Samsung Galaxy S7 review

• PROS

  Small, for a high-end Android phone. Excellent modem and Wi-Fi performance. Super sharp, bright screen. MicroSD card slot. Water-resistant build.

• CONS

  Not much internal storage. Camera isn't a big jump up from the S6.

• BOTTOM LINE

  There's nothing radically new about it, but the Samsung Galaxy S7 delivers the best Android smartphone performance in a relatively small package.

Think of it as the Galaxy S6...S. The Samsung Galaxy S7 (AED 2550 for 32GB) looks so much like the Galaxy S6 that you'd be excused for thinking it's not a major upgrade. Rather than reinvent the design like it did last year, Samsung has focused on performance improvements in the S7, restoring crowd-pleasing features that were missing from the S6 (like a microSD slot) and boosting battery life.

It's one of the best Android phone available in a truly one-handed form factor. There's been a lot of talk over the last year about how smartphones are getting boring—essentially, how they've plateaued in terms of changing our lives. I think the industry is just taking a breath before it goes crazy with virtual and augmented reality, which we've started to see with Samsung's Gear VR.

But smartphones are still our most personal computers. They're our always-ready cameras with which we record our lives. They're our cloud-based brains that Waze us around town or Google the answers to pressing questions. They're our connections to our friends and family, via Facebook, or text message, or old-fashioned phone calls. They're essential, used hundreds of times a day, and even an incremental improvement in how they work is still an improvement in our lives.

Here's an incremental improvement, for instance. As someone who uses my phone while on the move a lot, I've been raging for years about phone size bloat—how smartphones are getting wider and wider, making them harder to use with one hand. I'm happy to say that the 2.74-inch S7 is actually narrower than the S6 (2.78 inches). That will make the S7 the go-to device for anyone who thinks that high-end phones are just too big.

The Galaxy S7's AMOLED screen is the same size (5.1 inches) and resolution (2,560 by 1440) as the S6's screen. However, Samsung has amped up the brightness quite a lot. The S6 already had an excellent, highly visible screen; the S7 is even better. Both phones put the iPhone 6s to shame.

Samsung has returned water-resistance to the Galaxy S7, without the need for the irritating port cover from the Galaxy S5. This time, it's using a water-repellent coating inside the device. I washed and dried the phone, and even spilled hot coffee on it, with no issues. The phone is rated IP68, which means it's fully waterproof and dustproof.

But yes, otherwise, the S7 looks a lot like the S6, although its slightly more rounded back is just a touch thicker, to allow for a bigger battery. The bigger battery, in turn, gives the phone less of a protruding camera bump on the rear. At 152-gms, it's heavier, too. But it's still a metal-and-glass unibody design, coming in black or gold, with a physical Home button that functions as a fingerprint sensor below the display.

The sensor is the same as the one in the S6; very good, but it'll miss an off-center touch. The phone also still uses traditional micro USB, not USB-C, for charging and accessories. While the phone is about the same size as the Galaxy S6, many existing Galaxy S6 cases just barely won't work on the Galaxy S7. It's a real pity. When I slotted the S7 into an S6 case, I found the headphone jack was moved slightly to the right, so the hole for the jack on the case was in the wrong place.

Qualcomm is back. Last year was a bad one for the leading chip manufacuter, during which it put out some decent processors and one real disappointment, the Snapdragon 810. Well, the Snapdragon 820 is no 810. It has the finest modem in the business, and what's looking like highly competitive app performance.

The Snapdragon 820's X12 modem supports LTE download speeds up to 600Mbps and uploads up to 150Mbps. Call quality is fine, but I wish it was a little better. The earpiece is plenty loud, and there's no distortion; that's not the problem. And noise cancellation is excellent.

Battery life on the sealed-in 3,000mAh cell is noticeably better than on the S6. I did more battery tests than usual on this phone, because the Galaxy S6 had an annoying habit of draining its battery really quickly in standby mode. Unfortunately, this behavior tended to appear only after a month or two, and I haven't had the S7 for a month or two. But early signs are promising.

The S7 got 9 hours in our video streaming rundown, as compared with 7 hours, 13 minutes for the S6. In standby mode without heavy CPU usage, the S7 drained 11 percent of its battery in eight hours. Not bad. Intense usage killed it in about 6.5 hours, which isn't too bad either. The phone supports both fast charging and dual-standard wireless charging. Using the included fast charger, we got the phone from zero to fully charged in around 90 minutes.

The Galaxy S7 runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Samsung's skin over it, on a 2.15GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. The Snapdragon 820 benchmarks faster than any other chip we've seen in an Android phone. With Geekbench scores of 2,333 single-core and 5,330 multi-core, it beats the Galaxy S6 (1,440 single/4,811 multi) and the Galaxy Note 5 (1,472 single/5,020 multi) handily. GPU performance is also better, taking the GFXBench Manhattan test from 15 frames per second (fps) on the previous generation, to 25fps here.

What really matters is how the phone performs in practice. I like to use the controls of Asphalt 8 to check for responsiveness, and the S7 is as smooth as butter—as you'd expect. Apps launch quickly and there's no lag. The S7, like the past two generations of Galaxy phones, also has dual-window or pop-up multitasking.

Samsung has, once again, tried to lighten the burden of its Android skin. While the icons are still all restyled, Samsung ditched its Briefing screen to the left of the main home screen. It has also resisted the current, horrid trend to get rid of the app drawer in favor of a more iPhone-like interface.

One likeable customization is the always-on screen, which floats the time, date, battery status, and basic notification information on the screen at all times; you can swap it out for a calendar or one of a few preset images. The always-on screen information is convenient, and doesn't appear to consume much battery. And you can always turn it off if it's not for you.

The Galaxy S7's camera isn't much better than the S6's, but that's fine. The S6 has a terrific camera, and the S7 has a faster focus lock. Samsung's new promises mostly have to do with low light. Samsung replaced the Galaxy S6's 16-megapixel camera with a 12-megapixel shooter with larger pixels, to improve low-light performance. It also increased the number of focus pixels, to speed up focus in low light.

The latter part works: There's none of the pulsing you see on the S6 as the camera struggles to find focus. The S7 is also better at white balance than the S6, making my skin look orange less often. The low-light improvements are minor at best. In one of my several low-light tests, the S7 took a much brighter image than the S6 did.

But I didn't find that in other tests, and whether my hand was shaky mattered far more than anything else. Both the S6 and the S7 cameras outperform the iPhone 6s, though, with sharper and less noisy images. The 5-megapixel front camera is also very good, but a minor improvement over the S6.

Mostly images are a little less noisy. The bigger improvement for selfies comes in the addition of a Selfie Flash mode, which lights up the screen when you're taking a shot in the dark. Video now records at up to 4K resolution at 30 frames per second on the main camera, and 1080p on the front camera. Video recording is excellent, and maintained 30 frames per second even in very dim conditions.

In terms of audio and video playback, the Snapdragon 820 can handle any content you can throw at it. There's no cabled way to attach the S7 to a big screen any more, though; you need to use wireless screencasting.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is a no-compromise luxury phone, and the top of the Android lineup. It's also pretty conventional. The S7 is also the smallest flagship Android phone out there. It destroys every other Android device in its size class.