Battery life
There's one and only one thing that's not equal inside these two Samsung Galaxy phones: the battery capacity. As you might expect, the larger handset has a slightly bigger battery.
The Galaxy S7 Edge packs in a heftier 3,600mAh battery, while the standard S7 comes with a still-healthy 3,000mAh. It's actually still remarkable Samsung could fit that in a 5.1-inch phone.
To thoroughly test the battery, I initially played a 90-minute HD video, and the Galaxy S7 went from 100% to 84% representing a 16% drain. The Edge held to 86% for a 14% during the same test.
I found similar results going a full day with both phones (on opposite days for proper testing, of course) without completely draining either battery. The Galaxy S7 drained to 13% by the end of the day, while the S7 Edge fared better at 17%. It's a small, but meaningful difference.
Is the 3,000mAh S7 totally inferior to 3,600mAh S7 Edge? Should you be worried? No, because the larger Edge has to power than bigger 5.5-inch display, after all, narrowing its victory a bit.
There's also Fast Charging on each phone. I was able to replenish 25% of the S7 battery and 23% of the S7 Edge battery in 15 minutes. It took 1 hour and 29 minutes to fully charge the S7, and 1 hour and 38 minutes to do the same for the larger S7 Edge.
You have to look at it all this way: both phones have bigger batteries than their S6 and S6 Edge predecessors, so you're going to get more juice out of the S7 and S7 Edge, regardless.
All four of these phones drained around the same amount in our 90-minute battery tests, but Samsung has improved the standby time battery life since last year, similar to how Google's Nexus phones use Doze mode.
Even with the always-on screen, I have gotten better battery life from the new phones, while the S6 and S6 Edge have gone dead on me before bedtime too many times to count.
Camera
The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge cameras are the absolute best among smartphones, and the company has held this title since early 2015 when the S6 and S6 Edge first launched.
In fact, the older S6 phones beat the even the newer iPhone 6S and 6S Plus when they launched in September. Samsung has set and cleared its own bar with these new cameras.
All of this may be confusing at first if you look at the specs sheet, because the S7 and S7 Edge feature a 12MP camera instead of a 16MP sensor. But Samsung only dialed back the megapixel count to increase the size of individual pixels.
This has resulted in better low-light performance from the pair of phones, and it shows in each and every restaurant and bar photo.
Between the two I noticed no discernible differences between the photos, even at 100% crop. The cameras sensors and software are the same, and that's what I expected.
However, history has taught me to check. I found minor variations between the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, with the latter doing better and faster post-processing work, creating hard-to-spot differences.
