[Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Guides, News, & Discussion] TJCacher:
Long post. I apologize in advance.

Spent about an hour yesterday at my local Best Buy with an S7 Edge. I have a Silver Titanium Edge on pre-order with Verizon, but I wanted to see the colors in-person while I still had time to change my mind.

Here's a few random observations from that experience.

1. The store I visited had a *lot*of these devices on display. There were two each of the three U.S. colors for the Edge (black, silver and gold) and two each of the black and gold S7 (non-edge) models. Only one other customer was showing serious interest in them, as he moved from model to model holding his current device against the Samsung display models. I thought he was just comparing sizes, but I'm wondering if he was using some kind of device-contact method of transferring files or data, since he was holding the devices literally back-to-back.

2. The devices were configured with some pretty annoying in-store demo-mode software. I did my best to defeat them, since they made it hard to naturally experience the device's capabilities and ui, but Best Buy had pretty much locked them to run continuously. One of them did crash once during my demo. The demo software seemed to be aware of what you were doing and continuously jumped in and tried to explain/demo the feature they noticed you were playing with. This wasn't true for every feature I explored, but was particularly obnoxious as I tried to play with the edge-based gestures. I eventually just let it guide me completely through its little tutorial, and it was less onerous afterwards, but still interfered with the device's ui at times. Very annoying.

3. My impression of Samsung's reworking of the edge-based ui was very positive. Very useful and extensive slide-in toolbars, information feeds and whatnot. I'm now *really* looking forwards to setting up this device and customizing these features. I believe Samsung has really pulled a rabbit out of their hat, here, by taking a somewhat contrived feature like a curved display edge and managing to make it truly useful and innovative.

4. Touchwiz, ui and usage impressions. My last experience with Touchwiz was on a Note 3 running Jellybean. What a difference! Like night and day. The system was highly responsive and beautifully integrated into Marshmallow. All the TW features and ui elements that I played with looked and felt like they were integral to the OS itself. Samsung seems to have worked really hard on the aesthetics and use-patterns here. I've been using near-stock Android (Nexus 5, Sony z3c, Motorola) the last few years, and was nervous about returning to a much more heavily skinned version of Android, but this experience really eased my mind about that.

5. I wanted to comment specifically on the S7's implementation of multi-windowing. I had read up on the gestures and multi-windowing ui before I went in-store, because that was something I was strongly interested in. The windowing on my Note 2 and Note 3 models was something I had used a lot and had missed in the last couple of years on near-stock Android. In my opinion, Samsung has a really strong implementation here - greatly improved since the Note 3 days. The windowing features are extensive and intuitive, requiring just a little bit of playing around to master. I know that not all apps are usable for windowing in Samsung's default implementation, but AFAICT, the ones that would really be useful in split-screen or floating window modes are available and work really well.

6. Samsung's browser - I read that Verizon (my carrier whom I've pre-ordered from) had inexplicably chosen to remove Samsung's stock browser from their S7 models. I don't know for sure that this is true - guess I'll just have to wait and see. The other thing I read is that the choice of Verizon to remove the stock browser on this device was particularly dumb because, unlike Google Chrome, Samsung had optimized version 4 of its stock browser to run really well on the Qualcomm 820 used in the U.S. models. I was a bit skeptical about how much of a difference this kind of optimization might make but decided I wanted to test it for myself. I cleared the device's memory as best I could (swiped away tasks in the task switcher and used Samsung's built-in memory optimizer ["Powered by CleanMaster™" - lol] in their system settings app) prior to each test. My technique first involved running one iteration of the Jetstream JavaScript benchmark in each browser without noting the results - this got the device to warm up noticeably but not objectionably in my hands. After this I again cleared memory and ran the test first in Chrome (result was a weighted average of 59.9) and then in Samsung's stock browser (result was 66.9). I did this all twice, and results were close to identical both times. If my math is right, this represents a roughly 10% difference in favor of Samsung's stock browser for heavily JavaScript-based operations (a *lot*of the modern web at this point). I don't know if that's enough of a performance difference to really notice in day to day use - that's a personal choice kind of thing to my way of thinking. For myself personally I don't think this difference would be the deciding factor in which browser to use, as I'm pretty heavily invested in Google's ecosystem anyway, and enjoy sharing browser bookmarks, tabs, passwords and history between devices using Google Chrome. I do like the user interface of Samsung's browser a bit better, and there is the issue of ad-blocking to consider as well. You can configure the Sammy browser to adblock via several downloadable addons, whereas this feature is not available on Android Chrome via addons. There are other ad-blocking tools available though, even for non-rooted users. I use one of those and have found it to be highly effective. That will be my ad-blocking method of choice on my S7 as well. I also noticed that there is a playstore download for Samsung devices that should restore the browser if your carrier removes it, though presently it is the version 3 browser. Version 4 is promised as coming soon on the app's playstore page. One last browser observation - I've read that Samsung's browser can link fingerprint authentication to website logins, obviating the need to type in passwords, if that's a big deal for you. Given Chrome's built-in password handling it doesn't seem that big of a deal to me, but "different strokes" and all that.

7. Colors - I have a Silver Titanium on pre-order. I was tired of always buying a black or dark grey phone, and when I watched MKBHD's S7 impression video, I thought the Silver Titanium one he showed looked super attractive. After playing with all three colors in-store, I regret to say that my opinion has changed. The Silver one is even more of a mirror and fingerprint magnet than I had feared. It also is a lot more "blingy" looking in person than the impression I got from MKBHD's video. OTOH, I liked the Onyx Black model a lot more in person than I expected to. The black is a truly deep, dark completely saturated black, and the metal surround is a very beautiful super-dark grey color that contrasts beautifully with the glossy black body. It's still a huge fingerprint magnet (all material and color choices for this phone appear to be), but the reflectiveness of the glossy surfaces - on both the front and rear of the device - just are not as "in your face" as the Silver Titanium (and the even more bling-worthy Gold Platinum) model. The Silver model's rear side is so reflective that it could, literally, double as a (slightly blurry) mirror. Also, I now believe the reflectiveness of the upper and lower front bezels on the silver model would be very distracting to me, as I don't want to see myself reflected in these areas the whole time I'm using my phone. I'm probably going to go ahead and cancel my pre-order based on this experience and pre-order a Black Onyx model, even though it means I will go to the end of the pre-order line. Sigh...

I urge you to personally examine a model in the color of your choice before pre-ordering, if at all possible.

8. Available main storage capacity - Last point. Thanks for hanging in there if you've read this far. I've never owned a phone with more than 32 gigabytes of built-in storage, and it's never been a problem for me. My Sony only had 16 gigs, and I even managed to make that work by carefully juggling content between main storage, an SD card, and my cloud accounts and home network server. But it's 2016, and I don't really want to have to micromanage storage on a new near $800 flagship device, so Samsung's decision to restrict U.S. models to 32 gigs seems really stingy and short-sighted to me. But I can live with it if I have to. That said, I became very alarmed when I noticed the in-store demo unit I was using had less than 12 gigabytes of free storage available. I carefully examined the phone's storage settings to try and determine how a new 32-gigabyte phone would have 20+ gigabytes of its storage already occupied. The bulk of the problem, I believe, was the demonstration mode software installed by Best Buy to provide its somewhat annoying "in-store" experience. There were also a lot of game apps installed, which I didn't really look at too closely. Nonetheless, it appears to me that a freshly delivered consumer model, after a non-root debloat, is probably not going to have more than about 22 gigabytes of usable main storage available, and possibly closer to 20, so plan accordingly. Power users, especially, are going to have to move data to secondary storage and think carefully about app size and number of apps to install. I should also remind you all that Samsung has (probably for defensible reasons) chosen not to allow SD cards to be used as adoptable storage, which means that, under Marshmallow's design, installed apps will all have to fit into the available built-in storage along with any app data or media that you either can't or don't want to move to/store on an SD card.

Thanks to any who read this lengthy post. I'm really pumped about making the S7 Edge my new daily driver, and talking about features or issues with the phone here on XDA.