Thoughts on the Galaxy S7

So far, the S7 is a pretty nice phone, although there are a few things I’m still getting used to.

  • The location of the power button is closer to the middle of the phone than it was on the Nexus 5, so I’m still hunting around for it.
  • The positions of recent apps and back buttons are reversed, so i’m always pressing the wrong button.
  • The touch screen area extends to the edge of the phone, so when I’m holding the phone and my fingers or thumb end up wrapping around the phone, I end up triggering screen touches.
  • The Home button is an actual physical button, so I have to remember to actually push instead of just tapping that location.
  • Speaker is only on one side of the bottom of the phone, which I end up covering up sometimes depending on how I’m holding the phone.  If I’m playing podcasts at the time, the volume suddenly gets muffled and I’m wondering what’s going on until I realize what’s happened.

Android 8 (Nougat) has lots of options to tweak, especially with notifications.  Nice.

Battery life seems pretty good, although I haven’t really worked the phone really hard yet.  

The 32 GB of storage on the device gives  me more than enough space for the apps I want to keep handy.  

Split screen is really nice.  Got a sneak preview of it when I had Android 7 (Oreo) on my tablet.  Comes in pretty handy on the phone.

Still many more things to explore on the phone.