The Verge Reviews the New Samsung Galaxy Models ⇥ theverge.com

Name aside, I think Samsung has done a terrific job with the Galaxy S7 Edge. By stepping away from the assumption that the top of a phone is distinct from the sides, they’ve made the edges part of the display in a fairly clever way. Dan Seifert, the Verge:

Samsung’s using them here to make the phone much narrower than it would be if it had a flat display. It makes the whole device smaller and easier to use. That becomes readily apparent when you put the S7 Edge next to other devices with 5.5-inch or similar screens. It’s significantly narrower than all of them, including Apple’s iPhone 6S Plus (5.5-inch), the LG G4 (5.5-inch), Google’s Nexus 6P (5.7-inch), and Samsung’s own Note 5 (5.7-inch). When it comes to ease of use in your hand, a narrower phone is much easier to manage.

The iPhones 6 all use cover glass with a slight curve at the edges, which helps reduce the size of the display bezel and disguise the width of the phone in the hand. But imagine how much easier an iPhone would be to hold if just a couple of millimetres could be trimmed from either side.

This, though, remains disheartening:

Samsung says it worked with Google to reduce the number of redundant apps it adds to Google’s own suite, and the Verizon S7 I tested comes with only one browser (Chrome) out of the box (other carrier models will have both Chrome and Samsung’s browser). But it still has two email apps, two photos apps, three music players, two voice control systems, two app stores, and two text messaging apps. On top of that, Verizon adds thirteen more apps, including three from Amazon, another text messaging app, another streaming music app, and a navigation app that competes directly with Google Maps. These apps can be “disabled”, but cannot be removed entirely.

These phones are among the flagships of the Android world, but this unnecessary duplication is a mess. A brand-new Verizon S7 will have three text messaging apps and four different music players. Gross.