Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge Top 7 Features: Always-On Display, Dual Pixel Camera, and More

Samsung, the largest Android smartphone shipper, on Sunday launched its flagship smartphones of 2016: the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 Edge. Both the models sport top-of-the-line specifications while also offering some additional exciting features compared to last year's offerings.

Last year, Samsung introduced major design changes to its smartphones such as its decision to ditch plastic body in favour of metal. While the new models look very similar to their respective predecessors, the South Korean technology conglomerate has swapped the innards with new and powerful components. It has also made the smartphones more suitable for power users, bringing back the much-lamented microSD card slot. The battery is still non-removable though. Here are the top five features in Samsung's new flagship smartphones.

1. Hybrid dual-SIM slot, support for expandable storage 
Samsung took many by surprise when it announced that its new flagship smartphones in some regions will feature a hybrid dual-SIM tray, which can be utilised to insert either two SIM cards at once, or one SIM card and a microSD card. The South Korean company is giving its users the option to add another 200GB of storage using a microSD card.

2. Always-On display 
It appears everyone wants the 'Always-On' display. The feature, which we have previously seen as a software feature several Motorola smartphones and Lumia handsets, allows a user to check time, date, miss call details and notifications without having to wake up the smartphone. The feature makes use ofAmoled display, which offers the ability to light up only a certain number of pixels on the screen, thus saving battery. Interestingly, LG G5, which was also unveiled on Sunday, also boast of this feature.

3. Dual Pixel rear camera 
It's no secret that the Samsung Galaxy S6, the company's flagship from last year, takes great photos and videos - a point that Samsung executives stressed on at their conference. Samsung says it is further improving its phone's photo and video capturing abilities with what it is referring to as Dual Pixel sensors.

Samsung says that the Galaxy S7 - as well as the Galaxy S7 Edge - come equipped with a 12-megapixel Dual Pixel rear-facing camera. While that's fewer megapixel count - compared to Galaxy S6 which features a 16-megapixel sensor - the company assures that sensor on its new smartphone allows to capture 95 percent more light. This, Samsung says, will enable the Galaxy S7 to take better images in low lighting conditions. The size of the pixels on the sensor are apparently 30 percent larger than what's present on the iPhone 6s Plus. The autofocus has gotten faster too, it added, saying the sensor uses 100 percent of its pixels to focus. Both front and rear cameras come with a f/ 1.7 aperture as well - the largest on any Samsung smartphone till date.

4. IP68 certification 
The new Galaxy smartphones are certified with IP68 rating, which means that both the models can better withstand bad-weather conditions with dust and water resistance. The company claims that the models can resist dust and water to a greater degree - water immersion, for instance, up to 1 metre for 30 minutes. Samsung said that while the phones aren't precisely waterproof, they are "life-proof". To be precise, IP68 certification implies the device is completely dust tight, and can withstand continuous immersion in water. But with Samsung's warning, we advise users to err on the side of caution.

5. Top-of-the-line SoC and RAM 
But of course, you also want to know whether or not Samsung's new smartphones pack in a mammoth amount of processing power. Yes, they do. Both Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are powered by either Samsung's home-grown Exynos 8890 SoC or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 processor, depending on the region. Needless to mention, both the SoC models belong to the upper echelon. Either come coupled with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

(Also see: Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge to Launch With Exynos SoC in India)

6. Bigger batteries 
Samsung this year has included 3000mAh and 3600mAh batteries for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge respectively, a significant bump over last year's 2550mAh and 2600mAh batteries on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. The company also announced the Game Launcher and Vulkan API, both of which should optimise gaming performance to reduce battery consumption. No battery life figures have been provided yet.

7. Fast charging 
Both the new models can be charged in considerably less time, making use of the fast wired and wireless charging technology. Samsung has also included an option to turn of fast charging for both wired and wireless. The reason behind this is that fast charging decreases the overall lifespan of the battery, and heats the device significantly more than standard charging. The company has also introduced a new angled wireless charging dock, complete with a fan to keep things cool. The smartphones support both PMA and WPC wireless charging standards.

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Samsung Galaxy S7

• KEY SPECS
• NEWS

Display

5.10-inch

Processor

1.6GHz

Front Camera

 5-megapixel

Resolution

 1440x2560 pixels

RAM

 4GB

OS

 Android 6.0

Storage

32GB

Rear Camera

12-megapixel

Battery capacity

3000mAh

See full Samsung Galaxy S7 specifications

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

• KEY SPECS
• NEWS

Display

5.50-inch

Processor

1.6GHz

Front Camera

 5-megapixel

Resolution

 1440x2560 pixels

RAM

 4GB

OS

 Android 6.0

Storage

32GB

Rear Camera

12-megapixel

Battery capacity

3600mAh

See full Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge specifications

 

Mark Zuckerberg Demos 'Dynamic Streaming' VR at Samsung Galaxy S7 Launch

Samsung Gear VR is becoming more powerful. The South Korean electronics company announced that its virtual reality headset will be getting new features in a software update thanks to Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at Samsung's press conference ahead of Mobile World Congress to showcase the "dynamic streaming" feature while also underlining the social conglomerate's increasingly growing focus towards the nascent technology category. He had several other announcements to make.

Facebook-owned Oculus, which provides software for the Samsung's Gear VR, is bringing 360-degree, immersive video to Samsung's virtual reality headset, Zuckerberg said, during his surprising appearance at South Korean company's media event. The technology brings significant upgrades to streaming content, Zuckerberg claimed, by only playing the bits of information that are in view of the headset at a certain point as opposed to processing the entire 360 sphere of video.

"The idea is that instead of delivering the whole video in high-resolution, we just focus on the part you're looking at," Zuckerberg said. "This allows us to deliver the video with a much higher resolution and quality - about 4X - while also reducing the overall bandwidth consumed. [...] I'm excited to announce that we will bring all these technologies to Gear VR in the next few years."

Zuckerberg took the opportunity to note that Facebook continues to drive virtual reality technology forward and plays the front runner role. "VR is the next platform, where anyone can create and experience anything they want," he said. "For right now, it's mostly used for gaming. That's quickly evolving."

"That's why Facebook is investing so much in VR, so we can deliver these new social experiences. VR is going to be the next social platform." he said. "And that's why we're working with Samsung."

Oculus, which Facebook acquired for $2 billion (roughly Rs. 13,711 crores) in 2014, has more than 200 games in its store, Zuckerberg said, adding that the popular title Minecraft will be coming to the platform soon. Users have uploaded more than 20,000 videos in VR-compatible 360-degree format since the feature became available on Facebook and its apps last year. Millions of people watch these immersive spherical videos, he added.

On the sidelines of Samsung's event, in which the company announced its new flagship smartphones - the Galaxy S7, the Galaxy S7 Edge - Zuckerberg also announced that his company has built a social VR team that focuses entirely on exploring the future of social interaction leveraging virtual reality technology.

The social VR team is led by two gaming executives Daniel James and Mike Booth and has "hundreds of [...] best engineers," Zuckerberg said. "We've already helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices -- ranging from Facebook and Instagram to Messenger and WhatsApp -- and now we want to apply that same approach to the new medium of VR," wrote Facebook in a blog post. "In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection -- like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they're really there with each other."

Facebook announced earlier this year that the Oculus Rift will be available for sale starting March at a price point of $599.

The Moto X Force Shouldn't Exist in 2016

A smartphone screen cracks every 2 seconds. That may not sound like a very frequent occurrence given the number of smartphones in the world, but it all adds up pretty quickly. Many reading this will have a personal anecdote of breaking their smartphone's display, or will probably know a close friend or someone in the family who's experienced the same. At the sidelines of the Moto X Force launch in India on Monday, Motorola said 51 percent of smartphone users have shattered or cracked their display at some point.

The first time you break a display, you think it's not a big deal and you will get it changed; that's until you call the service centre and they say exactly how much it will cost. Take the experience of one of the Gadgets 360 team members, who got a pretty sweet deal on a 32GB Moto X Play not too long ago, picking it up at Rs. 14,499 thanks to various discounts and exchange offers in one of those crazy e-commerce sales. As luck would have it, he shattered the display of the phone within a few days of receiving his unit, and when he called the service centre, he was told the cost of putting a new screen would be around Rs. 7,500 - more than 50 percent of what he'd paid while buying the phone in the first place!

Sure, the percentage is lower compared to the MRP of the phone, but it's still a substantial cost. No wonder then 42 percent of smartphone users say that the biggest barrier to getting the screen fixed is the cost, and one in five users are presently using a phone with a damaged screen (all statistics courtesy Motorola).

Ten, maybe twenty, years down the line we will look back at today's smartphones and laugh at the absurdity of having to carry a glass slab in our pockets - "Of course they broke all the time, what else did you expect," kids of the time will probably tell us. "And they stopped working at the first exposure to water, really?"

That brings us to the other way in which the centres of our digital life are extremely fragile. While manufacturers like Sony have taken the lead in making sure our phones play nice around liquids (only to retract that at times, but let's leave that aside for a bit) and Motorola has done its bit by making phones that are water resistant or repellant, by and large, smartphone manufacturers have missed the boat when it comes to this subject.

The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus may have survived a water immersion test, but Apple doesn't market them as waterproof phones, and apart from the odd 'active' variant and IP67 rating for the Galaxy S5,Samsung has not a lot to show for either. So while companies like BlackBerry, Samsung, and Applewant you to spend over Rs. 50,000 on a smartphone, what you get in return is an object you must wrap in a case or a cover just to use on an everyday without fear of damaging it.

The Moto X Force, which is sold as the Droid Turbo 2 in the US, aims to set you free by offering a screen that's "shatter proof" in a water repellant package. Motorola made several design changes to the Moto X Force to achieve this, which obviously pushed the overall cost of the phone higher. But if this technology is developed further, and deployed at a larger scale - say across the entire line of a company's products - there's no doubt the overall cost will come down.

That's where the smartphone industry needs to move. Yes, there are additional costs associated with making a phone that's shatterproof and waterproof, but these are features that should really become standard in a smartphone that costs more than a certain amount, if not be part of every smartphone out there. If that happens, the Moto X Force will have no reason to exist.

Now cynics may argue it's against the manufacturers' interest to design tougher phones, since every time a phone breaks, you inevitably end up buying a new one, increasing overall sales. This is where free market acts as a check. All it takes is one company offering shatterproof and waterproof phones as a unique selling point (USP) to become popular, and everyone else will be forced to follow suit. We hope that day isn't too far away.

 

BlackBerry's Second Android Phone Tipped to Launch at MWC 2016

BlackBerry's second Android-based smartphone may launch at MWC 2016 next week in Barcelona, according to a new report. The company in December had hinted at another Android phone launch in 2016.

The new report adds that BlackBerry's purported second Android smartphone, said to be codenamed "Vienna", will be priced lower than the Priv smartphone. No date for the launch has been provided.

To recall, the BlackBerry "Vienna" was spotted in images back in November and showed that the company may ditch the slider design for its second Android phone and may opt for its iconic physical keyboard upfront design, previously seen on various BlackBerry phones. The front of the handset was seen housing the display and the physical keyboard below it. The rear included the camera with flash while the physical buttons for volume was seen on the right panel and power on the left side, as per the leaked images.

To be noted is that the BlackBerry Priv was codenamed "Venice" ahead of launch. To recall, BlackBerry CEO John Chen at CES earlier this year had indicated that the company may launch another Android smartphone in 2016 which will be targeted at the mid-range segment. Chen however was also reported to hint about not one but two phones - both running Google's Android OS.

Of course, as with all rumours and leaks, we advise readers to take the above information about the BlackBerry "Vienna" with a pinch of salt, as the company has yet to make any announcements about its new Android smartphone and the credibility of the sources cannot be independently verified.

Xiaomi-Mi-5and-Mi-5-Plus-Heres-what-we-know-so-farXIAOMI

XIAOMI

It's been long time coming but looks like Xiaomi is finally set to enthrall audiences across the globe with its next Mi flagship earlier this week. Lei Jun and Co. are holding out a major global event in their home surroundings, wherein two Mi devices; Mi 5 and Mi 5 Plus are to be unveiled, they say.

The device termed Libra has been making the rounds of media table over the past few weeks which is why the dated announcement of 16 July doesn't come across as an out of blue event. In all likelihood, Mi 5 and Mi 5 Plus are the devices lined up and here's what we know about the phones right now.

Both kind of Mi's 
We saw the two-thronged strategy from Xiaomi earlier this year when Mi Note and Mi Note Pro editions were launched and this was start to something bigger, literally. Mi 5 will be nothing bigger than 5.2-inch which seems quite sensible on Xiaomi's part and the Plus variant should have a phablet-sized 6-inch form, if not slightly smaller. Both the flagship options will get industry-standard 2K (1440p) display resolution.

Which Snapdragon SoC then? 
While it's obvious to get a Qualcomm chipset on high-end device (unless you're a HTC) but even then there's a big Snapdragon conundrum running these days. Will my device work fine with 810 or should I opt for safer 808? It's a bold move to opt for 810 with all the heating memoirs running aboard these days. OnePlus has already confirmed its priority by sticking with the 810 but Xiaomi's seems to be undecided about both the aforementioned variants, so we will have to wait for D-Day to see what the company opts for.

More camera power then please 
If Xiaomi wants Mi 5 series to rival the likes of Samsung Galaxy S6 or LG G4 then we want more imaging brilliance laced onto the phones. We're talking about a 16MP rear camera with laser auto-focus if possible and an 8MP shooter on the front for those quality selfie clicks. Bring it on!

Keep the battery running 
High-powered devices can only sustain for longer period if given the right back up solution. Big-size battery with quick charging technology feature is a flagship essential these days and Xiaomi has to stick to those for its sake.

Price it right with one eye on India 
Yes, if Indian market is only second to China for Xiaomi then a quick global-to-India availability needs to happen. One thing is for certain, Xiaomi devices above 20K aren't going to find many takers in the country (Mi 4 proved it) which is either they lower down price of Mi 4 (or discontinue) to shelf the Mi 5 at similar range.

It's Xiaomi vs OnePlus this month and are eyes will be glued to what the Chinese brands have to offer with their latest flagship device have to offer and when their India debut happens, after all that's where the money is these days. Stay tuned.