With its 5.1-inch screen but smallish top and bottom bezels, the S6 is not that much bigger than the iPhone 6. It falls right into what I personally (admittedly with largish man-hands) consider to be the sweet-spot for non-gigantic phone-size. It’s right in there with the HTC One M9 and the Nexus 5 and the new Moto X. This is Android’s new “small” and it’s pretty much what you’re stuck with unless you’re willing to do something drastic, like buy an old 2013 Moto X or hunt down a Sony Z3 Compact.
Using It
The Galaxy S6 is blisteringly fast. Switching between apps, scrolling through the multitasking queue, pulling down the notification shade, opening the camera, running games, I never once saw the slightest hitch in performance. There’s nothing wildly throw-your-hair-back about the speed; it’s not unbelievable or anything like that. Other recent flagship phones feel fast, too. But the S6 does everything you’d want it to as quickly as you could ask. And it does it consistently.
The S6 runs an Exynos processor—one of Samsung’s home-grown chips—instead of the Qualcomm’s new flagship Snapdragon 810, but it doesn’t suffer for it in the slightest. Apps launch with a snap, and even with Samsung’s historically bloated TouchWiz interface sitting on top of Android, swiping through homescreens, pulling down notification shades, and opening app drawers is quick and fluid.
To push the processor a little further, I loaded up old faithful Dead Trigger 2, which ran fantastically on the auto-detected “low” settings, and barely any worse once I manually jacked up the settings all the way to max. Similarly, GTA: San Andreas runs smoooooooth as hell, although I did see some super weird graphical glitches. So far, though, it’s the only place I’ve seen anything like that.
But all of this performance talk comes with a big ol’ asterisk. It’s great for now. Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has been getting less and less obtrusive—the newest version that runs atop Android’s latest Lollipop update is the most scaled back it’s ever been—but Samsung phones can get bad quickly. The Galaxy S5 we have banging around the office (still waiting for its fabled Lollipop update) is a shadow of its former self performance-wise, staggering under the weight of Samsung’s software plus new versions of Android. It’s impossible to predict if the S6 awaits a similar fate.
For now, though, the S6 a pleasure to use and it’s worth expressing one more time how not-terrible Samsung’s proprietary UI has gotten. In a streak of good decisions, Samsung has culled most of the extra bullshit options out of things like the camera. Once cluttered with useless toggles, it now looks simple, clean, with just the buttons you want and need. It’s practically indistinguishable from stock Android when you boot it up.
The quick notification buttons, those ones you use to toggle things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the notification shade? TouchWiz gives you options to customize the ones you want, without slapping you in the face with like 50 superfluous buttons for “Golf mode” or whatever insanely extraneous bullshit it used to. All that, plus the material design ethos in Android Lollipop has bled over into TouchWiz and made it less ugly than ever. Samsung has (mostly) learned how to keep its bullshit out of your way.
And when it isn’t getting out of your way, it’s actually doing a good job of adding value. The Galaxy S6 can run apps in windows, and even run two different ones side by side, just like the Note 4, though admittedly it’s not quite as useful on a smaller screen and without a stylus. What is useful though is that a double tap of the home button will immediately bring up and open Samsung’s quick and snappy camera app, which makes the Galaxy S6 maybe the best split-second shooter I’ve ever used.
If you’re looking for a real down-and-dirty look at how the Galaxy S6 shapes up shot-for-shot against its toughest competition, you can check out our camera comparison. But that’s almost beside the point. The point is that it’s fucking fast, and in the end that’s all that really matters. The app launches fast, it focuses fast, and shoots fast in a way that makes every other phone I’ve used feel like something from the civil war. When the camera is this fast, little differences in color quality hardly matter when you catch a photo that you would have missed entirely.
Here’s the thing about smartphones: they are a lot better when they have big screens. Virtually everything we do with smartphones is enhanced by a larger display: messaging, playing games, watching video, reading articles, browsing the web, you name it. After all, when it’s stripped down to its core, the modern smartphone is little more than a touchscreen display in front of an ultra-compact, connected supercomputer.
But in order to have a big screen, you have to put up with a big phone, and to be honest, big phones are a pain in the neck. They are clumsy to hold and easy to drop, don’t fit comfortably in our pockets, look ridiculous on your arm when exercising, and are all but impossible to use with one hand. But what if you could have a phone with a big screenand be able to comfortably use it in one hand? What if it easily slipped into your pocket, yet still provided an immersive display that was great to watch video or play games on? And what if it still had a big enough battery to power that big display all day long, regardless of how much you used your phone?
Samsung is betting it has the answer to all of those questions with its new Galaxy S7 smartphone. The Galaxy S7 is actually two phones: the standard S7 ($650-$695, depending on carrier) and the S7 Edge ($750-$795, depending on carrier). It's the Edge that truly tries to solve the big phone problem using Samsung’s unique curved display technology.
The S7 models aren’t hugely different from last year’s Galaxy S6 pair — in fact, they look almost identical. The Galaxy S6s were a watershed moment for Android devices: they were the first ones that could stand next to the iPhone in terms of design, materials, performance, and camera quality. So for the S7, Samsung didn’t rewrite its formula. Instead, it took what was good in the S6, refined and iterated upon it, and produced something much better.
And it fits in your pocket.
Filmed on location at Manhattan Neon
Between the two devices, the standard S7 is the less interesting model. It’s the most similar to last year’s phone: same size display (5.1-inch, quad HD, Super AMOLED), same materials (metal and glass, no plastic to be found here), same overall shape and design. It’s a little bit heavier and a little bit thicker than the S6, but not egregiously so in either category.
The S7 has adopted the Note 5’s curved glass back, which makes it more comfortable to hold, despite its thicker profile. The home button doesn’t stick out as much and the rear camera housing doesn’t protrude as much as before (again, likely because the phone itself is just over a millimeter thicker than the
S6). It’s a more refined version of the S6, but overall, largely the same hardware experience.
The S7 Edge, on the other hand, has undergone more dramatic changes. While last year’s S6 Edge has the same 5.1-inch display as the standard model, the S7 Edge steps up to a phablet-class 5.5-inch screen (also quad HD, Super AMOLED, and fantastic to look at). That does make it taller and wider than before, but not nearly as much as you might expect.
The secret to the S7 Edge is in those curved sides that give it the Edge name. Samsung’s been curving screens on its phones for a few years now, including on the S6 Edge and the larger S6 Edge+. But those felt more like a gimmick for marketing purposes than anything else.
The curved sides on the S7 Edge are different. Samsung’s using them here to make the phone much narrower than it would be if it had a flat display. It makes the whole device smaller and easier to use. That becomes readily apparent when you put the S7 Edge next to other devices with 5.5-inch or similar screens. It’s significantly narrower than all of them, including Apple’s iPhone 6S Plus (5.5-inch), the LG G4 (5.5-inch), Google’s Nexus 6P (5.7-inch), and Samsung’s own Note 5 (5.7-inch). When it comes to ease of use in your hand, a narrower phone is much easier to manage.
The S7 Edge also has curved glass on its back, making it much more comfortable to hold and easier to pick up off a desk or table than last year’s S6 Edge. The whole thing is rounded, polished, and delightful to flip over and over in my hand, much like a river stone that’s been tumbled under water for a millennia or two. It slips into my pants pocket with ease and is just short enough to stay in my pocket when I sit down. That’s something I can’t say about the iPhone 6S Plus, Nexus 6P, or Note 5.
On top of this, Samsung managed to make both S7 models water resistant. They can withstand up to 30 minutes under a meter and a half of water; the important thing here is that it you don’t have to worry about the being a fallible human being around your phone. The tiny tragedies of day-to-day life become no big deal: spilling coffee when your phone is on your desk, keeping it by the sink when you’re doing dishes, calling an Uber in a rainstorm, or, worse, dropping it in the toilet when you’re a few sheets to the wind. The S7s don’t have any fiddly flaps or port covers to accomplish this, either. Samsung isn’t the first phone company to make a water resistant phone, nor are the S7s Samsung’s first water resistant models, but it’s something that all phones, especially high-end ones, should have on their spec lists
No comments:
Post a Comment