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Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge review: Samsung makes the Galaxy S exciting again

By Liu Hongzuo - 13 Mar 2016

Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Features - Part 2

Features - Part 2

 

The Game Launcher and Game Tools

Game Launcher is a new gamer-friendly box on your Home screen that keeps all your game apps in one manageable place. The power-saving options lets you save precious battery juice when gaming, which is ideal for smartphone games that do not emphasize on having mesmerizing graphics. Game Launcher also lets you configure whether you want notification alerts coming in while you game. This makes all the difference between experiencing no interruptions in the middle of a tournament. If you're just looking to kill time, simply toggle the alerts back on again so you won't miss out on anything important.

Game Tools menu, while in-game.

What makes gaming even better is the set of in-game Game Tools built into the phone. Once you have Game Tools toggled on, you can have a host of options guaranteed to make your gaming sessions far more fluid. The Game Tools option hides itself well, becoming a tiny translucent button that can be repositioned anywhere onscreen while you're in any game app. Tapping it will give you a decent panel of control over your gaming sessions. Check out this video feature for a complete rundown of options on Game Tools and on the Game Launcher itself:-

Not only does it offer the option to toggle alerts on and off without quitting the game, it also gives you the choice to lock your Back and Recent soft keys (that flank the sides of your Home screen button) to help you avoid exiting the game app unintentionally. The Minimize Game option keeps your game app running, shrinking your game into a tiny bubble that can be tucked away while you take an urgent message or call. Screenshot is pretty straightforward in-game function, but Record is far more interesting and practical, especially for avid smartphone gamers.

Record in action. Spot the front camera at work!

Record actually tracks your gameplay from your screen, while including your facial reaction in a little bubble that can be repositioned anywhere during the recording itself. It sounds vain, but the Record feature is great for gamers who like to prove that their high-scores are attained by their own effort. The recorded video goes into the phone’s default Gallery, where other photos and videos are stored. Recorded games have a maximum resolution of 1080p, and it’s adjustable in your Game Tools settings.

 

More functionality in Edge Panel interface

 

The new Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge has an improved Edge UX with more shortcuts and panels, buffing its functionality to make it less of a party trick. You get to customize the order of the Edge panels on top of tweaking the contents within each panel itself. For example, you can get a shortcut on the new Tasks Edge that lets you e-mail a designated person, eliminating the number of steps taken. People Edge now come with contacts’ names below their profile picture, which is far more intuitive than the old layout that displayed a bunch of nameless floating heads.

More controls in Task Edge.The new Quick Tools.

A new and notable panel would be Quick Tools. It comes with a compass, a torch light with adjustable brightness, and a ruler that provides measurement in inches or in centimeters. The ruler’s scale goes up to 11cm (you can’t swipe the ruler to make it go beyond 11cm).

Add two rows in the Edge panel, instead of just one.

The width of the Edge panel is now at 550 pixels display, nearly double in size of the S6 Edge+’s 260 pixels. This increase in panel space is reflected in Apps Edge, where you get to store two rows of apps instead of just one. As shown in our hands on article, you can also adjust the panel size and transparency.

Finally, Samsung released its Edge Panel SDK for third-party vendors to offer their own new panels for S7 Edge users, granting the potential of getting more functionality out of the once-gimmicky feature via non-Samsung apps.

 

Longer screenshots with Capture More

Phone screenshots are captured when you briefly hold down the Home button and Power button. There’s also the Capture More feature which was previously available on the Note 5. Capture More lets you create longer, more complete screenshots, which is ideal for online-shopping websites and long-form articles like our review here. Now you can capture one long page/screen in just one image.

 

Free-sizing keyboard

The keyboard size adjustment is more flexible than the phones before it, as it allows you to alter both the width and height of your board layout.

Samsung has a better free-sizing keyboard in the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The option to resize your keyboard is under Settings – Language and Input – Samsung keyboard. Unlike its competitors, keyboard re-sizing here is done in free-form – you simply scale the keyboard size on the template before confirming the dimensions. We find this extra bit of control a nice upgrade from the usual one-hand keyboard options we’ve met thus far. The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 5 also had the same free-sizing feature, but it only allowed height adjustment, as opposed to the Galaxy S7’s width + height adjustment in addition to where you want to exactly place the keyboard after re-sizing it. This added fine grain control is boon for those upgrading from phones of different screen sizes and quickly adopting to the finger travel required to get inputs registered on the new phone.

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