First look at Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Samsung's latest flagships, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are slated for release in Canada and offer a significant upgrade to the S6 series of devices from a year ago. With new aluminum and glass enclosures, the Samsung Galaxy S7 (with a 5.1-inch display) and the larger S7 Edge (with a 5.5-inch dual edge display for $100 more), both offer a more integrated build, water resistance and an improved camera with f/1.7 aperture that lets in more light plus. Here are some impressions.

Samsung seems to have improved and further refined the design elements it introduced with the S6 series and returned requested features like water resistance plus the ability to add up to 200 GB microSD storage. Both devices will ship with a standard storage of 32GB which puts the onus on users to add the amount of extra storage they want.

Here's the water resistant Samsung Galaxy S7 getting dunked in a fishbowl

A video posted by Canadian Reviewer (@canadianreviewer) on Mar 7, 2016 at 8:32am PST

The new Galaxy S7 devices have a waterproof rating of IP68 can be immersed in 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes. While under water, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge can still operate and can receive calls or take video if these features were enabled before the phone was dunked in water.

Gaming is also improved thanks to a Game Launcher app and the Vulkan gaming API. Other improvements worth noting are a sleeker form factor that reduces the bulge of the rear camera, faster charging with a full charge time of 90 minutes for the S7 and 100 minutes for the S7 Edge with the included charger, plus the addition of an always on display.

During a demo earlier today, Samsung representatives explained that while a lot of the improvements are visible on the surface of the devices, the increase in performance is quite substantial with up to 30 per cent increase in CPU performance, 64 per cent improvement in GPU performance and 4GB of RAM to help with multitasking and system management.

I'm coming from a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and did a few brief side bys side performance comparisons. The Galaxy S7 loaded complex webpages on the Chrome browser one to two seconds faster than the Note 4 and seemed to be quicker in multitasking. Battery life on the Galaxy S7 seems to be very good at first glance and might be just be good enough to switch over users of large smartphones who choose phablets for longer lasting battery performance.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 has a 3000 mAh battery while the larger (yet thinner) S7 Edge has a 3600 mAh battery which can also be charged via a wireless charging dock. Both come with the quick charging adapter plus a microUSB to USB dongle that can be used to input and connect external devices. USB Type-C, which many other manufacturers and even Google are jumping on, is missing from this generation of Galaxy S phones.

Samsung also showed of its Gear VR accessory as well as Gear 360 camera for capturing video in immersive VR. Samsung fans now have a flagship that feels true and new and a bunch of desireable features plus very impressive battery life and a notable camera but for a very high price.