So sánh samsung a7 2023 và s7 edge
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have arrived and on paper you should be very excited indeed. Why? Because in theory Samsung has finally blended style and substance to perfection with these phones. What about the reality? Well, yes and no… The result is two mouthwatering phones that amaze, delight and frustrate in roughly equal measure. And this is why: Design - Beautiful, Practical But High Maintenance On the surface the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge have not changed a lot from Samsung’s 2015 Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. In fact they’re actually slightly thicker (1mm) and a little heavier (about 20g) than their predecessors:
Galaxy S7 (left) and Galaxy S7 Edge (right) are triumphs of industrial design and craftsmanship.... [+] Image credit: Gordon Kelly And yet none of that matters because the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge feel far better in hand. The reason for this is Samsung has added subtle curvature to their backs so they sit better in your palm, the camera bulge is reduced so they wobble less when used on a flat surface and the seams around their aluminium frames have been removed which further ups their build quality. Samsung has excelled itself with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge build quality. They're... [+] exceptional. Image credit: Gordon Kelly This may all sound incidental, but it adds up to a lot. These are devices that feel sculpted to your hand yet combine premium materials with baked in practicalities like wireless charging and the return of water resistance and expandable storage (more later). They’re supermodels, but with tomboy sensibilities. In fact this comes through particularly clearly with the duo’s water resistance. Their IP68 rating is a step up from the IP67 rating given to the Galaxy S5 and means they can remain fully submerged in up to 1.5m of water for an hour - something they handled with aplomb. They aren’t designed to take high impact water blasts so keep them out the shower, but having no fear of them getting wet in the rain or falling into a sink/drink is a return to the good old days. Furthermore, where the Galaxy S7 is good, the Galaxy S7 Edge is even better. In use it feels little bigger and no heavier than the S7 yet you get a screen which is noticeably larger. This is a 5.5-inch phone you can actually use one handed and its curves add a real Wow Factor. Still one frustrating Galaxy S6 flaw does affect both the new phones. Glass has always been a silly material to use in smartphone backs and Samsung, for all the subtle improvements, hasn’t learnt its lesson here. The company’s continued use of glass backs in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge means they are fingerprint magnets, needlessly slippy in the cold and sticky and greasy when the weather heats up. Samsung's glass Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge backs are beautiful, but massively impractical. Image... [+] credit: Gordon Kelly Smartphone makers need to learn that smartphones don’t need to have soap bar finishes to look stylish and the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge would benefit from some added grip. Winner: Galaxy S7 Edge - glass backs aside, these are two of the best designed phones ever made, but the Edge takes the prize thanks to a stunningly compact form factor which makes this 5.5-inch device little bigger than its 5.1-inch counterpart. Displays - A League Of Their Own Do you know what’s great about almost every premium smartphone currently available? Their displays. Do you know what’s great about the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge? They’re even better than everything else. In short: the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge displays have to be seen to be believed. The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge were only challenged by Samsung’s Note 5 and (the presumably now defunct) Galaxy S6 Edge+ and now the gap between the company’s 2K AMOLED displays and the competition has grown even wider. In fact Apple’s LCD-based iPhones are not even in the same league. Even outdoors the Galaxy S7 (right) has a dramatically sharper and more vivid display than the... [+] iPhone 6S. Image credit: Gordon Kelly DisplayMate’s detailed metrics claim Samsung’s new phones break records for colour accuracy, peak brightness, contrast ratio and viewing angle consistency, but in reality the best thing the average consumer will notice is these phones make you smile every time you wake up their screens. It doesn’t all work. ‘Always-on Display’ technology is Samsung’s headline addition this year, but for me it is a disappointment. Motorola and Google’s Nexus range already offer glanceable monochromatic data that doesn’t consume 10-15% battery life during a day (roughly 1% per hour) and Samsung’s implementation is basic. You can’t see Android notifications which makes that data an extra click away (home button or wake/lock) and (unlike the Nexus range) you can’t get straight to the home screen from the fingerprint scanner without waking the phone up first. It’s clunky, but you can switch it off. On top of this I’m still not convinced by the ‘functionality’ of the Galaxy S7 Edge display. Quick access to contacts, weather and tools - like a compass and ruler - are supposedly convenient (and vaguely useful now they’re double width) but I found them no faster than going to dedicated apps for a full screen experience. Furthermore the Edge ‘tab’ is an annoyance which is often activated by accident when swiping through photos. Winner: Galaxy S7 Edge. These are two jaw dropping smartphone displays, but the Edge is stunningly, achingly beautiful. Samsung needs to learn the Edge display stands on its own and doesn’t require gimmicks to justify its existence. Just enjoy it and switch the software off. Next page: Camera and Performance Problems… Camera - The Best Smartphone Cameras Available In recent years arguably the most lauded aspect to Galaxy smartphones has been their cameras and with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are again worth the hype. Interestingly, however, a quick look at the specifications may suggest they have taken a step backwards:
Samsung's Galaxy S7 (left) and Galaxy S7 Edge (right) cameras are stunning. Image credit: Gordon... [+] Kelly Yes, Samsung has dropped from 16 megapixels this year to 12, but it in its place is a blazingly fast F1.7 sensor and ‘Dual Pixel’ technology. The latter is particularly significant as 100% of the pixels in these phones is used for focusing, compared to less than 5% in a typical phone camera. This brings the promise of virtually instantaneous focusing, even on moving subjects or in very low light. And the good news is these phones deliver on it, even if they aren’t quite the quantum leap you might expect. Galaxy S7 Edge (left) and Galaxy S7 (right) performance is identical and highly impressive. Image... [+] credit: Gordon Kelly The first thing to say is the results from the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are identical. Samsung does release them in Sony and Samsung variants (both my review samples had Sony sensors) but - unlike the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus - there is no preferential treatment to a specific model. The best news is the focus time, which is blisteringly quick. As a result ‘tap to focus’ tends only to be used for changing the point of focus as opposed to being a fundamental part of the photo taking experience. This makes the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge arguably the best point and shoot phone cameras currently available. They open quickly, focus even faster and produce top quality results with accurate colours and a surprisingly wide depth of focus. Galaxy S7 Edge (right) and Galaxy S7 (left) capture detail in both bright and low light areas but... [+] this shot shows what happens when the S7 didn't automatically use its HDR mode which results in a blown out sky. I'd advise HDR is left on at all times. Image credit: Gordon Kelly The shot of the tree is a great example where the Galaxy S7 Edge (right) shows how it can pick out both the detail in the shadow inside the trunk, but also the overcast sky - two extreme lighting differences and most smartphones would fail to capture one or the other. That said it shows off one flaw: sometimes the phones' Auto HDR mode doesn't pick the right option and you can see in the Galaxy S7 (left) how that mistake leaves the sky blown out. I'd suggest always leaving HDR mode on. Where the new phones really excel, however, is in the dark and they sneak past current low light champ, the Nexus 6P, with even more accurate colours while blowing away the iPhone 6S. This can be seen in the low light street scene where the iPhone 6S produces a shot which borders on monochrome while the Galaxy S7 Edge (left) paints a vivid picture with only the street light (inevitably) blown out. The iPhone 6S (right) is no match for the Galaxy S7 Edge (left) in low light. Image credit: Gordon... [+] Kelly But the cameras aren’t perfect. The drop to 12 megapixels does result in a loss of detail at full size - as the comparison shot between the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S6 on the photo of the yellow flower shows - and this does reduce the ability to crop shots. Low light photos can also sometimes look a little yellow and at times (though not often) Samsung’s old foible of over sharpening can step in. In good light the additional megapixels of the Galaxy S6 (right) actually produce a sharper image... [+] than the Galaxy S7 (left). Image credit: Gordon Kelly Then again, it’s impossible to finish talking about the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge cameras in a negative way. While lower in resolution, the front facing camera is great for selfies (thanks to sharing the same F1.7 sensor) and video remains a Samsung strong point with its optical image stabilisation (OIS) and slow motion resulting in professional grade output. All of which combines to make the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge the most well rounded cameras on the market today. Winner - A Tie. These are brilliant smartphone cameras and, as the specifications promise, their results are identical. There’s some detail loss in good conditions with the resolution drop, but their speed and low light performance set a new high water mark for the sector. Note: My review samples both use Sony sensors and Samsung ISOCELL variants exist - whether that makes any noticeable difference remains to be seen. Performance - Hardware And Software: The Big Problem, Yet Again Up to now it would be understandable to conclude the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are essentially perfect, but they share one big flaw: software. On the hardware front Samsung has done everything it can. The two phones ship with chipset variants - Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipsets in the US and Samsung Exynos 8890 chips elsewhere and differences do exist between them (notably in graphics) - but they remain the fastest Android chipsets around and they’re backed up by no less than 4GB of RAM and Samsung’s blazing fast UFS 2.0 storage. Yet it isn’t enough. TouchWiz still lags and stutters. Samsung's TouchWiz user interface and bloatware are still by far the worst aspects of the Galaxy... [+] smartphone range. Image credit: Gordon Kelly You won’t notice this initially. Fresh out the box the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge fly, but load them up with apps, browse complex web pages and you’ll quickly run into ‘jank’. Scrolling is the biggest offender, particularly browsing the web but even occasionally in basic navigation such as scrolling through Flipboard (Samsung’s default replacement to Google Now) or settings menus. The experience is far from crippling, but it shouldn’t exist at all and the core experience can’t match iOS on the iPhone 6S/6S Plus or stock Android on the Nexus 6P which runs on previous generation hardware. And this is the crux of it. TouchWiz has never looked better. It’s as stylish as it has ever been (though still not a patch on stock Android’s Material Design to my eyes) and Samsung has cut about 1GB of bloat since the Galaxy S6, but it still falls short. Samsung needlessly replicates core Android apps and is still filling its phones with bloatware.... [+] Image credit: Gordon Kelly Users are still ‘treated’ to around 50 pre-installed apps out the box, nearly all of which cannot be removed and pointless app duplication. For example you’ll find two browsers, two email clients, two photo apps, two voice control systems, two app stores, two SMS apps and three media players. In addition deals with Microsoft and carriers add yet more bloat - for example, Verizon bundles 13 apps. It’s ridiculous. As such I feel Samsung phones could be powered by Intel Core i7 Extreme desktop CPU and 16GB of RAM and they’d still not run smoothly. Yes, the synthetic benchmarks are strong and these phones are very fast (particularly in games) but they aren’t smooth in day-to-day use and I’d swap the former for the latter all day long. It’s hugely frustrating and, even with their new heatpipes, they still get hot during intensive tasks. Samsung's Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge fingerprint readers are very fast, but they aren't as... [+] accurate as Touch ID on the iPhone 6S or Nexus Imprint. Image credit: Gordon Kelly Speaking of performance, Samsung also hasn’t quite nailed the fingerprint reader. It’s very fast but it fails to read fingerprints a little too often (on one occasion it locked me for 30 seconds after 5 failed tries) and Apple’s Touch ID and Google’s Nexus Imprint are a class above. Winner: Both Lose. Samsung’s software remains its achilles heel and the single biggest reason not to buy a Galaxy smartphone. The company needs to do a lot less to stock Android to achieve a lot more. Next page: Storage, Battery Life and Verdict… Storage - Less Choice, More Flexibility And Samsung’s approach to software impacts more than just performance. Strangely the company confirmed only 32GB versions of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge will be sold in Europe and the US and just 25GB of that will be user accessible thanks to the software bloat (by comparison stock Android uses 4GB of space). Thankfully there’s a solution. Samsung’s has wisely brought back microSD expandable storage this year and it makes for an easy and cheap way to give the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge masses of storage. For example, a 200GB microSD card can be purchased for around $70-80 giving your phone 225GB of accessible storage - eat that Apple! The Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge now integrate microSD slots into their sim trays. Image credit:... [+] Gordon Kelly But this isn’t an entirely perfect solution. For starters you need a fast card (Nothing less than ‘Class 10’ in my opinion) and nothing you can buy will match the performance of Samsung’s UFS 2.0 native storage. Consequently those with the means and desire to pay for 64GB/128GB of native storage are out of options and that’s a shame. Will Samsung change its mind and start selling larger capacity models? Surely it has to… at some point. Battery Life - Longer Vs Much Longer What Samsung has nailed with its 2016 Galaxy smartphones, however, is battery life. Finally quitting its unpopular battle with Apple to make ever thinner phones with ever decreasing battery life, Samsung has really stepped up to the mark this time
Galaxy S7 Edge (results pictured) and Galaxy S7 battery life is a dramatically better than its... [+] predecessors. Image credit: Gordon Kelly These leaps (particularly for the larger screened Galaxy S7 Edge) make a dramatic difference. For the first time since the Galaxy S5, owners of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge should be able to comfortably get a full day's usage out of their devices. And by ‘full day’ I mean 8am until 11pm, not just working hours. This makes a dramatic difference to last year’s phones which instilled genuine anxiety when away from a power source. In fact with heavy usage I could flatten a Galaxy S6 by lunch time. Of course extreme usage scenarios, such as extensive gaming, will still be able to deaden the new phones but you should still get a working day. The glass back allows the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge to integrate wireless charging, unlike the... [+] iPhone 6S. Image credit: Gordon Kelly Which of the two came out on top? The Galaxy S7 Edge, but not by as much as I expected due to the larger display. Still it’s still the one to get if battery life is a key factor for you and not much in the Android world (Note 5 and Nexus 6P aside) can match it. Interestingly I saw no correlation of my experience with these phones and a recent report claiming poor battery performance. In addition, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge both charge very quickly. I could get from 0-80% in about an hour and 100% in about 80 minutes. This is fractionally slower than the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge+, but those devices were charging smaller batteries. Wireless charging is slower at around 2.5 hours, yet the convenience factor cannot be denied. Samsung's decision to stick with microSD will be popular in the short term, but I'd have liked to... [+] see the transition to USB Type-C. Image credit: Gordon Kelly More controversial is Samsung's decision to stick to microUSB charging. I suspect this will be applauded in the short term, but personally I'd have preferred the move to the future proof and reversible USB Type-C. Other rivals have all started to make the move and I'd like to see the standard quickly adopted rather than strung out as it now will be given Android's the most successful handset maker has get to climb aboard. Winner: Galaxy S7 Edge. Samsung may not have brought back fully removable batteries, but a battery you don’t need to remove during the day is big improvement. These are big steps in the right direction. External Speakers - Weak and Disappointing I won’t spend long on this, but Samsung’s decision to continue supplying its premium smartphones with a single, mono speaker which fires from the bottom edge is disappointing. Waterproofing the phones means their volume levels are weaker than last year’s models and it remains far too easy to accidentally cover the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge speaker with a finger when watching videos. In short: Samsung is a long way behind the stereo front firing speakers on smartphones from the likes of HTC, Motorola and Huawei. Interestingly HTC in particular appears to be moving back to Samsung-style mono bottom edge mounted speakers so perhaps this isn’t a big deal. But if Samsung and Apple’s approach does win out it will be a shame. The design and build quality of the new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge cannot be denied. They feel... [+] every inch like premium devices. Image credit: Gordon Kelly Value And Availability Judging the value of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge is harder than it might seem. On the surface Samsung has taken notable steps forward with both phones:
This pricing is about €50/$50 less the launch price of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ last year. They also offer microSD expansion making storage upgrades far cheaper than the typical $100 increments for 64GB and 128GB. Furthermore Apple still (scandalously) starts the iPhone range at 16GB. Then again, the lack of 64GB and 128GB native storage options is baffling and the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge and Galaxy S6 Edge+ can all be had for knockdown prices since the new phones were announced. You’ll lose the enhanced ergonomics, improved camera, expandable storage, water resistance and extra horsepower but these are still beautifully made phones with lots of power and great cameras. Your own personal circumstance will dictate a lot here. The 5.5-inch Galaxy S7 Edge gets my vote due to its more distinguished design, longer lasting... [+] battery and incredibly compact form factor that is little bigger than the 5.1-inch Galaxy S7. Image credit: Gordon Kelly Bottom Line - Hardware Perfected, Software Still Falls Short Without doubt Samsung has crafted the most refined and stylish Android smartphones I’ve seen. For me it simply isn’t a contest and the Galaxy S7 Edge in particular is a masterpiece in power, poise, practicality, durability and design. I think it will go down as a classic and, on paper, these phones have everything an Android fan could want. And yet Samsung does its best to spoil them. Yes, you’ll read other reviews saying TouchWiz has never looked better and it is a bit less bloated than last year but in 2016 this isn’t enough. There’s no good reason to double and triple up on core Android apps other than self interest or to experience jank and stutter when there’s so much performance on tap. So I’m torn. With stock Android these phones would wipe the floor with anything Samsung’s rivals have produced to date - and I include Apple in that. In a pure hardware contest comparing the 5.5-inch 157g Galaxy S7 Edge with the 5.5-inch 192g iPhone 6S Plus is a laughably easy victory, but the user experience leaves much to be desired. I can guarantee Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge owners will be very impressed. You can’t ignore the quality of the craftsmanship, displays and cameras nor the practicality of the battery life, durability and expandable storage. For me Samsung’s new phones are just about the best smartphones on the market, their hardware demands it. But perfection was within their grasp and - frustratingly - Samsung’s self absorbed approach to software means the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge missed it. Winner: Galaxy S7 Edge. A lot about these phones is equal, but the style, compactness and battery life help the Galaxy S7 Edge stand out. If you can afford the additional cost, the Edge is the version to pick. |
