Studio711.com – Ben Martens

This isn’t my first post about my new Galaxy S7 and it probably won’t be the last, but I have some more thoughts about the phone and about Android in general:

• Using Android has made me appreciate how much thought and effort went into Windows Phone. People scoff at it, but it really was a great OS. Windows Phone may be failing in the American market for a lot of reasons, but the OS isn’t one of them. Android isn’t terrible, but it’s not nearly as polished or consistent. The plus side of that is that you can customize everything.
• I love the processor and graphics power in this phone. I can easily do live 1080p streams from my security cameras. I don’t know why but my old phone would choke on those streams.
• The cameras are terrific. The regular camera on our old phones was ok but the front-facing one was horrendous. Now we can using the front-facing camera without fear. I can also get RAW images from the cameras which make post-processing in Lightroom very nice.
• I didn’t even know this existed but we have “HD calling“. When we call each other, the call quality is way better than a standard telephone. I’ve also gotten the HD calling when calling to an iPhone.
• The microSD storage is a very nice feature. We put in some very fast 64 GB cards but it goes all the way up to 256GB.
• Android has gobs of nice features like Do Not Disturb hours so that we don’t get woken up when east coasters are texting us. We can either let specific people through at any time or set it so that our phones will ring if you call twice in quick succession. (Note: we have the latter so in an emergency, just call us back right away.)
• I was disappointed in the reminder functionality baked into Android. It’s there, but it’s sub-par. Thankfully, Microsoft has made Cortana available for Android and she has excellent reminder technology. The UI is great and the reminders sync to my Windows 10 computers too. By the way, if you do use the Google Now reminders, did you know you can access them from your desktop Chrome browser? Just search for “my reminders” and see what pops up.

I’m still finding more cool features so stay tuned!