[Samsung Galaxy S7 Real Life Review] gsmyth:
Just got my S7 (Exynos/G930F) 5 days ago and loving it. I previously had an S4 a couple of years ago and thought it was a great phone, the best things about at the time were the amoled screen and camera. The S7 to me feels like obviously a refinement of the S6, but holding it my hand it reminds me a lot of my S4, only with a much nicer/solid build quality. I didnt mind the plastic build of the S4 as it was light and compact, but thought the design aesthetics slipped a bit with the S5, the chrome frame was even more prominent and looked pretty ugly. But Samsung went back to the drawing board (or answered a lot of peoples desires) for the S6 in terms of design and materials used.

I like that they added back useful features to the S7 such as the water/dust resistance and the sd card slot. The camera is without a doubt the best out there in terms of the quality it captures and outputs. As I said before the S4's camera was great at the time and probably still stands up reasonably well. But the features such as OIS, f1.7 aperture and PDAF all combine to make a very high quality reliable camera, without an obvious 'gimmick' or feature such as dual cameras or extremely large pixel size, etc.

I also appreciate that they scaled back the bloatware, although they could probably do even more as other additional apps seem to sneak in there such as the microsoft ones and facebook, which are all available on the playstore so no need to build them in there. But in general touchwiz feels like it has been seriously optimised and tweaked to offer a fast, fluid interface. When pitted against the HTC10 and even Nexus 6P its came out on top in terms of speed of operation. Android in general has gotten a lot more finely tuned, particularly in the last 3 years, so you're going to get a great device and experience whether you go for HTC, Nexus, LG etc and so at the end of the day it really comes down to personal taste/preference and individual needs. But credit to Samsung for upping their game and at least seeming to take on board feedback about the S5/S6 to try and produce the 'perfect' (your opinion may vary!) device.

I think the one area that now needs a bit more attention is audio. I know the loudspeaker audio has been probably about the only thing that has been criticised on the S7, but I found it to be better than I was expecting and not a disappointment. I havent tried all the different options of bluetooth speakers/headphones/earphones or even sound mods here on XDA, but just the samsung earphones and my own sennheiser headphones and I wasnt blown away by audio quality. After the S4 I had the HTC One M8 and was pretty gobsmacked by the sound out of the box. Obviously the dual speaker set up gave decent output, but the audio quality over the standard earphones that came with the phone was top class. This has been carried on to the HTC10 which seems to be the phone to go for if you favour audio quality for music. Overall though I'm very happy and enjoying using the S7, as usual theres plenty of features to check out and try.

Oh and also enjoying the active display feature, very handy. Although I still look at it the odd time while its sitting on the desk beside me thinking thats its randomly rebooted. Out of the corner of my eye the clock looks like the Samsung boot text! :silly: