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Galaxy S7 Edge

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung has finally taken the wraps off the adjacent-generation Galaxy S7 and S7 Border. Samsung's not breaking much new ground with these sleek; consider these new models an evolution, not a revolution. That said, in that location's enough to exist excited almost, forth with a few key additions that replace sorely missed features in the concluding-generation models, then permit's step through the changes.

The Galaxy S7 keeps its 5.ane-inch quad Hd display, merely the S7 Border bumps up from 5.1 to five.5 inches, putting it within spitting altitude of the Milky way Note five'due south five.7-inch panel. The Border's curved portions are at present 550 pixels wide, so you can fit two rows of quick-admission icons. The contoured backs and ever-so-slightly-smaller bezels make the phones easier to hold, and Samsung managed to shrink the photographic camera lens bump a bit.

Long-time Galaxy fans may be excited about 2 key feature returns in particular: IP68-level water resistance, which lets you submerge the phones in v feet of water for half an hr, and more importantly on a day-to-mean solar day basis, the return of expandable storage. That means you tin pop in a behemothic (well, tiny) 200GB microSD card and take way more room than you lot'll get on an iDevice. Both models come up with 32GB of internal storage. The S7 Edge too picks upward a larger three,600mAh bombardment; the standard S7 still sits at 3,000mAh.

Galaxy S7 Edge

Underneath the hood is Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 820 processor and 4GB RAM on the U.Southward. side; European models will soldier on with Exynos processors. Both phones run Android 6.0 Marshmallow and go another level of refinement on TouchWiz, Samsung's long-time UI layer; the most notable characteristic is the e'er-on display that shows notifications, a clock or calendar, or an image of your choosing, at a bare-minimum cost to bombardment life per 60 minutes (and if the proximity sensor detects the phone is in a pocketbook or your pocket, it shuts off entirely).

Early on hands ons around the Web, such as at our sister site PCMag, are saying the devices have the usual Samsung-level stunning displays and gorgeous, saturated colors. We're as well expecting fifty-fifty meliorate camera functioning than last time around; while the S7 and S7 Border footstep down to 12 megapixels, from 16, it's so it can utilise larger 1.iv-micron pixels for improved low-light performance. The lens aperture is now an impressive f1.7; it will be nice to see if y'all tin actually blur the groundwork of photos a bit with this phone. Samsung also claims you lot can focus three times as quickly with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge equally you could with the final-generation devices. Both phones also feature five-megapixel front-facing cameras.

Galaxy S7 Edge

A few nits: There'southward still no removable battery pack, and Samsung stuck with micro USB again, instead of moving to the reversible and accommodating-meliorate USB-C, which is frustrating.

Overall, these are nice upgrades on what has now been a solid, undecayed line of summit-notch Android phones for several successive generations. We're looking forward to getting our hands on them in existent life, only early signs are encouraging. You tin can pre-guild the phones beginning February 23 on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and phones should offset appearing in stores (and your hands, if you pre-gild one) on March 11.