Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian Last year saw a dramatic shift in design for Samsung. Out went derided plastic and in came premium materials: glass and metal. The Galaxy S6 came in a regular flat version and one called “Edge” with a screen with curved on the left and right edges.
It is this version that the Galaxy S7 Edge takes its design from. Side-by-side they look barely any different apart from a bigger screen – 5.5in to the older 5.1in – and the back now has rounded edges.
In the hand it feels fantastic, much more comfortable and easier to hold. On the table it looks like a well-crafted piece of technology should.
The curved edges and minimal bezel of the 5.5in phone make the S7 Edge one of the physically smallest phablets to date. It is narrower than many smartphones with much smaller screens and is shorter too. It makes it really easy to use, particularly next to Apple’s iPhone 6S Plus, which feels massive and unwieldy in comparison.
For comparison, the Galaxy S7 Edge is 72.6mm wide with its 5.5in screen, which is the same width as the Nexus 5X with its smaller 5.2in screen, 5.2mm narrower than the 5.7in Nexus 6P and 5.3mm narrower than 5.5in iPhone 6S Plus with the same size screen. That half a centimetre makes a big difference in ease of handling.
The screen is the best I’ve ever seen fitted to a smartphone. Period. It’s pin-sharp with deep blacks and rich colours. It has a great range of brightness, taking it from really very dim to bright enough to see in direct sunlight. Samsung’s AMOLED screens have always been excellent. The S7 Edge has set a new bar.
- Screen: 5.5in quad HD AMOLED (534ppi)
- Processor: octa-core Samsung Exynos 8890 or quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820
- RAM: 4GB of RAM
- Storage: 32GB + microSD card
- Operating system: Android 6.0.1 with TouchWiz
- Camera: 12MP rear camera with OIS, 5MP front-facing camera
- Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, wireless charging, Bluetooth 4.2 and GPS
- Dimensions: 150.9 x 72.6 x 7.7 mm
- Weight: 157g
The S7 Edge is the snappiest smartphone I have used to date and flies through program loading, switching between apps, games and image processing without breaking a sweat.
It will likely handle anything you can throw at it. The Snapdragon 820 should perform similarly. Both have 
The relatively large battery charged from 25% to 100% in 90 minutes via a Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 USB power adapter, and wirelessly charged at a rate of 0.5% a minute using a 5W pad built into a piece of Ikea furniture. Using Samsung’s latest wireless chargers should be even faster, but one is not included in the box.The battery life of the S7 Edge was excellent, easily lasting over a day and a half without any special treatment. Using it as my primary device, listening to four hours of music via Bluetooth headphones, browsing and using apps for three hours with hundreds of push emails and 30 minutes of light gaming, the S7 Edge would see me from 7am on day one until 7pm on day two.
The Edge has Samsung’s new always-on screen, which displays the time, a calendar of a picture on the screen when it isn’t actively being used. Samsung says it’ll use less than 1% of the battery an hour. In my testing using the digital clock option the phone dropped just 2% battery in 8 hours overnight, which is very impressive.
The always-on screen shows call and text notifications, but not much else. I wear a watch, so didn’t find it useful, but it should be significantly more battery-efficient than constantly turning the phone on to check the time.The S7 Edge has a microSD card slot for adding more storage – the return of a fan favourite – but Samsung chose to stop it being part of what Google calls “adoptable storage”. It means the SD card shows up as a separate volume for storing files such as music or photos, but there are limits on what can and can’t be stored on it, unlike when it is adopted as part of the main storage of the phone.For instance, some apps can’t be installed on the SD card and some media services don’t allow content to be stored on it, meaning you’re restricted to using the 32GB of built-in storage.Most of Samsung’s modifications are good: more quick settings, more power-saving modes, extensive control over notifications including the power of the vibration.The Upday social news aggregator panel on the homescreen (which replaced Flipboard on earlier Samsung phones) can be turned off. I didn’t find it useful.The S7 Edge comes with a variety of Facebook and Microsoft apps pre-installed, the majority of which I would install normally anyway. They can’t be uninstalled, but can be disabled. I disabled the The edge software includes a wider panel over last year’s S6 Edge. It’s useful for app shortcuts or for quickly calling common contacts, but little beyond that. It can be disabled if you never use it, but doesn’t get in the way.The gaming tools are quite useful. They can record game footage, stop notifications or buttons from disrupting play and can limit the smartphone’s performance to save battery power. You can even minimise a game without pausing it, which could be useful for those that play games such as Clash of Clans or similar.
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It’s not quite perfect - the microSD card isn’t as useful as it could be and it won’t get updates as fast as a Google Nexus - it doesn’t break the mould or do anything revolutionary either, but it’s as good as a smartphone gets right now.