MWC 2016: Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge now Waterproof with better Battery, Cameras and SD Card Support!

Samsung had something to prove with last year’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. It wanted to show the world that it too could make high-end smartphones with great design and premium materials, just like Apple and HTC have done for years. And it succeeded: the S6 models were by far the nicest smartphones ever to come out of the Korean giant’s factories. 

The cheesy plastic was ditched and replaced with metal and glass. This move did wonders to shake Samsung’s bad rap for making cheap feeling, ugly devices. But they weren’t without flaws: high prices, the removal of expandable storage and waterproofing, and poor battery life disappointed many reviewers and buyers, and the S6 line hasn’t turned around Samsung’s sinking mobile business.

Now the company is launching its next volley, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The new S7 models don’t rewrite the book — they borrow liberally from the S6’s design and feature set. But they bring numerous refinements and improvements, and they restore features that went missing from the Galaxy S6 line. They are, very likely, the best phones that Samsung has ever made.

Samsung has tightened up the S6’s overall design for the S7: it’s more comfortable to hold, easier to pick up off of a table, has a flatter fingerprint scanner, and has a less pronounced camera hump. It won’t look unfamiliar to anyone that’s seen or held the S6, and it still looks remarkably similar to the iPhone 6 and 6S depending on which angle you look at it from. The standard S7 retains the 5.1-inch, quad HD Super AMOLED display from its predecessor.

The S7 Edge has received a more thorough update: it’s been given a larger, 5.5-inch display (still quad HD Super AMOLED and curved on both sides), and been refined even further. The back of the device has a slight curve to it now, making it much more comfortable to hold than last year’s phone. It’s also remarkably small, especially when its put side-by-side with other phones with 5.5-inch screens, such as the iPhone 6S Plus. The S7 Edge is a phone that most people could use with one hand, and it slips into a pocket with ease, despite having a spacious display. In the brief time I spent with it, I was taken away by how nice it was to hold in my hand. It’s a stunning piece of technology.

Both phones have support for microSD cards to augment their 32GB of internal storage (Samsung says a 64GB model will be available in some regions, but the US will just have the 32GB), as well as IP68 water and dust resistance, which allows for submersion in up to 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes at a time. The S7’s waterproofing includes sealed ports, so there are no fussy port covers over the USB ports or headphone jacks. The S7 does not use USB Type-C, but sticks with the traditional Micro USB port. Samsung says this is because Micro USB retains compatibility with the Gear VR headset released last year, and that USB C isn’t quite ready for the mainstream just yet.

Additionally, the S7 line is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor in North America, a departure from Samsung’s own Exynos chips that were in the S6. (Samsung is still using Exynos processors in the S7 for other regions of the world.) The RAM has been stepped up to 4GB this time around.

While Samsung brought back the expandable storage and water resistance of its earlier Galaxy models, like the S6, the S7 line does not have removable batteries. Instead, to address the battery life deficiencies of last year, Samsung increased the size of the phones’ batteries, up to 3,000mAh in the S7 (up from 2,550mAh in the S6) and 3,600mAh for the S7 Edge (vs 2,600 in the S6 Edge). Those batteries are significantly larger, especially in the S7 Edge, so hopefully the battery woes of the S6 are left in the past. Both phones also retain Samsung’s adaptive fast charging and fast wireless charging features.

Perhaps the most significant change this year comes in the S7’s new 12-megapixel camera. It’s lower resolution than last year’s 16-megapixel shooter, but Samsung says its larger pixels let in 56 percent more light than before for better low light images. The camera’s lens is a brighter f/1.7 aperture, allowing in 25 percent more light. Combined, the new sensor and lens let in 95 percent more light than last year’s already impressive camera, which is promising for low light photography. The sensor’s shape has also changed from a wide-format 16:9 to a more traditional 4:3 ratio.

Samsung says the new camera can focus up to three times faster thanks to its dual-pixel system that allows every single one of the 12 million pixels to act as focus pixels, similar to the system Canon uses in some of its DSLR cameras. The camera is also very quick to launch — in brief demos it handily beat out a Nexus 6P and iPhone 6S Plus in getting ready to take a shot.

For software, the S7 models are running Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. There are couple new enhancements for the S7’s edge swipe features, but the big new software trick is the Always-On Display, which permanently shows a clock with notifications, a calendar, or an image on the S7’s screen. It is not a motion activated display, like Motorola’s Active Display or Google’s ambient display, but remains on all the time. Samsung says the features only consumes half a percent of battery per hour in its tests, and if the proximity sensor is covered, as when the phone is in a bag or pocket, the screen will shut off.

The S7 and S7 Edge will be available on all four major carriers in the US starting on March 11th, with preorders beginning on February 23rd. The S7 will come in black or gold, while the S7 Edge will come in black, gold, or silver options. Samsung is sweetening the deal for early adopters with a free Gear VR offer with purchase of either S7 running February 23rd through March 18th. Samsung says that pricing for the new models should be in line with last year’s phones at launch, so the S7 and S7 Edge won’t be coming cheap.

Though Samsung produced a great product with the S6 last year, it didn’t stop the company from losing market share and profits in its mobile division. Samsung is facing ever stiffer competition, not only from its traditional rivals like Apple and LG, but also from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers that have eaten away at the low-end of Samsung’s business. The S7 and S7 Edge are not reinventions of the wheel, but iterations and refinements, and address some pain points of the older models. Whether that’s enough to turn Samsung’s smartphone business around remains to be seen, but it will be an interesting show to watch.

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Samsung Galaxy S7 revealed in new Leaked images!

What could be leaked images of the Samsung Galaxy S7 have been released, just under a fortnight ahead of the upcoming flagship smartphone’s official launch.

One image, released by Vietnamese tech website ReviewDao, appears to show the back of the device, but unfortunately doesn’t give too much away.

We can’t confirm much about the phone’s rumoured specs from the image, but SamMobile pointed out the camera does appear to be a little more flush with the back plate than it was in the S6, potentially proving one of the many S7 rumours right.

It also looks like the back is plastic, and not glass, as has been rumoured – however, according to SamMobile this phone may only be a prototype, so we shouldn’t take it as an accurate impression of how the final phone will look.

You can catch a glimpse of the metal frame on the sides of the device, however, which is apparently magnesium and not aluminium, according to rumours.

Another leaked image, which was released around the same time on Chinese social network Weibo, purports to show the front of the S7 Edge, the larger, curved-screen version of the phone, which will likely be released alongside the standard model on 21 February.

The image shows the phone displaying the results of an AnTuTu benchmark test, which labels the phone as an SM-G9350, which earlier leaks have claimed is the S7 Edge’s model number.

The benchmarking result, which reflects the phone’s technical performance, is 134704, which is what could be expected for a phone with the S7’s rumoured specs.

The images don’t reveal too much by themselves, but they could have confirmed a few stories about the long-awaited phone.

The Galaxy S7 is due to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday 21 February, in an event which starts at 6PM GMT

Samsung’s Galaxy S7 will reportedly come in two new sizes!

Samsung’s Galaxy S7 smartphone will be released with two different screen sizes, according to a report from South Korea’s ET News. One version will reportedly have a flat, 5.2-inch display, while the second — the “Edge” variant — will incorporate a curved, 5.5-inch screen. It’s previously been rumored that the Galaxy S7 will include a 5.7-inch display, the same size as the screen on the S6 Edge+.

Launching the S7 with two different screen sizes would be a change in strategy for Samsung, which released this year’s S6 in flat- and curved-screen variants, but with the same size 5.1-inch screen. The rumored approach would be more comparable with Apple’s tactics with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, released with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens respectively. (The S6 Edge+ has a larger screen too, but was released months after the original S6 and S6 Edge.)

Citing unnamed sources, ET News also reports that Samsung is planning an initial production run of approximately 5 million units for the new Galaxy (split between 3.3 million for the S7 and 1.6 million for the S7 Edge) with mass-production rumored to start in February. A previous report from The Wall Street Journal suggested a March release date for the S7, as well as claiming that the phone will look “largely similar” to the S6 and will feature a pressure-sensitive screen like Apple’s 3D Touch feature.

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Samsung Galaxy S7 to have an Apple-like 3D touch and microSD Card

The Wall Street Journal has posted some tantalizing new details about Samsung’s upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7. The report paints a picture of the S7 as being a minor upgrade to the major revamp that was the Galaxy S6 but with a few new features to entice upgraders.

The biggest news, according to the Journal, is that the S7 and S7 Edge will feature a “pressure-sensitive display” which the report notes “will be similar to that offered by rival Apple Inc. on the iPhone 6s earlier this year.” Apple’s 3D Touch hardware launched with the iPhone 6S, Apple rolled out support to the core OS interface and packed-in apps, and tons of third-party apps (even Google) added support for it. Samsung lacks the sway over an app ecosystem that Apple has, so while it can update the core OS interface, we doubt many other apps will support the pressure-sensitive display, as was the case with Samsung’s early foray into fingerprint readers.

In the “not surprising” category, the Journal said that Samsung will again be releasing two versions of the phone—the flat-screened Galaxy S7 and the curved-screened Galaxy S7 Edge—and that both devices will look “will look largely similar” to their predecessors. The report said the phone is slated to launch in March with an unveiling at Mobile World Congress, which is similar to the Galaxy S6 timeframe, and it will come with a USB Type C-port, which is quickly becoming a standard for new devices.

The Galaxy S6 was the first Samsung flagship to scrap the microSD card slot, but data hoarders will be glad to hear that the microSD card is reportedly returning. It’s apparently only coming to the flat device, though—the report says that the microSD slot will not appear in the Galaxy S7 Edge.

2015 was the year Samsung removed the MicroSD slot from its entire flagship lineup, but it was also the year Google made an SD slot more useful than ever by adding an “adoptable storage” feature toAndroid 6.0 Marshmallow. The feature allows a user to declare an SD card “permanent” and format it just like internal memory. The internal and external memory pools are then merged together and managed by the OS, giving users more storage without making them worry about file management.

In the “very surprising” category, the report says Samsung is “considering adding a retina scanner” to the Galaxy S7. For now the report seems unsure about if the feature will actually make it into a retail product, noting that with three months to go until release, “features could change.”

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Samsung’s response to the iPad pro: The massive 18.4-inch Galaxy View tablet!

Not to be outdone by Apple’s $799 iPad Pro, which has an ultra high-resolution screen measuring 12.9 inches diagonally and goes on sale next month, rival Samsung is gearing up to launch a brand new tablet with a huge 18.4-inch screen, the Galaxy View.

Although the View is yet to officially launch, some online retailers are now taking pre-orders for the $599 Android device, 9to5Google reported Monday.

Available for pre-order over at Adorama for $599 for an entry-level model with thirty-two gigabytes of built-in flash storage, the Galaxy View is powered by Samsung’s own 1.6 GHz Exynos 7580 octa-core chip with 2GB of RAM, code-named ‘Carmen2’.

On the connectivity front, the device includes Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi networking and Cat. 6 CA LTE cellular. Built-in storage is expandable up to 128 gigabytes via a micro-SD card.

The front camera is a paltry 2.1-megapixel module with 1080p video capture at thirty frames per second. There’s no LED flash on the front camera and there’s no second camera on the back.

Driven by Android Lollipop, the View’s gigantic 18.4-inch TFT screen has a full HD 1,920-by-1,080 pixel resolution. Samsung claims the View’s 5,700 mAh battery provides 8.5 hours of video playback time.

If the promotional images and the device’s moniker are an indication, Samsung is positioning the View as an inexpensive tablet with a massive screen, mostly dedicated to watching video and enjoying media.

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