How I made Samsung’s Galaxy S7 the (almost) perfect Android smartphone

Samsung and I had our differences in the past. We still disagree on many things, but the relationship is much more manageable these days. And I have none other than the Galaxy S7 to thank for that.

I’d been very vocal about my distaste for their phones, for various reasons, some of which still exist at the time of writing, but there’s no denying that their Galaxy lineup has come a long way since early 2010, when they introduced the first Galaxy S phone. Never trailing the competition, the Galaxy S phones always packed the best tech and gimmicks, introduced bold innovations, and managed to propel Samsung to the forefront of the OEM race to marketshare dominance. But until the 6th iteration of the Galaxy S, plastic (and cheapish looking, I might add) was the repellent for me. Add to that the unintuitive, distasteful, often times useless TouchWiz (Samsung’s own take on Android — a skin that alters the UI and, arguably, adds more functionality), and the Samsung phones would easily sit at the very bottom of my list of recommended phones.

Times have changed. Last year, I’ve had a change of heart with the introduction of the Galaxy S6. And this year, with the refinement that is the Galaxy S7, I wholeheartedly recommend the phone to anyone looking for an Android flagship. Here’s what it’s got going for it:

• The fastest (and one of the current best) smartphone cameras out there. The launching, focus and snapping speed is almost surreal. And it has manual controls. With the f/1.7 aperture. And stuff.
• Brilliant build quality. One of the best built phones I’ve used to date. Despite the 2 (still) misaligned holes at the top. Waterproof. And that 1mm of added thickness over last year’s model? Yeah, huge positive difference.
• Top of the line specs — screen, processors, RAM, storage, battery… ticks them all. And then some.
• Great size. In a market that is currently being driven by the Samsung-debuted phablet trend, the gorgeous 5.1″ screen presents barely any bezels and makes for a near perfect screen-to-body ratio.

Sweet.

In the title, I mention “almost perfect” Android smartphone. The Galaxy S7 still presented me with a few annoyances, which I was aware of before making the purchase. I managed to fix many of them, the most frustrating of which was the nowadays less terrible TouchWiz.

No matter how lightweight you make it, I’m still not going to like TouchWiz.

In its present form, TouchWiz is infinitely better than what it used to be a couple of years ago. Some of the additions (topic for another post) are also very useful. But sometimes TouchWiz still makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Or, on more zen days, toss the phone against a wall that I don’t care about damaging.

In order to avoid any resulting horror stories and ruined walls, I made a few tweaks:

1. I installed Nova launcher right off the bat, and used icon packs. No more squircle icons with colors inspired from a bachelor party in the sixties.
2. I used a simple dark (or material) theme, which I downloaded, for free, from the preloaded theme store app.
3. I cleaned up the homescreen and got rid of any gigantic widgets. I am a fan of simplicity; I like the clean, stock look. I also turned off Flipboard Briefing (enabled by default and takes over an entire homescreen when you swipe to the right).
4. I disabled and/or hid any preloaded apps that I never wanted installed in the first place (hint: fully invested in Google’s document editing suite, I don’t need another).

And there you have it; a solid, good looking, great performing phone. Battery life has been more than good — this is my personal phone but not my only phone — so I get a good 35 hours of use out of it including 3.5 hours of screen-on time on average.

Settings menu with dark theme applied <> Homescreen with icon/folders (more on this below)

As for what still bugs me about the Galaxy S7…

The capacitive navigation buttons, they’re just wrong, man. Every other darn phone that I have — and I have quite a few of those, trust me — has it figured out: back button to the left of the home button, recents/switcher or search button to the right. Except for Samsung. Nope. They didn’t get the memo. Samsung’s back button is to the right of the home button. Because who cares what everyone else is doing. And who cares about logic.

Or how about those emojis? Did they really have to mess with those, too? Seriously, what is this one supposed to be and is the mouth shaped like a triangle!?

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