Newsletter
After so many rumors and leaks, Samsung finally unveiled the Galaxy S7 Edge last Sunday during MWC 2016. It is a pretty solid upgrade compared to its predecessor as it now features a larger 5.5-inch display, protection against water damage and a microSD card slot to expand the internal memory on the phone. The company’s customization of the Android operating system called TouchWiz was criticized in the past, but the company has been removing some features that were not very useful and polishing the whole interface. The Edge UX is available in all of Samsung’s phones with a curved display, and it has been vastly improved on the Galaxy S7 Edge.
The Galaxy Note Edge was the first phone with a display that curves around one of its sides, that portion of the screen was used as a secondary display to show notifications and other information, in addition to shortcuts for frequently used apps. Then, the Galaxy S6 was released with a dual-edge display, this time around, the curved part of either side of the screen featured some shortcuts for contacts and the edges displayed notifications, news, weather and other relevant information. The Edge UX was improved on the Galaxy S6 Edge+, adding app shortcuts to the edges.
On the Galaxy S7 Edge, the enhanced Edge UX includes new Edge panels, so a wider portion of the screen can be used to display shortcuts for apps, contacts, and web pages, as well as news and even some handy tools. There’s a tab that needs to be pulled in order to access the Edge panels and many aspects of this tab can be customized, including its position, size, and transparency. The Edge panels are also customizable, so users can choose the ones they want to see in this section. Some of the available panels include People edge, Apps edge, Quick Tools and Weather. An interesting one is the Tasks panel, which includes shortcuts for some features within apps, such as direct access to different modes on the camera or the timer and stopwatch on the clock. There are some panels from third-party developers such as Yahoo!, providing information like news or scores for different sports. Users can even download additional Edge panels to increase the functionality of this portion of the screen.