 My initial reaction to holding the Galaxy S7 in my hand was Oh boy! Another iterative update from a Korean mega corporation! How utterly uninteresting. But, having spent the last couple of weeks using the S7 as my daily driver, I can confidently say that there won't be any spoilers here. Roll the intro! The Aria headphones from Phoenix come complete with a cardioid clip mic and acoustic chambers constructed entirely of Japanese pine wood. Click the link in the video description to learn more. As dangerous as this may be to say, in my mind, the S7 is about as good as we will ever need from a quality of construction standpoint. Which isn't to say we don't need an active SKU for the people who throw their phones around. I mean, sure, with carbon fiber, next generation glass, or other advanced materials, slight improvements could be made, and will be made, to the overall fit and finish, but I've never understood, for example, Apple's obsession with thinner and lighter just because we can. And, apparently, neither does Samsung. The S7 is unapologetically thicker and heavier than the iPhone 6S, and doesn't suffer for it at all. I mean, the extra heft, to me, makes it feel like a premium piece of machinery, and frankly, I would make the argument that the extra functionality enabled by the thickness increase, the microSD expansion slot that's next to the SIM slot on the top, the much larger 3000 mAh battery, and the hardly noticeable bump over the lightning fast 12 megapixel optically stabilized camera, each individually make up for that size and weight increase. And there are other things that I really like about it as well. Can I be the first to say, I mean, okay, I'm probably not the first, but can I say it anyway, that the lock button and volume buttons are great? They're not directly opposing each other, so it's easy to press one side without mashing on the other side, and they're big and clicky enough that I can feel them in my pocket, but not accidentally press them. I mean, I know I've harped on this a lot in the past, but it's because it's a major annoyance for me, and Samsung has proven now that it's really not that hard, Apple. With that said, it's not perfect. Samsung opted for a micro-B USB port for the bottom instead of a type-C port, though this is somewhat more forgivable thanks to the S7's inclusion of wireless charging, to maintain compatibility with the Gear VR, and still hasn't managed to deliver a speaker solution that doesn't require me to cup my hands around the bottom of the device or plug in the 3.5mm jack also found there in order to hear anything. Moving around to the front, we've got a 5.1-inch 2560x1440 Corning Gorilla Glass 4-topped AMOLED display with a 5-megapixel f1.7 selfie camera that carries forward the S6's very solid low-light performance for a front cam and its wide-angle lens. The latter is a big advantage if you're trying to get a large group into a shot with you in any sensible venue that's banned selfie sticks without getting a wicked case of a selfie arm here, but the flip side is I'm pretty sure this camera makes my nose look big. In terms of inside guts, the S7 represents the best that Samsung can build, and I'll explain that asterisk in a moment. So it's got 4 gigs of LPDDR4 RAM, 32 or 64 gigs of onboard storage with that microSD expansion slot I mentioned before, although, by the way, it can only be used as traditional mass storage. No adoptable storage in spite of the Android Marshmallow OS. It's rocking umpteen bajillion sensors including a barometer and heart rate monitor, fast charging for its non-removable 3000 mAh battery, a significant capacity bump over the S6, by the way, and support for sexy new Wave 2 AC wireless access points with multi-user MIMO, which theoretically means lightning fast Wi-Fi like the iPhone 6S, but in practice means still fast but not as fast Wi-Fi. This test was done on a symmetric gigabit internet connection. Now to the asterisk. Samsung is shipping two versions of the S7, either with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 CPU with an Adreno 530 GPU or an Exynos 8890 CPU with a Mali-T8 80MP12 GPU, depending on the region. They are similar in speed, but different chipsets may have different quirks when it comes to custom ROM installation or even apps. Also notable is the fact that the camera sensor is being dual sourced, similarly to the S6, so you may get either a Sony or a Samsung sensor. Not by region this time, but rather it appears to be pure luck of the draw, which I guess leads us pretty well to the camera discussion. I love the S7's camera. Sure, it's got fewer megapixels than the S6, but they're larger for better low-light performance, and I absolutely love the app. It launches nearly instantly with a double tap of the home button, which if you're trying to capture the cute antics of kids or pets is half the battle, and autofocus then snaps a picture, either with the on-screen buttons or with the volume buttons, or even a metric whack of them in burst mode, by the way, almost as fast. Photo and video capture can be started from the same window. Photos taken while recording video are again lightning fast and look really good, and unlike the iPhone 6S that I was using with my roaming sim on my recent trip to New York, while finishing up this review, by the way, the S7 lets you under the hood with downloadable and rearrangeable camera modes, including a Pro mode that allows adjustments to white balance, shutter speed, ISO, focus, and even a raw shooting mode that should tickle shutter bugs pink. While there are other phones with great cameras out there, it's the usability that makes the S7 such a killer for me, and now that all of this extra stuff in Samsung's camera app actually works well, rather than being weird half-baked add-ons like they always seemed to be in the past, I think Apple finally needs to respond. Which leads me to my thoughts on general usability and the experience of switching to the S7 as my daily driver for the last couple of weeks. TouchWiz is, in my mind, officially a non-issue. Whether we're talking about split-screen or their integrated phone directory service that attempts to help you filter out useless spam, the things that it adds no longer hurt the Android experience in my eyes, and there isn't really much that I care about that they take away. Performance of the phone was without fault, and while frequently switching between it and the iPhone 6S on my recent trip, I never felt like I was missing a beat, which is high praise indeed. Snapdragon 810's thermal issues don't seem to have made another appearance here, with the S7 only losing about 10% of its performance after 10 minutes of continuous Geekbench 3 CPU benchmarks, and it's not quite an A9, but it's still very solid, and the screen, while guilty of some over-saturation, managed some fantastic usability from nighttime to broad summer daylight. If I had to give some feedback to Samsung, I would ask, respectfully, that they give me the choice to use on-screen buttons instead of the hardware ones. I find it hard to hold devices with capacitive buttons horizontally, I bump back while reaching to the far left of my keyboard when I'm using it one-handed, and I often find myself mashing the home button while taking the S7 out of my pocket. Remember, the headphone jack is on the bottom, so that's the part of the phone that you're going to have to grab. I'd also love to, while I'm giving feedback, have the fingerprint sensor on the lock button instead of on the home button. It's amazing, I never realized what a great idea this was until I started using the Xperia Z5 Compact. I'd like the lock button to take me to the notification screen, and the home button to take me to my main desktop when I have a smart lock Bluetooth device connection, and, while I'm at it, Motorola's ambient display, where you can actually interact and preview notifications, is much better than just being able to see the time, the date, and battery life. But, with all that feedback in mind, that's it. I made it to the end of almost every day with 30% battery or more, and the S7 was such a pleasure to use that I found myself browsing more, taking more pictures, and taking more videos. And this is without mentioning that Samsung brought back waterproofing. So the S7 is a winner, and it's overthrown my previous king, the Z5 Compact, by merit of its much faster and better camera. The only thing that the Z5 still drives me crazy with, even after the Marshmallow update. So there it is, seven generations in. You finally got me, Samsung. You finally got me. And you know what else has got me? The D brand, makers of the matte black vinyl skin that was featured in the B-roll for the Galaxy S7 throughout this video. And not only looks good, but also actually in the case of this phone, improves the functionality of the device. Because I was reading and watching other people's reviews, and everyone's going like, oh yeah, the S7 is so slippery. Ah, ah, yeah, not actually if you replace the backing with that matte one, or with one of the carbon fiber ones, of which I actually have two examples here. This is a limited edition orange one they did a while ago, and here is the regular black carbon fiber that they usually send us. So D brand skins, in a nutshell, they're affordable, they're easy to apply, they fit perfectly, and they protect your device from incidental scrapes and scratches while making it look better, and you're not stuck with matte black, or carbon fiber, or other carbon fiber. You can actually choose any finish you want using their configurator, and you can even mix and match if you want something different on the front or the back, or hey, maybe you just want something completely psychedelic. They can do that too. So check them out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. 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