 The Galaxy S6 Active blew me away with its strong battery life, great camera, and rugged build quality. And as my wife's daily driver, has actually continued to impress me with better than expected software updates, provided you perform them manually if you're not an AT&T user. Its successor, the S7 Active, blew me away with its brick-like size and weight, and unbelievably ugly gold front bezel. But then again, maybe there is more to this ugly duckling than meets the eye. Let's all hope so. Corsair boasts unrivaled comfort and universal compatibility on its Void Surround headset, featuring a genuine Dolby 7.1 headphone USB adapter. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. I don't want to bore you, so let's get the specifications out of the way really fast here. The Galaxy S7 Active rocks a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 CPU, there is no Exynos version for some markets this time around, an Adreno 530 GPU, and 4 gigs of RAM, making it competitive with a nearly identical to, plus or minus a gig of RAM here or there, any other flagship smartphone on the market. On the back is a dbrand skin, so you can't see the abhorrent color scheme. You're welcome. Along with the 12 megapixel rear camera that I know and love, a two-tone flash and wireless charging under the hood. On top is a noise-canceling microphone and a headphone jack in my preferred position. On the right is a nice clicky lock button and a tray for a single SIM card and microSD card. This can be used to expand the 32 gigs of built-in storage. On the left is a volume rocker that feels good but is regrettably right across from the lock button. Derp. And the active key. Something I wish Samsung and other manufacturers for that matter would add a lot more of to their smartphones, because this thing is great. It acts as a shutter button when the camera app is open, and there are three different actions bound to single, double, and long presses. If you don't care about activity zone, or you don't have direct TV or whatever, you can change them to open any app you'd like. Now, I'd still love to see more flexibility here, like being able to directly call a contact, turn on the flashlight, activate my mobile hotspot, or whatever else, but it's something I found myself using a lot, even the way it is now. On the bottom is the main microphone and a microUSB charging port. Hopefully a new VR headset comes soon so Samsung can switch to Type-C, and a bottom-mounted speaker that is decidedly status quo. I'd like to see everyone taking HTC's approach with an upgraded earpiece speaker, giving the phone not necessarily stereo, but dual-speaker sound. Next to the earpiece is the same 5-megapixel selfie camera from the S7, so it's good if a little bit too wide, making noses or other facial features appear oversized. Under it is the 5.1-inch Gorilla Glass 4-covered 2560x1440 AMOLED screen that continues to impress me with its not overly saturated colors, considering this is a Samsung OLED we're talking about, and fantastic visibility in all conditions, including direct sunlight. Beneath that, yeah, okay, so these are hardware buttons. They're still here. They're a bit of a love it or hate it thing. Personally, I got used to them pretty fast, and it was nice to not have to worry about pressing back with my palm while reaching across the keyboard or accidentally closing videos all the time in landscape mode, but your mileage may vary. All right, so last time around, the big draw to the Active model was the IP68 Ingress Protection rating compared to the S6's complete lack of official water resistance. That's why I loved it so much, even though it lacked a fingerprint sensor, something that has made it feel surprisingly obsolete in the last year, as more and more third-party applications, LastPass is one that I use multiple times every day, are making use of this feature. Fortunately, the middle home button has won this time around, making the Active a full, no compromises, S7 experience, which is good, because the regular models picked up damn impressive water resistance this time around, with RS7 beating out offerings from Sony and Kyocera in this Sea Water Depth Challenge, which you can check out right here. Let's talk other trade-offs. You lose the sex appeal for sure. The Active is noticeably heavier and thicker with bigger bezels, but in addition to water and dustproofness, the Active is rated for drop resistance, though it should be noted that if you drop anything enough times, it will eventually break, and it features a whopping 4,000 mAh non-removable battery, which combined with Samsung's good power management in the latest TouchWiz, resulted in me making it as close to two full days as I ever have with a smartphone since I started reviewing them, about 175% of a day. Un-freaking-real. It is AT&T exclusive, so 4G band support is a little more limited because it doesn't need such broad compatibility, but I didn't run into any issues with reception on my carrier, that stupid message that was always in the tray with the S6 Active when it first launched is gone, and most of the AT&T stock apps can actually be fully disabled this time, so they don't continue to run in the background. TouchWiz continues to improve, so I don't have a ton of comments there other than keep up the good work, ladies and gentlemen, and the camera is the same camera that continues to outperform pretty much everything else in terms of launch speed, shutter speed, image quality, low light. I love the S7's camera. So then, is the Active better than the regular S7? Is it worth the price delta? Well, that's actually hard to say. The battery life is amazing. That was the only thing that kept the Droid Turbo ahead of the S6 Active for me last time around, and software support for the S6 Active has been confidence inspiring, even if you need to use ADB to upgrade it outside of America. But there is one nagging issue, one that I thought I was imagining when I couldn't reproduce it on camera and left it out of my S6 Active review. Both the S7 Active and its predecessor's touch screens lag occasionally, the most obvious symptom of which is double presses, especially fast ones, resulting in a long press while typing. Frustratingly, I was once again unable to reproduce it on camera due to the intermittent nature of the issue, but especially side by side with the touch latency optimization of the HTC 10, it is noticeable. Other than that, this phone is the absolute no compromises bomb, and it gets a very strong recommendation, especially if you're the kind of person who was gonna buy an S7 and then spend a hundred bucks on a battery bank and a rugged case anyway. Speaking of accessories for your phone, especially ones that save you from incidental dings and scratches, dbrand skins. Head over to dbrand.com. We've got a link in the video description and check out their high quality, precision cut vinyl skins. They've got them available for phones, tablets, game consoles, game controllers, and even laptop computers these days. And the best thing about dbrand, aside from the fact that they fit perfectly and are easy to apply and they're high quality and they stay on and all that stuff you'd expect from a vinyl skin, but unfortunately don't usually get, the best thing is the configurator. With the configurator you can see all the different zones that you can change the colors of, and you can swap them out in real time building the perfect device that is exactly your style and that perhaps no one else would even want. So check it out again. That's linked in the video description, dbrand.com. They're great guys over there and they make great skins and they ship worldwide. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed. Maybe buy an S7 Active over at Amazon. We've got a link down there in the video description or some other phone. Ultimately it makes very little difference to me. Or even consider supporting us by buying a cool shirt like this one or joining our community forum where you can ask tech questions, answer other people's tech questions, and just generally talk shop. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right to go check out channel Superfun where we've recently had a bunch of really cool videos including this off-roading one in my Lamborghini. But I don't care about Lamborghinis. I care about knowledge. Books.