**My Experience with the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge**

As I held the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge in my hands, I couldn't help but notice that it was overexposing some images due to its tendency to push the exposure compensation. To fix this issue, I would often use exposure compensation to knock down the exposure just a tad and that seemed to resolve the problem. However, one of the biggest issues with taking pictures up close was the very shallow depth of field, which made it difficult to get multiple subjects in focus.

The S7 Edge's f1.7 lens only adds to this issue, as I found that the plane of focus is extremely narrow, making it challenging to maintain focus on a specific subject. This led me to try and focus on one point, only to have the camera focusing on something else right next to it, ruining the entire photo. On the plus side, the S7 Edge does offer beautiful shallow depth of field, which can be beneficial for certain types of photography.

**Samsung's Post-Processing: A Love-Hate Relationship**

Unfortunately, Samsung's post-processing is one aspect that I have mixed feelings about. Their noise reduction filter tends to over-smooth images, resulting in a loss of detail and making the photos look unnatural. Additionally, they oversharpened the images too much, which can make them appear harsh or even pixelated at times. Last year's model wasn't as aggressive with post-processing, but it seems that Samsung has taken this approach to the next level.

However, there is one aspect of post-processing that I do appreciate: the ability to shoot in raw format. This gives you more control over the camera and allows you to edit the images as desired. Additionally, using the manual mode provides extra control over the camera, which can help mitigate some of Samsung's post-processing issues.

**Low-Light Improvements**

One area where I've noticed significant improvements is in low-light performance. The S7 Edge's camera can now handle situations that were previously challenging, and it shows a noticeable difference from last year's model. Without needing an additional app or upgrade, the camera has made significant strides in this department.

Another feature that I appreciate is the shutter speed control, which allows you to set longer exposures on a tripod. This can be very useful for capturing motion blur or certain types of photography, and it's a great addition to the S7 Edge's feature set.

**Front-Facing Camera: A Nice Surprise**

The front-facing camera on the S7 Edge is 5 megapixels, which may seem small compared to other smartphones. However, I've found that it has some nice features, such as HDR mode, which adds a lot of detail and color to selfies. The camera also has excellent color reproduction, making it a great choice for taking photos.

In addition to its great performance in still photography, the front-facing camera is also capable of producing high-quality video. I've found that focusing on close objects works well with this feature, which can be useful for vlogging or other types of content creation.

**Video Capabilities**

When it comes to video recording, the S7 Edge does an excellent job. The 4K resolution provides a lot of detail, and optical image stabilization helps reduce camera shake and blur. However, I did notice that software-based stabilization doesn't work as well in 4K mode. This can be seen when filming on the go or using certain features like Ultra HD and the " Bread Baking" segment.

In these situations, electronic video stabilization works much better, but it's worth noting that this feature may not always provide the same level of stability as optical image stabilization. Despite this, I found the S7 Edge to be capable of producing excellent video in a variety of situations.

**Conclusion**

Overall, I've been very happy with my experience using the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. While there are some compromises made in terms of sensor size and aspect ratio, I believe that these trade-offs will work well for most users. The phone's camera capabilities, particularly in low-light conditions, have impressed me greatly.

That being said, I do wish that Samsung would tone down their post-processing a bit, as it can be aggressive at times. Additionally, having more control over the camera and aspect ratio of the sensor would be beneficial for certain types of photography. Nevertheless, I believe that the S7 Edge is an excellent choice for most users, and I'm happy to have had the opportunity to test it out.

**Your Thoughts:**

Let us know what you think about these phones! Which one would you choose? Would you go for the Edge variant or the S7? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff and before me I have two phones this is the Galaxy S7 Edge and the Galaxy S7 both of these are very beloved phones and a lot of people have been talking about them there's been a lot of hype surrounding these guys so I kind of wanted to give these the in-depth review treatment cover the goods the bads and the Uglies to help you decide if one of these is for you or more specifically which one of these devices is for you I must preface this video though with I actually am pretty impressed myself I don't think I've been this impressed with the Samsung product since the Galaxy Note 2 so Samsung really indeed has done a really good job especially with the S7 Edge I think Samsung has improved upon the Galaxy S6 in all the ways that they really needed to so let's go ahead and get into this and you can tell me what you think all right so before getting into the nitty-gritty of this review I kind of want to do something new at the beginning of the review where I talk about all the things that I love about the phone and things that I hate so this is kind of like a quick review a streamlined review and then we will get into the in-depth part after this so between these phones specifically I like the Galaxy S7 Edge because I really like the aesthetic I really love how this display is nice and big and I like that this has a bigger battery as well otherwise between them these both have a fantastic experience Samsung has done the best job I think that they have done so far I love everything from the custom theming to this display which is gorgeous by the way I love Samsung pay I've had a lot of fun with that it works really well I really like how quick this feels I love the fast charging and yes it does charge very quickly I love the battery life especially on this one the gorgeous premium inhand feel I really like the water resistancy or the waterproofing I've affectionately named this rubber ducky because I've been able to take it in the bathtub with me as if I don't have technology around me enough now it has to inade my bath time as well I love the inclusion of the SD card slot I liked the gear VR bundle that was really nice arguably the camera is also a really really wonderful feature I've loved the camera post-processing I think the colors looked really nice also the focusing is insane on this it's got the fastest Focus I've seen and the low light performance has greatly improved over last year so that's a lot to love about a phone but nothing is perfect and there are some things that I don't like as well so don't like the camera post processing and that I can't stand how much Samsung has decided to over sharpen the images some people aren't as sensitive to that as I am but I preferred last year's I also don't like how AMOLED displays are kind of a lottery a lot of people have been complaining about how they don't have a uniform looking display so the whites on their display will look a little bit pinkish in one area and more of a coolish tone in another area luckily my display looks as uniform as I could possibly want it so I am very grateful for that because I've had a lot of trouble in the past with exchanging phones to get an AMOLED display that looks nice also I've noticed that my home button unless I hit it directly Center on tends to not respond I think that has to do with the waterproofing I did a poll and saw that some people are having this issue as well so it seems to be more of a batch variation problem but not too annoying but it definitely is there I have not liked the price these guys are insanely expensive as far as phones go and If you vouch for a carrier version or a Snapdragon version alog together good luck unlocking the bootloader that does not look to be possible at least not right now so if you want to get rid of Touchwiz you're going to have to get an unlocked exos version of the phone so that's a little bit of a pain in the butt so those are all the goods and the bads so far as quickly as I could name them off so let's go ahead and move into the in-depth part of the review so now let's move on to looking around these phones talking about the build quality and their appearance we've also got the Galaxy S6 and the s 6 Edge from last year just for comparison so the first thing of course that sticks out is the size difference the S7 Edge is quite a bit bigger than the S7 5.5 in display 5.1 in display and I have noted that I like the feeling of the S7 Edge in hand much better than the S7 I like especially on the back how this is just more of a gentle curve and slope where this one is quite slope to me takes on the design cues from the Galaxy Note 5 and I don't really care for that that all too much some are going to argue that the Galaxy S7 has more to hold on to by way of metal where the Galaxy S7 Edge you can see that it's only got a little bit of metal here not much and and candly feels like you're holding an all Glass phone but to me it kind of feels nice it feels organic but with so much glass on a phone you're going to notice how finger printy these things get the black onx especially yes it's beautiful it looks more like a stone to me in this color very organic but it just leaves such a trail behind of smudge and smudge gummy grimy grimy nastiness so I can't go anywhere without a cleaning cloth unless I want to put a skin on it or put it in a case in which case I will lose how pretty this phone is just to escape fingerprints so I kind of just deal with it otherwise you have the option of white which we don't have in the United States that would have been the first choice this is my second choice you also have a more flashy gold which just wasn't for me and you have a silvery looking one as well so so of the choice I had this is the color I prefer most so when looking at the front we have Gorilla Glass 4 we have a 5 megapixel front-facing camera we have a proximity sensor ambient light sensor we've got our receiver we've also got our home button and also fingerprint sensor on the right hand side is the power button in the same place for both of these guys on the leth hand side we have our volume buttons on the top we have a microphone and we also have our slot for the SD card and SIM card sadly there is is no infrared blaster that's something I really missed from last year on the bottom we have a standard headphone jack we have a micro USB charging port we have a microphone and also the speaker which sounds kind of muffly tiny to me unfortunately due to the waterproofing and is not as loud as last year then on the back we have our 12 megapixel camera we've got a single LED flash and the sensor to sense heart rate happily over last year at least with the edge version I am very impressed with the changes that Samsung has made because last year I felt that the edge felt really hard to hold for me it kind of felt a little bit sharp in the hand it wasn't a pleasure for me so the first time that I picked up the S7 Edge I thought wow Samsung has really improved upon all the things I had complaints about this is now truly a really nice phone to hold and looks very beautiful now something that is more subtle than I noticed is that the glass is curved a little bit differently on the S7 Edge than on the S6 Edge I feel it's a more gentle type of a sloping more uniform and in a way I feel like we have less glare because of it on the edge and I don't notice color shifting as bad at least not on mine although I do notice that there are variations the S6 is a bit more thinner boxy looking and doesn't have that slope on the back although I preferred how this felt in the hand because I don't like that slope too much but that's all down to opinion otherwise you see that these two look so similar that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you saw the home button and really had a chance to hold it and see that curve on the back so now let's talk about the waterproofing of this phone the water resistancy this is ip68 certified so it's dust tight and you can drop it in 1.5 M of water for a half hour you do not want to go down past what they recommend 1.5 M because of how this is waterproofed the device is not protected on the inside against water just on the outside so at some weak points you have some rubber rings such as here in the SIM card slot also here and here and at the buttons all those have a rubber ring that keeps water from getting through also the device is glued tightly closed so water can't go past the display or the back and then at the speaker there is a mesh that allows sound to go out but no water to get in so if you go past a certain depth the water pressure is going to go past these weak points and get into the phone and it's going to ruin the phone the board itself does not seem to to be protected we have to thank Jerry rig everything channel for checking that one out but I did do some real world test examples and I want to show those to you now so check out what it can survive in a real world capacity hello I'm in the sh can I call you back seriously no it'll take 5 minutes A lot of people are kind of losing their pants over in this w w no still works still works oh no and the audio seems to be all right again so that's good that's good later I'll explain let's unbox oh no it's in the pwn scum please get it please please don't do that again all right so now let's move on to talking about battery life in the Galaxy S7 edge here we have a 3,600 Mill hour battery that is not bad not bad at all last year we had a 2,600 Mah hour battery that's a, milliamp hours bigger than last year and I'll tell you it really does make a difference last year on both of these devices on the Galaxy S6 this is actually 25550 2,600 the battery life was pretty abysmal for me maybe it was good for some people but I could get about 3 hours of onscreen time and I needed to charge it twice day at least these days with a 3,600 mAh battery on the S7 Edge I make it through the day no trouble whatsoever I can get 5 hours of onscreen time maybe for some people 5 hours of onscreen time isn't a lot but I was consistently able to get 5 hours of onscreen time and this device lasted me all day long for me 5 hours is a really good amount of time usually with devices I get somewhere around 4 if I used it in incredible amount I got somewhere around 4 hours but that's underneath extreme circumstances seriously though the battery life is very good and I've been incredibly happy and keep in mind this is the Snapdragon version of the phone I've been hearing that the exos variations of the phone get even better battery life so here we have the Galaxy S7 and from what I'm hearing from people it's getting like 4 hours of on screen time so that's 3,000 mamp hours versus 3,600 eh I could see how they be an hour difference it's really going to depend on your usage I keep it usually on auto brightness or underneath halfway most of the time I do a lot of social media I don't play intensive games I do use the camera a lot I watch a lot of YouTube videos so that kind of gives you an idea of my usage but I am on my phone all day long it's like a mobile office for me so great battery life good battery life both of these are an improvement over last year but seriously with the Edge variant I couldn't be happier go with this version of the phone if you care about battery life I do want to note that this is the T-Mobile variant of the phone and I did get a chance to try out the T-Mobile SIM and my AT&T SIM and got the same battery life thankfully I was able to get 5 hours of on screen time so it didn't seem that at least in this particular phone changing up the sim cards for different carriers made a difference so that's good because I know that can make a big difference your signal area can make a difference and what you do on your phone can make a difference difference brightness just so many different things make a difference but still I can see that this phone is very well capable of getting 5 hours of on screen time and Lasting all day or even into the second day with no trouble at all so now let's move on to talking about specs and performance we do have performance gains from last year last year we had the xn0 7420 and this year it's the Snapdragon 820 and the exos 8890 I am happy enough with the SN Dragon 820 that is what we have in the United States you'd have to send out and get an international variant and that would be a little bit on the difficult side plus you don't get the warranty like you have with a carrier version so instead of eight cores we now have four CPU cores we've got two that are clocked at 2.15 GHz and two that are 1.59 GHz we have the adreno 530 GPU 4 GB of RAM over three from last year unfortunately this is 32 GB of internal storage there aren't any other variations available the first question I know that people are going to ask me is how is it doing with RAM management last year when playing around with the edge variant or just the S6 the RAM management was terrible I could open up four applications and they would start refreshing after that when trying to switch between them happily I'm able to get 8 nine 10 applications or even more depending on what they are and the RAM management has been just fine so the RAM management issue is much much much much better it makes all the difference in the experience for me because I can browse the web and I can keep my web page I don't have to have YouTube refresh itself it was just incredibly annoying so that's not a problem anymore at least not for the common person so how about performance then around the phone and around the interface well to me it seems primarily quite smooth especially underneath this settings area it looks like it's a nice 60 frames per second although I have to say that over the entire interface everything isn't entirely smooth we do see some frame drops here still and there I'm able to prove that if you want to see that go underne these settings I enable developer options I can go down to the bottom GPU rendering profile show on screen as bars now you can see here that we have a line and that each time you see this Spike here those are drop frames and the higher it goes above this line is more drop frames than one drop frame so it's represents several drop frames so just scrolling through here you can see we drop a frame here or there underneath the app tray you can see it drops a few frames underneath the settings things are looking pretty darn smooth for the most part you can see how it's doing in applications like Twitter scrolling you can see that it's got several drop frames going on so still around the interface and scrolling in some applications it's it's not entirely smooth you can see that even apps like the Google Play Store even still struggle with dropping frames look pretty jittery and are not entirely smooth many frame drops so this is pretty much my favorite part of the phone right here is underneath settings where everything looks pretty buttery smooth still though the the interface does feel quick and snappy despite some of those frame drops applications open very very quickly even large applications due to the very quick storage that this device has that is an argument against adoptable storage because you're not going to have an SD card whose storage is as fast as what this phone provides and it's loaded only takes a matter of seconds there are definitely both CPU and G GPU gains from last year here is geekbench 3 and here we have gfx Benchmark here's the S6 here's the S7 Edge you can see the respective offscreen and onscreen score differences here we have 15 frames per second this is on screen pushing all those pixels around where last year it was 6.1 here we have 31 and 13 for off screen 28 versus 15 for onc screen 47 versus 25 for offscreen so 53 versus 38 for onscreen and 90 versus 56 so a definite definite gain here now all that is good and great but what also matters is sustained performance or how it does in terms of throttling over time here is the gfx Benchmark battery test and you can see for performance how quickly the Galaxy S6 throttles and the S7 is doing pretty good GPU wise you can see you do have some throttling here but I think it's standing up much better from last year the Galaxy S7 looks to perform somewhat similarly and then I did another throttling test underneath 3D mark this is slingshot 3.1 so I ran it over and over and over and over again so here we have on the S7 Edge you can see 1958 and then a half hour later it was down to 2074 so it took a half hour to Throttle Down this much but if you look at the Galaxy S6 here you can see that I was about 1042 at 2046 and then what like 15 minutes later I was dropped down to 529 so dropping about half in about 15 minutes so it looks like this is definitely doing much better it still throttles as I've seen every device throttle over time but this does have a heat pipe in it so it tries to disperse the heat outward and I've noticed that the Galaxy S6 got really really hot when playing games and this one with my infrared thermometer I could see it's like the hottest I've seen it get to be like 2 104 up towards this area so it feels more warm to me I don't feel this guy overheating when playing games same with the Galaxy S7 as well I see that they perform similarly so I've been overall happy with that type of performance gameplay wise I think Real World gameplay wise I think that things look pretty great to me I have no complaints whatsoever playing with this device has been a joy again even if I played with this for a half hour like I did with this as 8 game it only got warm to my touch I didn't get any type of blistering temperatures warm would be about 100° or so Fahrenheit so very very very happy with the performance fast internal storage fast at loading games if we just didn't have some of those drop frames around the interface this would make for a near perfect experience at least in my book now let's move on to talking about the featur features of these phones and let me say that these are the most feature packed phones I've seen there's so many features that I don't think that the common person would know what all these features are much less what they do let's just start out with some oldies but some goodies so we've got this finger sensor on the back this is the heart rate monitor so you can use this underneath the S Health application variations in your heart rate can give a look at what your stress is like and just general you can see what your beats per minute is we have a fingerprint sensor at the bottom of the phone and that does work pretty well it's not as good as some other sensors I have seen and that it just takes a little bit longer it can be a little bit finicky sometimes but overall it's been a really good experience some other now oldies but goodies include the triple click of the home button and you have a smaller screen so this just makes the whole interface small for one-handed use then return to full screen I miss the controls that used to be included you could also resize it before it doesn't look like you can do any of that anymore I don't know why return to full screen we've still got our popup features available and now underneath the menus you can disable these on the Galaxy S6 you weren't able to disable this so I like that Samsung did add back some of the menus can go and just make this full screen drag downward again you can make this into a little dot that stays on your home screen you can keep five open at a time so that's a nice multitasking experience you can also multitask by having a split screen so YouTube and you can pick whatever application like music so you've got two applications running at the same time you can resize the windows those are oldies but goodies of course you've got some of those Edge features that we've had here for a while these are not going to be found on the regular S7 so if you swipe your finger like this if you have this feature turned on you can get notifications see what the status is going on on a couple different things I overall don't really use this feature but it's nice to have it there I suppose you also have the night clock that can be on we also have a new feature the always on display feature you can see that depending on what the theme is some of the themes have their own little characters that you can put on the display when it's always off so you can see that you can choose clock calendar or an image so clock style here I have the one that's included in my particular theme not all the themes have their own cute little style to be included with it see I can just put image and then I can just have the image that's included in this theme alog together I don't really keep this feature on it almost stresses me out a little bit whenever I see that it flashes to another part of the display so you don't get burning it looks like I'm receiving a notification on the display and in that way it disturbs me so I I feel a little bit on edge and a little bit stressed out plus you can't interact with it it it just simply sits there so I don't really care for that honestly so you still have your Edge feeds as I showed on the side you can get to show up when the display is off edge lighting so if you receive a call and the phone is faed down you will see it that's the same as last time nothing new there we also have Edge panels so there's more things going on with this Edge panel thing it's much more to where I actually am kind of starting to use it but almost not really what I do like is that you have the ability to set the transparency you can switch where you want it to be active because I don't care to see this little bar showing up all the time I like to make it go completely transparent so I have it just set here on the side so it's easily reachable and my fingers reach comes up from the side and I've got contacts this is people Edge I have task Edge so I've set a couple things I can automatically text my husband or my mom it will go right into composing a message to them or I can just decide to compose a message and decide who it is later you can create browser shortcuts such as this vegan chili macaroni and cheese and now whenever I click that I'll go right to that web page so that's nice and you can set a bevy of other things for task Edge that's pretty nice I've got the weather you can download other applications this is RAM status and I also paid for this one this is file manager so you can see you have several different choices you can choose keep whichever one's active it tells you what they are Yahoo Finance My Places apps Edge these are quick tools so there's just so much here currently if you go underneath download there's a couple of different options ones that are both free and ones that are paid I would like to start seeing things for Facebook for example or maybe even one for YouTube and this is now open to developers or at least Samsung said this is going to be open to developers so I'm excited to see what can be generated here overall I think that this Edge thing is starting to turn into something more than just a gimmick but I myself haven't used it too much as of yet it's so fast to do something so simple as to compose a message just by hitting messages and since this phone is so quick at opening applications I don't really find a need for extra extra shortcuts but that's just my take I can't neglect themes this is something that I really love is the themes I'm finding some cutesy themes that I like to keep around I think my favorite is this one here check out how adorable this is It's called night sky always on display live so apply this is also a dark theme so arguably it saves battery I just love how the color scheme on this is it's completely adorable and customized even going underneath settings I love the starry background and the color scheme here this is absolutely adorable we've also got this new game launcher feature which I guess is pretty cool if you're someone who's really into playing games on your phone so you can decide to have no alerts when you're playing games so you can't be disturbed you've got power saving features so you can change the frame rates and the resolution you've also got game tools so let's go ahead and start asphalt 8 underneath game tools here you see that you can decide to have the no alerts you can lock recent and back Keys you can minimize the game to being just a little dirty thing like I showed you before if it'll do it there we go so now you can minimize even your game applications which is nice so if you needed to take a phone call for example or you needed to hand your phone to someone else for a second there it goes it resumes this is all things to that 4 GB of RAM really really helps we can take a screenshot it's going to be saved underneath the gallery and then you can record the screen as well so you have some settings for that so underneath record you can choose an image if you want you can change the size you can actually also record with the front-facing camera and you can choose to have the microphone so that you can speak and say what's happening in the game or you can just record game audio from the system you can choose the resolution and also your bit rate and as you're doing that that is all saved underneath the gallery so here we have Asphalt 8 it has its own little folder so AIO my fing way yeah so that's pretty cool I don't know if I'm ever going to use that personally but at least you can disable that you can turn off game tools and you don't have to be bothered by it again I can go underneath Asphalt 8 and not see any of that interface so that's nice so many features on these phones really you get the same features on the Galaxy S7 just minus those Edge features all right so now let's move on to talking about these displays both of these are incredibly beautiful displays we have a 5.5 in display 5.1 in both of these of course are AMOLED there's still Diamond Matrix pen tile for both of them but at this PPI you can't tell so this is 577 pixels per inch and 534 there's ever so slightly a difference but the normal person is not going to be able to tell it's even hard for me to tell the difference between the pixel densities of both of these so just pick whichever one works for you one thing I notice with the edge version of the phone is that the fingertip rejection isn't so good right now I'm hoping for an update because sometimes when I'm holding the phone my fingers will touch the display and it will start doing wonky things so hopefully Samsung can fix that I've heard some people having a problem when using the camera for instance if you hold down on the side of the display some are having a hard time focusing on things or even getting the phone to actually take a picture so please fix that Samsung otherwise I've been very happy with this Edge display both of these devices get very nice and bright I measured both of them getting about 400 knits with manual brightness but once you hit Auto is where it gets even brighter so out in sunlight I was able to measure that it got 700 knits some are saying it gets even more than 700 knits so you will will not have issues out in direct sunlight whatsoever now of course since these are AMOLED displays you also get really really nice Inky blacks a really great contrast ratio now as for the calibration of these devices I've had my hands on many units at mwc and I've had three in house to look at as well I can see that the calibration varies between the devices a bit it's kind of a lottery of what you're going to get but I can see what Samsung is trying to Target with the calibration and overall do a really good job let's go to the basic mode as that is the mode that is the most accurate for Content that we're able to see mostly consumer content anyway so that is the basic mode or the srgb mode what I mean by consumer content is Netflix YouTube the Android operating system itself and also web all that content is meant for srgb or is encoded in srgb so when you hear people talking about how well the display is calibrated ated to srgb it's how well can that content look on this display and will it look accurate so that is why we care so much about looking at the basic mode so I was able to run some measurements between the S7 Edge and also the S7 and I can see that the gamut is pretty close to matching srgb that is the range of colors the display is able to show at least underneath the basic mode the saturations look pretty good for color accuracy they're not all over the place they're adding a lot of saturation so there's no wonky colors now when looking at the gamma it is a bit too high for srgb at 2.4 instead of 2.2 this is typical to Samsung I see them do this quite often they've done this forever it makes the image look slightly darker and more saturated than gamma 2.2 the thing that really varies between the displays that I've seen is the color temperature and the white point or how whites look that really is going to be the biggest lottery I see that Samsung is trying to Target d65 whites or 6,500 Kelvin for white and also having red green and blue balanced so ideally this should look like daylight whites on a cloudy day imagine what that type of white looks like and that's what d65 is supposed to be some devices I have seen are a little bit on the greenish side the whites look like they've got too much green in them them have a weird color cast to them generally though I've seen them looking better than last year my Galaxy S6 looked pretty greenish for example and mine here are looking pretty close to that daylight neutral the biggest thing I hear people complain about is that their device doesn't have a uniform display or the whites or the Grays end up having two tones to them thankfully this display here doesn't have a two-toned type of display it looks nice and white uniform throughout where some displays will have more of a warm tone at the top more of a coolish greenish tone at the bottom so it is possible to get a nice looking display it really is it's just really going to be a lottery that seems to be typical for AMOLED displays so that is the basic mode that's going to be the most important mode that is if you want to represent the content that we have well my favorite mode though is the AMOLED photo mode and it keeps the same white points so it keeps the same d65 looking whites it does extend the greens though so you get more saturation in the greens the cyan the yellows if you can see the difference here so adds a little bit of punchiness to the display but it doesn't overdo it and then you have the AMOLED Cinema mode which is going to make the colors go to hell pretty much a lot of people like this mode though because it really overs saturates the colors it also gives an artificial contrast effect where it really makes the Shadows look a lot deeper and also the AMOLED Cinema mode lends a much cooler white Point as well and that is on purpose so for people who really like to have an effect with the display they tend to like the AMOLED Cinema but it tends to make my eyes bleed a little bit so I'm good with either of these too also there's adaptive display they say optimize the color range saturation and sharpness of your display automatically this mode may not be compatible with thirdparty apps this is the one that is enabled by default it still looks quite saturated to me but I don't think that many people are going to be straying away from that mode it looks all right I've also been quite appreciative of this slider for the auto brightness you can adjust the auto brightness to what you fancy so both of these devices have really great displays some of the best displays you're going to be able to get on the market and so far I've been quite happy as well so how about telepon then Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS all of that good stuff I haven't had any issues what's ever using this as a phone as this is a phone calls have come through just fine for me and on both ends I haven't had any issues with my Wi-Fi or my Bluetooth GPS has been pretty nice and spot-on to me so really no complaints whatsoever it's hard to talk about reception because it's going to depend on what country you're in which phone version you have what carrier you're on your reception area but for me it's been just fine I haven't had anything to complain about trying this across both a TNT and T-Mobile on the same phone now the last thing that I want to talk about is the camera and of course you have the excellent way of executing the camera even from when the phone is off double tap and within not even a second it starts up for you the interface is really nice and clean I like how it's laid out you have some options here on the side you can decide to hide them if you'd like to so you have your effects tab you have HDR Auto you can also turn it on or off I prefer to keep it on because it works really well you have your timer you have your flash on and off auto your option for your resolution so you have a 43 aspect of the sensor that's unfortunate 12 megapixels and downward so on and so forth your 169 crop is going to be 9.1 megapixels then from there you can get into the camera settings there's all kinds of settings here for video size you have UHD QHD full HD 60 frames per second 1080p 1 to1 HD and VG GA you've got motion photo which is kind of like Apple's live photo tracking autofocus you can track an object you can choose to have grid lines on for composition location tags shooting methods so voice control you got your quick launch you can choose to save images as a raw file save to SD card you have your volume buttons function so take pictures you can also use it to zoom and to start video very streamlined and simple then you have mode you can switch to the front-facing camera take a picture and here's your shutter button and here is to start video so underneath mode Auto Pro select to focus panorama video collage live broadcast all the things we've seen before and some other things that I really wouldn't use such as food which seems to really just blur everything around the food and make it pop more PR mode is where it's at if you want to have some extra control so you have some options for the Focus Center or multi you have your metering mode Center weighted Matrix and spot you got your timer Flash and also your aspect and resolution of your pictures then here you have your filters there a couple different modes or you can make a custom one if you'd like here's your control for your focus for your white balance ISO and also shutter speed thankfully they have that underneath here like the Galaxy Note 5 on Galaxy S6 I still don't have the option to mess around with the shutter speed so that is there and then we have exposure compensation then underneath the front-facing camera hello you have a couple of modes selfie wide selfie video collage live broadcast virtual shot you've also got these crazy Beauty modes here cover myself up so you can see so you can play around with your skin tone you can change where the light is hitting your face you can slim your face you can make your eyes larger there's shape correction as well that's getting kind of crazy this is what I usually see on Chinese phones this isn't something I would use but I guess it's nice to have the option and of course here you can choose your resolution flash your timer Auto HDR which I always keep on and effects very very high functioning camera a lot of features here still none of these features matter if you don't have good photo quality and video quality as well so I want to talk about the video quality and the photo quality so for the purpose of this review I kept the mode on auto and I also kept hdr on auto as well I decided to do this as most people would keep it on these modes anyway and the best part of having a camera in your pocket is the magic of being able to point and shoot without having to do much but well point and shoot I am bummed that the aspect of the sensor is 43 69 will be a crop and you will lose resolution from 12 to 9.1 megapixels I'm also bummed that the sensor is lower resolution than last year but Samsung made that compromise to help with low light the camera is incredibly fast to focus though and take pictures so action shots should not be a problem I was able to catch plants in motion and every single one was in Focus over the Galaxy S6 which had a hard time keeping up taking that many pictures in a row dynamic range looks fantastic I was happy to see that the camera could really bring out the skies colors are wonderful they are a tad bit oversaturated but the effect still looks nice there's also more contrast to these photos than what I could see from last year I did notice that the camera tends to overexpose some images so I would end up using the exposure compensation to knock down the exposure just a tad and that tends to fix the problem when taking pictures up close the depth of field is very very shallow with that f1.7 lens I often find the depth of field to be a bit bit too shallow for my taste from Acro shots because the plane of focus is so narrow I often found that I tried to focus on a point and the camera ended up focusing on something else right next to it and then the entire photo would be spoiled because I could no longer tell what the image was supposed to be a picture of so on the plus side you get nice and shallow depth of field but then very little is in Focus so if the camera lies to you and tells you something's in focus it might not be and it spoils the picture now some things that really bothered me unfortunately Samsung's post-processing is quite aggressive they use a noise reduction filter that ends up over smoothing an image to where there isn't any detail left and also they oversharpened the images way too much as well last year it wasn't so aggressive if you don't want to deal with Samsung's post-processing though you can shoot in raw that is an option also if you use the manual mode you'll have some extra control over the camera though you're still dealing with Samsung's overall processing I am quite happy with the low light improvements from last year I can definitely tell a difference also without needing another app or upgrade the camera has a shutter speed control like I mentioned before so you can put the camera on a tripod for longer exposures that's really very nice and useful the front-facing camera is 5 megapixels it has really nice colors as well and I also left it on the auto HDR mode all the time John and I had a lot of fun with that front-facing camera and I think it's going to suffice for most people has a nice bit of detail as well video also looks great the very shallow depth of field does help here when focusing on a close object Focus ing in video is very fast so the camera can deal with quite Dynamic scenes without losing focus 4K has a lot of nice detail and it's nice that Optical image stabilization Works in 4k the only one that won't work in the 4K is the software stabilization this is me to the camera while walking filming Ultra HD and Jonathan getting some bread I used to bake these used to bake those what are they special loaves these are sweet yeast rolls oo I want to make our own yeast roll so I wonder if this uses Optical image stabilization underneath 4K keep forgetting if it does or not fcking here is a 1080p 60 frames per second with the electronic video stabilization enabled so you can see what this looks like turn around do it back so you can see all right picking a different aisle now a stabilization off 60 frames per second 1080p I think this looks much better without the stabilization rning around and doing it again maybe I'm wrong but the focus also seems to look a little bit better without the stabilization on I don't know hi John what are you doing it's a it's a video I always smile pictures and say stuff for always smile the videos and say stuff for pictures poor Jonathan that's a big spill how do you feel all over the table under the table over here and on the chairs always cleaning up after Erica's messes what overall I've been very happy with this camera except for Samsung's kind of crazy postprocessing and I also wish that the aspect of the sensor was 169 at 12 megapixels but I think for most the compromises that Samsung has made here are going to work really well and all kinds of different environments so I really can't complain that much I can go get myself a DSLR if I want to to complain that much so thank you everybody for watching this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff please rate comment and subscribe let me know what you think about these phones which one would you go for would you go for the edge variant or would you go whoops that was the S6 which of these would you go for would you go for the edge variant or would you go for the S7 let me know what you guys think overall ask any other questions in the comment section below I usually stick around for an hour or so once the video is released and I like to answer questions ew Grime very very grimy phones all I've done is hold these for a while and they look like this I'm going to be having the LG G5 in hand very soon of course I want to compare those phones in some capacity so again let me know what you think and have a good nighthey everybody this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff and before me I have two phones this is the Galaxy S7 Edge and the Galaxy S7 both of these are very beloved phones and a lot of people have been talking about them there's been a lot of hype surrounding these guys so I kind of wanted to give these the in-depth review treatment cover the goods the bads and the Uglies to help you decide if one of these is for you or more specifically which one of these devices is for you I must preface this video though with I actually am pretty impressed myself I don't think I've been this impressed with the Samsung product since the Galaxy Note 2 so Samsung really indeed has done a really good job especially with the S7 Edge I think Samsung has improved upon the Galaxy S6 in all the ways that they really needed to so let's go ahead and get into this and you can tell me what you think all right so before getting into the nitty-gritty of this review I kind of want to do something new at the beginning of the review where I talk about all the things that I love about the phone and things that I hate so this is kind of like a quick review a streamlined review and then we will get into the in-depth part after this so between these phones specifically I like the Galaxy S7 Edge because I really like the aesthetic I really love how this display is nice and big and I like that this has a bigger battery as well otherwise between them these both have a fantastic experience Samsung has done the best job I think that they have done so far I love everything from the custom theming to this display which is gorgeous by the way I love Samsung pay I've had a lot of fun with that it works really well I really like how quick this feels I love the fast charging and yes it does charge very quickly I love the battery life especially on this one the gorgeous premium inhand feel I really like the water resistancy or the waterproofing I've affectionately named this rubber ducky because I've been able to take it in the bathtub with me as if I don't have technology around me enough now it has to inade my bath time as well I love the inclusion of the SD card slot I liked the gear VR bundle that was really nice arguably the camera is also a really really wonderful feature I've loved the camera post-processing I think the colors looked really nice also the focusing is insane on this it's got the fastest Focus I've seen and the low light performance has greatly improved over last year so that's a lot to love about a phone but nothing is perfect and there are some things that I don't like as well so don't like the camera post processing and that I can't stand how much Samsung has decided to over sharpen the images some people aren't as sensitive to that as I am but I preferred last year's I also don't like how AMOLED displays are kind of a lottery a lot of people have been complaining about how they don't have a uniform looking display so the whites on their display will look a little bit pinkish in one area and more of a coolish tone in another area luckily my display looks as uniform as I could possibly want it so I am very grateful for that because I've had a lot of trouble in the past with exchanging phones to get an AMOLED display that looks nice also I've noticed that my home button unless I hit it directly Center on tends to not respond I think that has to do with the waterproofing I did a poll and saw that some people are having this issue as well so it seems to be more of a batch variation problem but not too annoying but it definitely is there I have not liked the price these guys are insanely expensive as far as phones go and If you vouch for a carrier version or a Snapdragon version alog together good luck unlocking the bootloader that does not look to be possible at least not right now so if you want to get rid of Touchwiz you're going to have to get an unlocked exos version of the phone so that's a little bit of a pain in the butt so those are all the goods and the bads so far as quickly as I could name them off so let's go ahead and move into the in-depth part of the review so now let's move on to looking around these phones talking about the build quality and their appearance we've also got the Galaxy S6 and the s 6 Edge from last year just for comparison so the first thing of course that sticks out is the size difference the S7 Edge is quite a bit bigger than the S7 5.5 in display 5.1 in display and I have noted that I like the feeling of the S7 Edge in hand much better than the S7 I like especially on the back how this is just more of a gentle curve and slope where this one is quite slope to me takes on the design cues from the Galaxy Note 5 and I don't really care for that that all too much some are going to argue that the Galaxy S7 has more to hold on to by way of metal where the Galaxy S7 Edge you can see that it's only got a little bit of metal here not much and and candly feels like you're holding an all Glass phone but to me it kind of feels nice it feels organic but with so much glass on a phone you're going to notice how finger printy these things get the black onx especially yes it's beautiful it looks more like a stone to me in this color very organic but it just leaves such a trail behind of smudge and smudge gummy grimy grimy nastiness so I can't go anywhere without a cleaning cloth unless I want to put a skin on it or put it in a case in which case I will lose how pretty this phone is just to escape fingerprints so I kind of just deal with it otherwise you have the option of white which we don't have in the United States that would have been the first choice this is my second choice you also have a more flashy gold which just wasn't for me and you have a silvery looking one as well so so of the choice I had this is the color I prefer most so when looking at the front we have Gorilla Glass 4 we have a 5 megapixel front-facing camera we have a proximity sensor ambient light sensor we've got our receiver we've also got our home button and also fingerprint sensor on the right hand side is the power button in the same place for both of these guys on the leth hand side we have our volume buttons on the top we have a microphone and we also have our slot for the SD card and SIM card sadly there is is no infrared blaster that's something I really missed from last year on the bottom we have a standard headphone jack we have a micro USB charging port we have a microphone and also the speaker which sounds kind of muffly tiny to me unfortunately due to the waterproofing and is not as loud as last year then on the back we have our 12 megapixel camera we've got a single LED flash and the sensor to sense heart rate happily over last year at least with the edge version I am very impressed with the changes that Samsung has made because last year I felt that the edge felt really hard to hold for me it kind of felt a little bit sharp in the hand it wasn't a pleasure for me so the first time that I picked up the S7 Edge I thought wow Samsung has really improved upon all the things I had complaints about this is now truly a really nice phone to hold and looks very beautiful now something that is more subtle than I noticed is that the glass is curved a little bit differently on the S7 Edge than on the S6 Edge I feel it's a more gentle type of a sloping more uniform and in a way I feel like we have less glare because of it on the edge and I don't notice color shifting as bad at least not on mine although I do notice that there are variations the S6 is a bit more thinner boxy looking and doesn't have that slope on the back although I preferred how this felt in the hand because I don't like that slope too much but that's all down to opinion otherwise you see that these two look so similar that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you saw the home button and really had a chance to hold it and see that curve on the back so now let's talk about the waterproofing of this phone the water resistancy this is ip68 certified so it's dust tight and you can drop it in 1.5 M of water for a half hour you do not want to go down past what they recommend 1.5 M because of how this is waterproofed the device is not protected on the inside against water just on the outside so at some weak points you have some rubber rings such as here in the SIM card slot also here and here and at the buttons all those have a rubber ring that keeps water from getting through also the device is glued tightly closed so water can't go past the display or the back and then at the speaker there is a mesh that allows sound to go out but no water to get in so if you go past a certain depth the water pressure is going to go past these weak points and get into the phone and it's going to ruin the phone the board itself does not seem to to be protected we have to thank Jerry rig everything channel for checking that one out but I did do some real world test examples and I want to show those to you now so check out what it can survive in a real world capacity hello I'm in the sh can I call you back seriously no it'll take 5 minutes A lot of people are kind of losing their pants over in this w w no still works still works oh no and the audio seems to be all right again so that's good that's good later I'll explain let's unbox oh no it's in the pwn scum please get it please please don't do that again all right so now let's move on to talking about battery life in the Galaxy S7 edge here we have a 3,600 Mill hour battery that is not bad not bad at all last year we had a 2,600 Mah hour battery that's a, milliamp hours bigger than last year and I'll tell you it really does make a difference last year on both of these devices on the Galaxy S6 this is actually 25550 2,600 the battery life was pretty abysmal for me maybe it was good for some people but I could get about 3 hours of onscreen time and I needed to charge it twice day at least these days with a 3,600 mAh battery on the S7 Edge I make it through the day no trouble whatsoever I can get 5 hours of onscreen time maybe for some people 5 hours of onscreen time isn't a lot but I was consistently able to get 5 hours of onscreen time and this device lasted me all day long for me 5 hours is a really good amount of time usually with devices I get somewhere around 4 if I used it in incredible amount I got somewhere around 4 hours but that's underneath extreme circumstances seriously though the battery life is very good and I've been incredibly happy and keep in mind this is the Snapdragon version of the phone I've been hearing that the exos variations of the phone get even better battery life so here we have the Galaxy S7 and from what I'm hearing from people it's getting like 4 hours of on screen time so that's 3,000 mamp hours versus 3,600 eh I could see how they be an hour difference it's really going to depend on your usage I keep it usually on auto brightness or underneath halfway most of the time I do a lot of social media I don't play intensive games I do use the camera a lot I watch a lot of YouTube videos so that kind of gives you an idea of my usage but I am on my phone all day long it's like a mobile office for me so great battery life good battery life both of these are an improvement over last year but seriously with the Edge variant I couldn't be happier go with this version of the phone if you care about battery life I do want to note that this is the T-Mobile variant of the phone and I did get a chance to try out the T-Mobile SIM and my AT&T SIM and got the same battery life thankfully I was able to get 5 hours of on screen time so it didn't seem that at least in this particular phone changing up the sim cards for different carriers made a difference so that's good because I know that can make a big difference your signal area can make a difference and what you do on your phone can make a difference difference brightness just so many different things make a difference but still I can see that this phone is very well capable of getting 5 hours of on screen time and Lasting all day or even into the second day with no trouble at all so now let's move on to talking about specs and performance we do have performance gains from last year last year we had the xn0 7420 and this year it's the Snapdragon 820 and the exos 8890 I am happy enough with the SN Dragon 820 that is what we have in the United States you'd have to send out and get an international variant and that would be a little bit on the difficult side plus you don't get the warranty like you have with a carrier version so instead of eight cores we now have four CPU cores we've got two that are clocked at 2.15 GHz and two that are 1.59 GHz we have the adreno 530 GPU 4 GB of RAM over three from last year unfortunately this is 32 GB of internal storage there aren't any other variations available the first question I know that people are going to ask me is how is it doing with RAM management last year when playing around with the edge variant or just the S6 the RAM management was terrible I could open up four applications and they would start refreshing after that when trying to switch between them happily I'm able to get 8 nine 10 applications or even more depending on what they are and the RAM management has been just fine so the RAM management issue is much much much much better it makes all the difference in the experience for me because I can browse the web and I can keep my web page I don't have to have YouTube refresh itself it was just incredibly annoying so that's not a problem anymore at least not for the common person so how about performance then around the phone and around the interface well to me it seems primarily quite smooth especially underneath this settings area it looks like it's a nice 60 frames per second although I have to say that over the entire interface everything isn't entirely smooth we do see some frame drops here still and there I'm able to prove that if you want to see that go underne these settings I enable developer options I can go down to the bottom GPU rendering profile show on screen as bars now you can see here that we have a line and that each time you see this Spike here those are drop frames and the higher it goes above this line is more drop frames than one drop frame so it's represents several drop frames so just scrolling through here you can see we drop a frame here or there underneath the app tray you can see it drops a few frames underneath the settings things are looking pretty darn smooth for the most part you can see how it's doing in applications like Twitter scrolling you can see that it's got several drop frames going on so still around the interface and scrolling in some applications it's it's not entirely smooth you can see that even apps like the Google Play Store even still struggle with dropping frames look pretty jittery and are not entirely smooth many frame drops so this is pretty much my favorite part of the phone right here is underneath settings where everything looks pretty buttery smooth still though the the interface does feel quick and snappy despite some of those frame drops applications open very very quickly even large applications due to the very quick storage that this device has that is an argument against adoptable storage because you're not going to have an SD card whose storage is as fast as what this phone provides and it's loaded only takes a matter of seconds there are definitely both CPU and G GPU gains from last year here is geekbench 3 and here we have gfx Benchmark here's the S6 here's the S7 Edge you can see the respective offscreen and onscreen score differences here we have 15 frames per second this is on screen pushing all those pixels around where last year it was 6.1 here we have 31 and 13 for off screen 28 versus 15 for onc screen 47 versus 25 for offscreen so 53 versus 38 for onscreen and 90 versus 56 so a definite definite gain here now all that is good and great but what also matters is sustained performance or how it does in terms of throttling over time here is the gfx Benchmark battery test and you can see for performance how quickly the Galaxy S6 throttles and the S7 is doing pretty good GPU wise you can see you do have some throttling here but I think it's standing up much better from last year the Galaxy S7 looks to perform somewhat similarly and then I did another throttling test underneath 3D mark this is slingshot 3.1 so I ran it over and over and over and over again so here we have on the S7 Edge you can see 1958 and then a half hour later it was down to 2074 so it took a half hour to Throttle Down this much but if you look at the Galaxy S6 here you can see that I was about 1042 at 2046 and then what like 15 minutes later I was dropped down to 529 so dropping about half in about 15 minutes so it looks like this is definitely doing much better it still throttles as I've seen every device throttle over time but this does have a heat pipe in it so it tries to disperse the heat outward and I've noticed that the Galaxy S6 got really really hot when playing games and this one with my infrared thermometer I could see it's like the hottest I've seen it get to be like 2 104 up towards this area so it feels more warm to me I don't feel this guy overheating when playing games same with the Galaxy S7 as well I see that they perform similarly so I've been overall happy with that type of performance gameplay wise I think Real World gameplay wise I think that things look pretty great to me I have no complaints whatsoever playing with this device has been a joy again even if I played with this for a half hour like I did with this as 8 game it only got warm to my touch I didn't get any type of blistering temperatures warm would be about 100° or so Fahrenheit so very very very happy with the performance fast internal storage fast at loading games if we just didn't have some of those drop frames around the interface this would make for a near perfect experience at least in my book now let's move on to talking about the featur features of these phones and let me say that these are the most feature packed phones I've seen there's so many features that I don't think that the common person would know what all these features are much less what they do let's just start out with some oldies but some goodies so we've got this finger sensor on the back this is the heart rate monitor so you can use this underneath the S Health application variations in your heart rate can give a look at what your stress is like and just general you can see what your beats per minute is we have a fingerprint sensor at the bottom of the phone and that does work pretty well it's not as good as some other sensors I have seen and that it just takes a little bit longer it can be a little bit finicky sometimes but overall it's been a really good experience some other now oldies but goodies include the triple click of the home button and you have a smaller screen so this just makes the whole interface small for one-handed use then return to full screen I miss the controls that used to be included you could also resize it before it doesn't look like you can do any of that anymore I don't know why return to full screen we've still got our popup features available and now underneath the menus you can disable these on the Galaxy S6 you weren't able to disable this so I like that Samsung did add back some of the menus can go and just make this full screen drag downward again you can make this into a little dot that stays on your home screen you can keep five open at a time so that's a nice multitasking experience you can also multitask by having a split screen so YouTube and you can pick whatever application like music so you've got two applications running at the same time you can resize the windows those are oldies but goodies of course you've got some of those Edge features that we've had here for a while these are not going to be found on the regular S7 so if you swipe your finger like this if you have this feature turned on you can get notifications see what the status is going on on a couple different things I overall don't really use this feature but it's nice to have it there I suppose you also have the night clock that can be on we also have a new feature the always on display feature you can see that depending on what the theme is some of the themes have their own little characters that you can put on the display when it's always off so you can see that you can choose clock calendar or an image so clock style here I have the one that's included in my particular theme not all the themes have their own cute little style to be included with it see I can just put image and then I can just have the image that's included in this theme alog together I don't really keep this feature on it almost stresses me out a little bit whenever I see that it flashes to another part of the display so you don't get burning it looks like I'm receiving a notification on the display and in that way it disturbs me so I I feel a little bit on edge and a little bit stressed out plus you can't interact with it it it just simply sits there so I don't really care for that honestly so you still have your Edge feeds as I showed on the side you can get to show up when the display is off edge lighting so if you receive a call and the phone is faed down you will see it that's the same as last time nothing new there we also have Edge panels so there's more things going on with this Edge panel thing it's much more to where I actually am kind of starting to use it but almost not really what I do like is that you have the ability to set the transparency you can switch where you want it to be active because I don't care to see this little bar showing up all the time I like to make it go completely transparent so I have it just set here on the side so it's easily reachable and my fingers reach comes up from the side and I've got contacts this is people Edge I have task Edge so I've set a couple things I can automatically text my husband or my mom it will go right into composing a message to them or I can just decide to compose a message and decide who it is later you can create browser shortcuts such as this vegan chili macaroni and cheese and now whenever I click that I'll go right to that web page so that's nice and you can set a bevy of other things for task Edge that's pretty nice I've got the weather you can download other applications this is RAM status and I also paid for this one this is file manager so you can see you have several different choices you can choose keep whichever one's active it tells you what they are Yahoo Finance My Places apps Edge these are quick tools so there's just so much here currently if you go underneath download there's a couple of different options ones that are both free and ones that are paid I would like to start seeing things for Facebook for example or maybe even one for YouTube and this is now open to developers or at least Samsung said this is going to be open to developers so I'm excited to see what can be generated here overall I think that this Edge thing is starting to turn into something more than just a gimmick but I myself haven't used it too much as of yet it's so fast to do something so simple as to compose a message just by hitting messages and since this phone is so quick at opening applications I don't really find a need for extra extra shortcuts but that's just my take I can't neglect themes this is something that I really love is the themes I'm finding some cutesy themes that I like to keep around I think my favorite is this one here check out how adorable this is It's called night sky always on display live so apply this is also a dark theme so arguably it saves battery I just love how the color scheme on this is it's completely adorable and customized even going underneath settings I love the starry background and the color scheme here this is absolutely adorable we've also got this new game launcher feature which I guess is pretty cool if you're someone who's really into playing games on your phone so you can decide to have no alerts when you're playing games so you can't be disturbed you've got power saving features so you can change the frame rates and the resolution you've also got game tools so let's go ahead and start asphalt 8 underneath game tools here you see that you can decide to have the no alerts you can lock recent and back Keys you can minimize the game to being just a little dirty thing like I showed you before if it'll do it there we go so now you can minimize even your game applications which is nice so if you needed to take a phone call for example or you needed to hand your phone to someone else for a second there it goes it resumes this is all things to that 4 GB of RAM really really helps we can take a screenshot it's going to be saved underneath the gallery and then you can record the screen as well so you have some settings for that so underneath record you can choose an image if you want you can change the size you can actually also record with the front-facing camera and you can choose to have the microphone so that you can speak and say what's happening in the game or you can just record game audio from the system you can choose the resolution and also your bit rate and as you're doing that that is all saved underneath the gallery so here we have Asphalt 8 it has its own little folder so AIO my fing way yeah so that's pretty cool I don't know if I'm ever going to use that personally but at least you can disable that you can turn off game tools and you don't have to be bothered by it again I can go underneath Asphalt 8 and not see any of that interface so that's nice so many features on these phones really you get the same features on the Galaxy S7 just minus those Edge features all right so now let's move on to talking about these displays both of these are incredibly beautiful displays we have a 5.5 in display 5.1 in both of these of course are AMOLED there's still Diamond Matrix pen tile for both of them but at this PPI you can't tell so this is 577 pixels per inch and 534 there's ever so slightly a difference but the normal person is not going to be able to tell it's even hard for me to tell the difference between the pixel densities of both of these so just pick whichever one works for you one thing I notice with the edge version of the phone is that the fingertip rejection isn't so good right now I'm hoping for an update because sometimes when I'm holding the phone my fingers will touch the display and it will start doing wonky things so hopefully Samsung can fix that I've heard some people having a problem when using the camera for instance if you hold down on the side of the display some are having a hard time focusing on things or even getting the phone to actually take a picture so please fix that Samsung otherwise I've been very happy with this Edge display both of these devices get very nice and bright I measured both of them getting about 400 knits with manual brightness but once you hit Auto is where it gets even brighter so out in sunlight I was able to measure that it got 700 knits some are saying it gets even more than 700 knits so you will will not have issues out in direct sunlight whatsoever now of course since these are AMOLED displays you also get really really nice Inky blacks a really great contrast ratio now as for the calibration of these devices I've had my hands on many units at mwc and I've had three in house to look at as well I can see that the calibration varies between the devices a bit it's kind of a lottery of what you're going to get but I can see what Samsung is trying to Target with the calibration and overall do a really good job let's go to the basic mode as that is the mode that is the most accurate for Content that we're able to see mostly consumer content anyway so that is the basic mode or the srgb mode what I mean by consumer content is Netflix YouTube the Android operating system itself and also web all that content is meant for srgb or is encoded in srgb so when you hear people talking about how well the display is calibrated ated to srgb it's how well can that content look on this display and will it look accurate so that is why we care so much about looking at the basic mode so I was able to run some measurements between the S7 Edge and also the S7 and I can see that the gamut is pretty close to matching srgb that is the range of colors the display is able to show at least underneath the basic mode the saturations look pretty good for color accuracy they're not all over the place they're adding a lot of saturation so there's no wonky colors now when looking at the gamma it is a bit too high for srgb at 2.4 instead of 2.2 this is typical to Samsung I see them do this quite often they've done this forever it makes the image look slightly darker and more saturated than gamma 2.2 the thing that really varies between the displays that I've seen is the color temperature and the white point or how whites look that really is going to be the biggest lottery I see that Samsung is trying to Target d65 whites or 6,500 Kelvin for white and also having red green and blue balanced so ideally this should look like daylight whites on a cloudy day imagine what that type of white looks like and that's what d65 is supposed to be some devices I have seen are a little bit on the greenish side the whites look like they've got too much green in them them have a weird color cast to them generally though I've seen them looking better than last year my Galaxy S6 looked pretty greenish for example and mine here are looking pretty close to that daylight neutral the biggest thing I hear people complain about is that their device doesn't have a uniform display or the whites or the Grays end up having two tones to them thankfully this display here doesn't have a two-toned type of display it looks nice and white uniform throughout where some displays will have more of a warm tone at the top more of a coolish greenish tone at the bottom so it is possible to get a nice looking display it really is it's just really going to be a lottery that seems to be typical for AMOLED displays so that is the basic mode that's going to be the most important mode that is if you want to represent the content that we have well my favorite mode though is the AMOLED photo mode and it keeps the same white points so it keeps the same d65 looking whites it does extend the greens though so you get more saturation in the greens the cyan the yellows if you can see the difference here so adds a little bit of punchiness to the display but it doesn't overdo it and then you have the AMOLED Cinema mode which is going to make the colors go to hell pretty much a lot of people like this mode though because it really overs saturates the colors it also gives an artificial contrast effect where it really makes the Shadows look a lot deeper and also the AMOLED Cinema mode lends a much cooler white Point as well and that is on purpose so for people who really like to have an effect with the display they tend to like the AMOLED Cinema but it tends to make my eyes bleed a little bit so I'm good with either of these too also there's adaptive display they say optimize the color range saturation and sharpness of your display automatically this mode may not be compatible with thirdparty apps this is the one that is enabled by default it still looks quite saturated to me but I don't think that many people are going to be straying away from that mode it looks all right I've also been quite appreciative of this slider for the auto brightness you can adjust the auto brightness to what you fancy so both of these devices have really great displays some of the best displays you're going to be able to get on the market and so far I've been quite happy as well so how about telepon then Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS all of that good stuff I haven't had any issues what's ever using this as a phone as this is a phone calls have come through just fine for me and on both ends I haven't had any issues with my Wi-Fi or my Bluetooth GPS has been pretty nice and spot-on to me so really no complaints whatsoever it's hard to talk about reception because it's going to depend on what country you're in which phone version you have what carrier you're on your reception area but for me it's been just fine I haven't had anything to complain about trying this across both a TNT and T-Mobile on the same phone now the last thing that I want to talk about is the camera and of course you have the excellent way of executing the camera even from when the phone is off double tap and within not even a second it starts up for you the interface is really nice and clean I like how it's laid out you have some options here on the side you can decide to hide them if you'd like to so you have your effects tab you have HDR Auto you can also turn it on or off I prefer to keep it on because it works really well you have your timer you have your flash on and off auto your option for your resolution so you have a 43 aspect of the sensor that's unfortunate 12 megapixels and downward so on and so forth your 169 crop is going to be 9.1 megapixels then from there you can get into the camera settings there's all kinds of settings here for video size you have UHD QHD full HD 60 frames per second 1080p 1 to1 HD and VG GA you've got motion photo which is kind of like Apple's live photo tracking autofocus you can track an object you can choose to have grid lines on for composition location tags shooting methods so voice control you got your quick launch you can choose to save images as a raw file save to SD card you have your volume buttons function so take pictures you can also use it to zoom and to start video very streamlined and simple then you have mode you can switch to the front-facing camera take a picture and here's your shutter button and here is to start video so underneath mode Auto Pro select to focus panorama video collage live broadcast all the things we've seen before and some other things that I really wouldn't use such as food which seems to really just blur everything around the food and make it pop more PR mode is where it's at if you want to have some extra control so you have some options for the Focus Center or multi you have your metering mode Center weighted Matrix and spot you got your timer Flash and also your aspect and resolution of your pictures then here you have your filters there a couple different modes or you can make a custom one if you'd like here's your control for your focus for your white balance ISO and also shutter speed thankfully they have that underneath here like the Galaxy Note 5 on Galaxy S6 I still don't have the option to mess around with the shutter speed so that is there and then we have exposure compensation then underneath the front-facing camera hello you have a couple of modes selfie wide selfie video collage live broadcast virtual shot you've also got these crazy Beauty modes here cover myself up so you can see so you can play around with your skin tone you can change where the light is hitting your face you can slim your face you can make your eyes larger there's shape correction as well that's getting kind of crazy this is what I usually see on Chinese phones this isn't something I would use but I guess it's nice to have the option and of course here you can choose your resolution flash your timer Auto HDR which I always keep on and effects very very high functioning camera a lot of features here still none of these features matter if you don't have good photo quality and video quality as well so I want to talk about the video quality and the photo quality so for the purpose of this review I kept the mode on auto and I also kept hdr on auto as well I decided to do this as most people would keep it on these modes anyway and the best part of having a camera in your pocket is the magic of being able to point and shoot without having to do much but well point and shoot I am bummed that the aspect of the sensor is 43 69 will be a crop and you will lose resolution from 12 to 9.1 megapixels I'm also bummed that the sensor is lower resolution than last year but Samsung made that compromise to help with low light the camera is incredibly fast to focus though and take pictures so action shots should not be a problem I was able to catch plants in motion and every single one was in Focus over the Galaxy S6 which had a hard time keeping up taking that many pictures in a row dynamic range looks fantastic I was happy to see that the camera could really bring out the skies colors are wonderful they are a tad bit oversaturated but the effect still looks nice there's also more contrast to these photos than what I could see from last year I did notice that the camera tends to overexpose some images so I would end up using the exposure compensation to knock down the exposure just a tad and that tends to fix the problem when taking pictures up close the depth of field is very very shallow with that f1.7 lens I often find the depth of field to be a bit bit too shallow for my taste from Acro shots because the plane of focus is so narrow I often found that I tried to focus on a point and the camera ended up focusing on something else right next to it and then the entire photo would be spoiled because I could no longer tell what the image was supposed to be a picture of so on the plus side you get nice and shallow depth of field but then very little is in Focus so if the camera lies to you and tells you something's in focus it might not be and it spoils the picture now some things that really bothered me unfortunately Samsung's post-processing is quite aggressive they use a noise reduction filter that ends up over smoothing an image to where there isn't any detail left and also they oversharpened the images way too much as well last year it wasn't so aggressive if you don't want to deal with Samsung's post-processing though you can shoot in raw that is an option also if you use the manual mode you'll have some extra control over the camera though you're still dealing with Samsung's overall processing I am quite happy with the low light improvements from last year I can definitely tell a difference also without needing another app or upgrade the camera has a shutter speed control like I mentioned before so you can put the camera on a tripod for longer exposures that's really very nice and useful the front-facing camera is 5 megapixels it has really nice colors as well and I also left it on the auto HDR mode all the time John and I had a lot of fun with that front-facing camera and I think it's going to suffice for most people has a nice bit of detail as well video also looks great the very shallow depth of field does help here when focusing on a close object Focus ing in video is very fast so the camera can deal with quite Dynamic scenes without losing focus 4K has a lot of nice detail and it's nice that Optical image stabilization Works in 4k the only one that won't work in the 4K is the software stabilization this is me to the camera while walking filming Ultra HD and Jonathan getting some bread I used to bake these used to bake those what are they special loaves these are sweet yeast rolls oo I want to make our own yeast roll so I wonder if this uses Optical image stabilization underneath 4K keep forgetting if it does or not fcking here is a 1080p 60 frames per second with the electronic video stabilization enabled so you can see what this looks like turn around do it back so you can see all right picking a different aisle now a stabilization off 60 frames per second 1080p I think this looks much better without the stabilization rning around and doing it again maybe I'm wrong but the focus also seems to look a little bit better without the stabilization on I don't know hi John what are you doing it's a it's a video I always smile pictures and say stuff for always smile the videos and say stuff for pictures poor Jonathan that's a big spill how do you feel all over the table under the table over here and on the chairs always cleaning up after Erica's messes what overall I've been very happy with this camera except for Samsung's kind of crazy postprocessing and I also wish that the aspect of the sensor was 169 at 12 megapixels but I think for most the compromises that Samsung has made here are going to work really well and all kinds of different environments so I really can't complain that much I can go get myself a DSLR if I want to to complain that much so thank you everybody for watching this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff please rate comment and subscribe let me know what you think about these phones which one would you go for would you go for the edge variant or would you go whoops that was the S6 which of these would you go for would you go for the edge variant or would you go for the S7 let me know what you guys think overall ask any other questions in the comment section below I usually stick around for an hour or so once the video is released and I like to answer questions ew Grime very very grimy phones all I've done is hold these for a while and they look like this I'm going to be having the LG G5 in hand very soon of course I want to compare those phones in some capacity so again let me know what you think and have a good night\n"