you know it might not have the best image quality right off the bat in jpeg now like any smartphone it's not really going to do low light at all with the small sensor it does rely on heavy noise reduction before giving you the final image but it does do a pretty good job and most people probably won't even care or notice as I mentioned before the S7 has so-called dual pixel technology for autofocus which means it does have crazy fast autofocus I'm a huge fan of it I believe that it's the same type of dual pixel technology that are in some Canon cameras such as the c100 but I'm not 100% sure on that all I know is that this does really fast Auto auto focus takes maybe a fraction of the second and it's always spoton also with the camera we've got of course a lot of video options we have resolutions all the way from 4K down to 480p if you want potato quality for some reason and with 1080p you can actually do 60 FPS so you have a high frame rate option and there is a slow motion mode as well as for bit rate the 4K seems to be about 48 megabits per second while 1080p is 17 megabits per second these are okay bit rates but I would like to see the opt option at least to go to a much higher bit rate if we have the storage and want to take really high quality video there also are some other cool video features for example Focus tracking so you click on something and then it does its best job to keep that object in Focus no matter what you move around so that's pretty neat and then there's also an HDR mode for video and images I can understand what HDR would be for images but I don't really know how that works for video still nice to have it I guess next let's talk about battery performance this is a 3,000 mAh battery which which is a pretty good size I'm not going to complain if you do want a much bigger battery you could always go with the S7 Edge or even the S7 active which has a whopping 4,000 mAh battery I found the battery life to be pretty good it's not amazing it's going to last you all day with moderate use although if you're using it heavily all day especially on cell data you're probably going to have to recharge it at least once that being said it does support Samsung's adaptive fast charging so you can at least recharge it really quickly they claim you can get to 50% in 30 minutes although keep in mind that as you get closer to full charge it's going to charge slower it also supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 so if you already have some of those AC adapters those will work with it as well and I have found of course with the fast charging enabled it does charge very fast especially if you have the screen off everything like that so if you are running low on battery it's not really a big deal to plug it in and get a ton of percentages in just a few minutes now in addition to regular fast charging the S7 has what is called Wireless fast charging charging which claims to be 40% faster than regular wireless charging now you will need a special Wireless fast charging pad from Samsung or perhaps a third party but I'm really happy if any phone has wireless charging at all so this fast wireless charging is really just icing on the cake I'm not aware of any other phones that have a similar type of fast charging though it's possible more will in the future now let's get into probably the most important part what it's like using the phone the experience of it overall this is definitely a very Snappy phone and I was surprised that there's really no stuttering at all even in the past top of line phones would have a little bit of stuttering here and there haven't experienced any of that so far in the time I've been using it the default interface for the S7 is going to be Samsung's TouchWiz though I personally prefer stock Android so the first thing I did was install the Google Now launcher to replace the home screen though TouchWiz does have some other cool features that I like outside the home screen for example it has an extra volume button for making phone calls which I love I'm not aware of any other phones that have that so if you're talking with someone I don't know how many times this has happened on customer service you can barely hear them it sounds like they're talking through a tin can you can now press the extra volume button it amplifies it so you can actually hear them now another cool feature that I found interesting is the heart rate sensor that I mentioned before which can be used with the S Health app and you basically just put your finger on it and it measures your BPM really cool useful for exercising it also even claims to be able to measure your blood oxygen saturation and stress level though um a bit skeptical about how accurate those measurements are just by putting your finger on a sensor but I guess it's still cool nonetheless maybe you can use it as a relative measurement now before I mention that the screen looks pretty oversaturated in the colors and don't get me wrong it does look nice but there are options in the settings that allow you to adjust different screen modes that change the contrast and saturation to look how you want there's not much documentation on what these different screen modes do exactly even in the official Samsung literature so I had to do quite a bit of digging to find out and I did find one website called display mate.com and they did quite a bit of research on these different screen modes and testing so I'm going to include some of the results from them and definitely go check them out the default screen mode is called adaptive display mode and it does look neat but it's going to have bad color accuracy and all the colors as I mentioned are really oversaturated so for example the reason you might want to know this is that if you go to a post on Instagram or something and you edit the photo you get it looking exactly how you want and then you go to post it it's going to look pretty bland to everyone else CU it's not going to look as saturated as you saw on the screen the next screen mode is AMOLED Cinema didn't really find much about this apparently it's good for viewing movies and that sort of thing but still not that accurate AMOLED photo is the third option which is getting better it actually does use the d65 standard white point and the color gamut according to display mate is approximately Adobe RGB which is often used in photography but in most cases for viewing web content Adobe RGB isn't going to be the best choice though if you know you're specifically looking at Adobe RGB images this might be one to consider finally is basic mode which is going to probably be the best option for most accurate color according to display mates testing it approximates the srgb color space which is standard for basically all web and computer content every monitor you use is going to have an srgb gamut however if you're switching over from the adaptive display mode it's probably going to make everything look washed out and Bland even though it is more accurate so if you don't really care about color accuracy just go with the default and if you do go with the basic that being said I just keep it on the default because it looks nicer and I just know if I go to post an Instagram photo or something I just turn it on to basic mode during that time so overall the final verdict is I very much do like this phone it's got some great features such as being waterresistant ip68 it's got really fast responsive performance haven't had any issues with its stuttering or anything like that it's got a pretty good battery life not amazing but definitely better than expected I would say and it's got a great camera with some nice software features and I guess that's all really to be expected this is Samsung's flagship phone they've got a great track record and I would like to hear what you guys think your opinions down in the comment section you can let us know what you think if there's anything that you want maybe in even future phones we can talk about that down there if you did enjoy this video I would appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up so I know you liked it and if you want to continue watching I've got some other videos on the right hand side you might enjoy like the unboxing the S7 and you can just click those or look in the description for the same link like if you're on a phone if you want to subscribe I make new videos Monday Wednesday Friday so I think it should be worth it so that's it thanks again to AT&T and thank you guys for watching I hope to see you next time have a good onehey what's up guys you're watching Theo Joe Tech and in this video I have a full review of the Samsung Galaxy S7 the latest Flagship from Samsung I've got quite a bit to say so let's take a look now first of all I do want to give a big thank you to AT&T for providing me with this phone toour review so full disclosure I did not buy this phone myself but it's not like they're paying me money to do the review they just gave it to me so I am allowed to say whatever I want about it you're going to hear what I do like what I don't like and everything in between so why don't we start off with the obvious what the phone looks like the first thing you'll notice is the 5.1 in Super AMOLED display it's a 1440p display and that is about 577 pixels per inch at that size so it is extremely sharp it's a great looking display right off the bat the AMOLED panel means it's going to have really nice Vivid colors and great contrast although it seems like it's extremely oversaturated in general though there are other screen modes you can select and change that are more color accurate and we can get into those later also on the front you're going to find the 5 megapixel front-facing camera which is pretty reasonable resolution for just capturing selfies for that purpose and also at the top you're going to find next to it the proximity sensor and the speaker of course then near the bottom you're going to find the tactile home button which does double as a fingerprint reader and the return and recent apps button are capacitive as opposed to the home button if I had to have a preference I'd probably say I would prefer that all the buttons were capacitive that's just what I'm used to but I guess that was a limitation to include the fingerprint reader so it's not really a big deal on the bottom we have a pretty standard setup we have a 3.5 mm Jack of course speaker microphone and a micro USB port I probably would have liked to see USB type-c but I guess they decided it wasn't widely adopted enough but they better have it next year I can tell you that I think it's inevitable at this point as for the speaker it's pretty decent not really anything to write home about but no complaints either on the right hand side is the power button which is actually pretty well placed for your thumb I like that design it was well thought out and on the other side we have the volume buttons and then at the top we have the nano SIM card tray as well as the micro SD card tray they're both in one so we do have expandable storage up to about 200 GB I think for SD so you can put all that in there as well moving on to the back things get a little bit more interesting the first thing you'll notice is the camera it's a 12 megapixel f1.7 camera so that's a really nice wide aperture and the pixel size is 1.4 microns on that sensor now for pixel size the bigger the pixel size the more light it's going to be able to let in on any camera so you're going to have less noise and better performance overall especially in low light comparing that to some other phones for example the iPhone 6s only has 1.22 microns the previous Galaxy S6 was only 1.12 microns and the LG G5 is only 1.1 microns but that is because it does have the larger 16 megapix resolution which will reduce pixel size and if you're curious a full-frame DSLR such as the 5D Mark II by Canon would have a pixel size of about 6.25 microns so obviously pixel size makes a big difference the camera also uses so-called dual pixel technology which is going to give you much faster autofocusing and I'm going to get more into the camera and that sort of stuff later on in the review next to the camera you can see a Flash and interestingly enough a heart rate sensor which can be used with the Samsung Health app and again I'll get into that a bit later some of the specs you can't see inside include a 3,000 mAh battery which is pretty good it's acceptable would like to see phone manufacturers putting in huge batteries but it is an improvement over the S6 last year we've also got 4 GB of RAM again definitely acceptable good amount and an increase over last year's model although I would like to see in general more smartphone manufacturers putting in way more RAM I think we can afford it it's about time internal storage is 32 GB but as I mentioned before there is an SD card slot for expandable up to 200 GB so you're going to have plenty of space now for CPU it's a little bit interesting there are actually two possibilities for which CPU you got depending on which model apparently the US got the Snapdragon 824 core CPU at 2.15 GHz while the international version got Samsung's own exos 8898 core CPU at 2.3 GHz now of course these are both very fast CPUs both topof the- line but some tests have shown that the exos CPU is going to outperform the 820 in certain situations from what I understand the reason behind these two different CPUs is that Samsung designed their exos CPU from the ground up specifically to work with GSM and LTE networks which are found all over the world however the US has a lot of CDMA networks and it doesn't play well with that so for the US version I guess they went with Qualcomm still it's pretty surprising they would go with two totally different CPUs and for what it's worth this phone that I'm reviewing has the Snapdragon 8 20 so it's just something to keep in mind if you have a choice between the international and US version just know that now finally before we get into performance one of the coolest features of this phone is that it is waterproof well water resistant technically it has an ip68 water resistance rating which means it can apparently survive 30 minutes underwater of up to 5 ft deep so that's pretty awesome if you spill something on it you don't have to worry you drop it in the toilet or even in a pool you don't really have to worry about that it can take all right so let's get into how this thing performs starting off with the camera for a phone it really does take good pictures it's nice and sharp at low ISO at least and even in the corners you're going to have very minimal Distortion which is nice it also has really good stabilization I think so you can get a pretty steady shot even at very long shutter speeds but what I really like about this phone especially is the camera app it's going to give you a lot of control that are really not available in many other phones specifically there's a pro mode that lets you adjust the iso shutter speed white bounce Focus that sort of thing you can also change autofocus mode between multi-point or Center Point and even change the light metering mode between Center weighted Matrix or spot meter what I like the best is that in the pr mode you can actually set it to Output a raw file in addition to jpeg which is a big deal to me if I'm taking a photo that I know I want to do post-processing with to make look better raw files are essential especially on a camera phone where you know it might not have the best image quality right off the bat in jpeg now like any smartphone it's not really going to do low light at all with the small sensor it does rely on heavy noise reduction before giving you the final image but it does do a pretty good job and most people probably won't even care or notice as I mentioned before the S7 has so-called dual pixel technology for autofocus which means it does have crazy fast autofocus I'm a huge fan of it I believe that it's the same type of dual pixel technology that are in some Canon cameras such as the c100 but I'm not 100% sure on that all I know is that this does really fast Auto auto focus takes maybe a fraction of the second and it's always spoton also with the camera we've got of course a lot of video options we have resolutions all the way from 4K down to 480p if you want potato quality for some reason and with 1080p you can actually do 60 FPS so you have a high frame rate option and there is a slow motion mode as well as for bit rate the 4K seems to be about 48 megabits per second while 1080p is 17 megabits per second these are okay bit rates but I would like to see the opt option at least to go to a much higher bit rate if we have the storage and want to take really high quality video there also are some other cool video features for example Focus tracking so you click on something and then it does its best job to keep that object in Focus no matter what you move around so that's pretty neat and then there's also an HDR mode for video and images I can understand what HDR would be for images but I don't really know how that works for video still nice to have it I guess next let's talk about battery performance this is a 3,000 mAh battery which which is a pretty good size I'm not going to complain if you do want a much bigger battery you could always go with the S7 Edge or even the S7 active which has a whopping 4,000 mAh battery I found the battery life to be pretty good it's not amazing it's going to last you all day with moderate use although if you're using it heavily all day especially on cell data you're probably going to have to recharge it at least once that being said it does support Samsung's adaptive fast charging so you can at least recharge it really quickly they claim you can get to 50% in 30 minutes although keep in mind that as you get closer to full charge it's going to charge slower it also supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 so if you already have some of those AC adapters those will work with it as well and I have found of course with the fast charging enabled it does charge very fast especially if you have the screen off everything like that so if you are running low on battery it's not really a big deal to plug it in and get a ton of percentages in just a few minutes now in addition to regular fast charging the S7 has what is called Wireless fast charging charging which claims to be 40% faster than regular wireless charging now you will need a special Wireless fast charging pad from Samsung or perhaps a third party but I'm really happy if any phone has wireless charging at all so this fast wireless charging is really just icing on the cake I'm not aware of any other phones that have a similar type of fast charging though it's possible more will in the future now let's get into probably the most important part what it's like using the phone the experience of it overall this is definitely a very Snappy phone and I was surprised that there's really no stuttering at all even in the past top of line phones would have a little bit of stuttering here and there haven't experienced any of that so far in the time I've been using it the default interface for the S7 is going to be Samsung's TouchWiz though I personally prefer stock Android so the first thing I did was install the Google Now launcher to replace the home screen though TouchWiz does have some other cool features that I like outside the home screen for example it has an extra volume button for making phone calls which I love I'm not aware of any other phones that have that so if you're talking with someone I don't know how many times this has happened on customer service you can barely hear them it sounds like they're talking through a tin can you can now press the extra volume button it amplifies it so you can actually hear them now another cool feature that I found interesting is the heart rate sensor that I mentioned before which can be used with the S Health app and you basically just put your finger on it and it measures your BPM really cool useful for exercising it also even claims to be able to measure your blood oxygen saturation and stress level though um a bit skeptical about how accurate those measurements are just by putting your finger on a sensor but I guess it's still cool nonetheless maybe you can use it as a relative measurement now before I mention that the screen looks pretty oversaturated in the colors and don't get me wrong it does look nice but there are options in the settings that allow you to adjust different screen modes that change the contrast and saturation to look how you want there's not much documentation on what these different screen modes do exactly even in the official Samsung literature so I had to do quite a bit of digging to find out and I did find one website called display mate.com and they did quite a bit of research on these different screen modes and testing so I'm going to include some of the results from them and definitely go check them out the default screen mode is called adaptive display mode and it does look neat but it's going to have bad color accuracy and all the colors as I mentioned are really oversaturated so for example the reason you might want to know this is that if you go to a post on Instagram or something and you edit the photo you get it looking exactly how you want and then you go to post it it's going to look pretty bland to everyone else CU it's not going to look as saturated as you saw on the screen the next screen mode is AMOLED Cinema didn't really find much about this apparently it's good for viewing movies and that sort of thing but still not that accurate AMOLED photo is the third option which is getting better it actually does use the d65 standard white point and the color gamut according to display mate is approximately Adobe RGB which is often used in photography but in most cases for viewing web content Adobe RGB isn't going to be the best choice though if you know you're specifically looking at Adobe RGB images this might be one to consider finally is basic mode which is going to probably be the best option for most accurate color according to display mates testing it approximates the srgb color space which is standard for basically all web and computer content every monitor you use is going to have an srgb gamut however if you're switching over from the adaptive display mode it's probably going to make everything look washed out and Bland even though it is more accurate so if you don't really care about color accuracy just go with the default and if you do go with the basic that being said I just keep it on the default because it looks nicer and I just know if I go to post an Instagram photo or something I just turn it on to basic mode during that time so overall the final verdict is I very much do like this phone it's got some great features such as being waterresistant ip68 it's got really fast responsive performance haven't had any issues with its stuttering or anything like that it's got a pretty good battery life not amazing but definitely better than expected I would say and it's got a great camera with some nice software features and I guess that's all really to be expected this is Samsung's flagship phone they've got a great track record and I would like to hear what you guys think your opinions down in the comment section you can let us know what you think if there's anything that you want maybe in even future phones we can talk about that down there if you did enjoy this video I would appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up so I know you liked it and if you want to continue watching I've got some other videos on the right hand side you might enjoy like the unboxing the S7 and you can just click those or look in the description for the same link like if you're on a phone if you want to subscribe I make new videos Monday Wednesday Friday so I think it should be worth it so that's it thanks again to AT&T and thank you guys for watching I hope to see you next time have a good one\n"