Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review: Now only £355 and with Android Oreo

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review: Display

One thing you needn’t doubt, however, is the quality of the S7 Edge’s display, as Samsung’s 5.5in, 2,560×1,440 Super AMOLED panel is, once again, best in class. It covers a full 100% of the sRGB colour gamut along with pitch perfect 0.00cd/m2 black levels. Images look stunning on the S7 Edge, and its ultra-high contrast ratio captures plenty of detail, too, so you can be sure your photos and videos will always look their best.

As per usual, Super AMOLED displays aren’t as bright as their LCD counterparts, as evidenced by the S7 Edge’s peak brightness level of 361.01cd/m2. However, as with the S7, the S7 Edge has a clever trick of being able to boost its brightness in very bright sunshine when it’s set to auto. To test this, I shone a torch over its adaptive light sensor, which promptly made its peak white levels shoot up to 503cd/m2. This is around what I’d expect to see from an LCD smartphone, so to see this on a Super AMOLED display is pretty impressive, combining the brightness of an LCD when you really need it with the rich, vibrant colours of Super AMOLED when you don’t.

Samsung’s also introduced an always-on element to the S7 Edge’s display this year, which shows the time, date and battery status when the phone’s in sleep mode. This is incredibly useful if all you want to do is have a quick glance at the time, and it doesn’t use much battery either, as Samsung’s Super AMOLED panel only illuminates the pixels it needs to show the information instead of the entire backlight.

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review: Performance

The S7 Edge’s performance is equally unparalleled, as its octa-core 2.3GHz Samsung Exynos 8890 processor and 4GB of RAM shot right to the top of our benchmark leaderboard. In Geekbench 3, for example, it scored a massive 2,147 in the single core test and 6,323 in the multicore test, putting it neck and neck with the S7.

It’s interesting to note, though, that the S7 and S7 Edge still can’t beat Apple’s iPhone 6S when it comes to the single core test, as both handsets are a good four hundred points slower than the 6S in this respect, showing that they’re slightly less efficient when it comes to low-level tasks. The S7 family have the edge in multicore performance, as the iPhone 6s only managed 4,417 here, but it’s clear that Samsung’s Exynos chip still has room for improvement despite being significantly faster than every other Android phone you can buy right now – although this, too, might change once we get the LG G5 in for testing, as this will be coming with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 chipset.

For the time being, though, the S7 Edge’s GPU provides a big step-up over existing Snapdragon 810 handsets, as it finished GFX Bench GL’s offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test in 2,296 frames, giving it an average frame rate of 37fps. It’s essentially the same score we saw on the S7, which is no surprise given the identical hardware, but it’s still a great phone for mobile games, and one that will happily handle anything Google Play can throw at it.

Web browsing was super-fast, too. With a Peacekeeper score of 1,528, the S7 Edge breezed through complex web pages, providing quick and easy scrolling even while pages were loading lots of pictures and adverts.

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review: Battery Life

There’s a lot more to the S7 than raw performance, though, as it also has a gigantic battery life. When we set the screen brightness to our standard measurement of 170cd/m2 and ran our continuous video playback test, the S7 Edge lasted a massive 18h 42m, which is just shy of a full hour over the S7.

Admittedly, I was hoping the Edge’s larger 3,600mAh battery might last a little bit longer than the S7’s 3,000mAh battery, but when you take into account the Edge’s big screen, it’s perhaps not all that surprising. Either way, you should easily get a full day’s use out of the Edge, if not well into a second day if you don’t use it too heavily.

What’s more, Samsung’s improved its fast-charging technology for the S7 Edge, as it takes just under two hours to go from 0 to 100% using a typical 5V 2.0A fast charger. It also supports wireless charging via the usual Qi and PMA standards.