KPH tech blog

The Galaxy S7 is strange on first use – it’s perfect. It’s weird because I’m so used to getting things that aren’t as great as they should be. I’m used to getting what I think is a brilliant device, only to find something wrong with it, and then having to find a workaround or a solution to do the almost impossible with my half-hearted device.

I’ve done this with each computer I get, for example – lowering graphics intensities within games settings menu’s so that the individual game, which ‘needs’ a gaming PC with dedicated graphics card, will run on my not-so superior laptop.

Apart from a few niggles which presented themselves after a couple of weeks of use, which I’ll go into detail below, I can’t spot anything majorly wrong with the Galaxy S7. And that’s strange, for me. It’s almost too perfect, and the prospect of something being straight-away perfect, straight out of the box, is an entirely new concept for me.

Having said all this about finding problems with devices, I actually find it fun to test the limits of a device and then find workarounds when things don’t happen as they should. After one week of use, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the S7. Everything worked as it should, and as advertised. It was only after a second week when I started to see some cracks, albeit minor ones compared to my now really sluggish HTC Desire Eye. I’ll now explore some of these topics, including features that are useful and have no problems at all, starting with the waterproof rating.

Waterproof Rating

The S7 is rated at IP68 which should be good for some underwater filming, maybe in the Bahamas at some point in the future. But at the moment, I’m not even going to test it. Why? For starters, I haven’t I’ve got money to throw away, and I’m not being paid to review this device. I’m intending on it being my daily driver at least for the next two years, until December 2018.

I know that it probably will be able to handle being dropped in water, BUT (and this is a Big But), I’ve never been careless in the past, always getting a case for my phones in case I drop them. The S7 is no exception – I’ve already got a case for it, only slipping it out at home when I know it’s safe to take it out above a soft, bouncy carpet.

I’ve also been able to use my phones in light rain in the past, even when waterproofing smartphones wasn’t ‘a thing’ – wiping the screen occasionally to keep water from seeping through the cracks.

Also, I have only just got the phone, and if the water test doesn’t work as it should (for whatever reason), I’d be left with an unusable or defective device that I’m paying for, and where water damage probably isn’t insured.

Secondly, phone reviewers and mobile tech journalists everywhere (e.g. Android Authority, Android Central, iDownloadblog) have to test out these capabilities to cater for the numbers of readers, people like you and I, who want to know. Whereas, I’m doing this blog in my spare time. I don’t want ro ruin a device that I can’t yet afford to repair or replace, so I apologise for skipping this test. Instead, I shall embed some water test videos here for you to enjoy.

Screen

There was a time when I wouldn’t even consider a Samsung phone because, for me, the ‘Super’ AMOLED screens that Samsung were touting were so vibrant and vivid compared to the standard LCD displays I was used to.

Indeed, after a few days of initial use, I realised that the S7 was causing eye strain and light headaches, and to combat this, I had to turn down the brightness and switch the display mode from Adaptive Display to AMOLED Photo. This helps by muting the vivid colours and therefore reduces the screen’s vibrancy.

Since altering this setting, I’ve noticed a drop in eye strain and I’m no longer getting headaches from simply using the phone like any other human being. I can now use the phone at almost full brightness indoors, where before I had to turn the brightness down all the way to almost zero. I shall continue with these settings until I become fully accustomed to the look and feel of a Super AMOLED screen.

Camera

Review after review touted that the S7’s rear lens was as good as you will get from a smartphone camera, and after my own tests in the local technology store, I also found this to be true. I was also impressed with the speed of snapping shots, something I hadn’t seen personally since the days of snapping away on my 4th-Gen iPod Touch.

I was also impressed with the quality of Slow motion video compared to the Huawei P9 and LG G5, but something I’ve realised is that I can’t zoom in or out – which isn’t great when you’re trying to record a close up of a goal or near miss at a football match (VIDEO).

Another important feature of this phone is Video Stabilisation – which doesn’t appear to be on all the time. In fact, now the toggle always appears to be greyed out, which isn’t useful at all, particularly at times when I’ve started to record only to notice footage is shaky. Even when it is enabled, if you do move the phone, the viewfinder displays it as a rather delayed moon-walk/fishbowl effect.

It’s annoying that I have to check if Video Stabilisation is enabled every time before I press record, going specially into the camera settings menu and potentially eating away at that precious moment I wanted to capture.

Fingerprint Sensor/Home Button

It is useful, and then it isn’t. Unlike the Huawei P9, where you could touch the rear-fitted sensor and the phone would unlock, on the S7 I have to press down on the home button, leaving my finger over the button so that it can unlock itself.

Despite altering the logged fingerprints, often times it fails to unlock and I have to type in the backup password instead.

A useful feature that I’ve used extensively is the double-press of the home button to open the camera app. It’s much quicker than the long-press I used to have to do with my Desire Eye or my Lumia 820, and even quicker than the unlock and swipe up I used to have to do on my 4th-Gen iPod Touch.

Messaging  (Messages App)

The default Samsung Messages app is fairly good, with a nice clean aesthetic and message threads separated by a line – each thread resembling the bubble format of of iMessage or Facebook Messenger. But there is a downside, and that is the lack of features. I soon found it quite lacklustre and switched back to TrueMessenger to benefit from the TrueCaller ‘spammers’ database as well as its own spam filtering system – moving suspected Spam messages to a separate Spam folder away from the SMS messages that I actually want to receive and respond to, which by default appear in the Inbox folder.

While I noticed that Samsung’s Messages has an option to block message senders and callers, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add people – only phone numbers. This is a major problem area, as the spam messages I’ve received are from ‘people’ rather than phone numbers (such as those notifying me that my Apple account is due to expire today). Therefore, I was unable to block the sender.

Keyboard

Simple to use, but frustrating. It’s nice to see some form of autocorrect integrated into the keyboard, however it does seem to be struggling to keep up with me. Also, on its default setting, I fear the keys are too small, thus leading to some doubling back to manually correct the text when the autocorrect system fails. Trying to type with I accidentally pressed the e key, only to then have the keyboard correct it to either.

Having to keep going back to edit the text is excruciatingly frustrating as this impedes on my train of thought and hampers my overall typing speed. Naturally, I have since switched back to SwiftKey.

An added benefit of SwiftKey is that I’ve used the keyboard for about two years and have accrued my own personal dictionary of words and names – all linked to my SwiftKey account, making syncing these words up to my S7 a breeze.

Copying and Pasting Text – Varying font size Glitch

Compare the above two sections: Messages app, versus Keyboard app. Notice anything unusual? Yep, the font size is different. I decided that the Keyboard section needed to be placed after the section on Messages, and decided to employ a simple copy-and-paste trick within the WordPress app on my Galaxy S7. Big mistake!

Unfortunately, copying and pasting text seems to increase the font size and re-format paragraph breaks. As there’s no way of altering these settings within the app, I have to open the blog post on my computer, cut-and-paste to a word processor like Wordpad or Microsoft Word, reset all formatting, re-space the paragraphs, and then copy-and-paste the text back into the blog post.

This apparent reliance on a computer is a real hindrance for the mobile journalist who really just wants to get an article typed up quickly and efficiently on a smartphone while on the move.

This could be a fault of the app, the phone, or both, but it doesn’t happen on my Desire Eye, which is weird, so I’ve left the text size in its disillusioned, un-uniform state, to illustrate the lack of conformity.

TouchWiz, and Good Lock

Contrary to the days of old, where TouchWiz was clunky and had a horrible colour mix of bright blue and green, the UI is actually quite appealing on the S7 – the notifications shade white, with dark blue used to show settings (like WiFi and Bluetooth) that have been toggled on or off.

I actually like it, and find it very functional to my needs, but apparently the world doesn’t agree with the idea of TouchWiz – probably because it reminds people of its past clunkiness (a bit like Internet Explorer). Recent screenshots of the Android 7 Beta on the Galaxy S7 now show the TouchWiz notification shade resembles the more default Android menus found on Google’s Pixel and Nexus devices.

Audio

The headphone port is what I’m talking about here, because it seems it’s just a bit too quiet. I have to turn up the volume to three notches below maximum to hear anything from my cans.

Speed

This probably goes without saying for a new phone, but it really is super quick. Just while doing updates from Play Store, on same WiFi connection the S7 managed to download and install 4 apps while my HTC Desire Eye struggled to install a Twitter update in the same amount of time.

Glitches

Switched off without warning while watching a YouTube video, remained unresponsive for a good few minutes, making me worry that I’d somehow permanently bricked the phone just by using it. Somehow got it into Recovery Mode and then got stuck with Samsung logo flashing either solid blue LED notification light. Pressed and held down power and volume down and managed to reboot phone. Has been working fine since. After research, turns out this is a common problem with Samsung phones. Disappointing, but at least I know how to bring it back to life if it ever happens again.