You have read all the glossy reviews, now for some reality. This is my first impressions on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.

First up, the phone came free with the Gear VR. Both the phone and VR box were inside a larger box, which when opened revealed that the inside panels of the box were black. The phone and VR boxes were wrapped in black wrapping paper, creating a wow moment. The envelope that was inside the box was black too.

I have the black S7 Edge. Let’s not beat around the bush. It is gorgeous. The QHD screen is excellent. And the camera takes some cracking shots when it works. There is lag sadly. This is when pressing the home button, it doesn’t always register. Inserting my 200gb Sandisk micro SD caused the phone to collapse. While it was indexing the card for several hours, the phone was unusable. Anyway, I had my main sim in the S7 Edge along with 30 core apps. I had taken a number of photos and then I got the error message shown at the end of the article, that is the camera force closed when launching it.

So I performed a hard reset and started again and all seemed well. So my wife and I had a go with the Gear VR. It says not to wear glasses and instead use contact lenses. Well, as both of us don’t use contact lenses, we found that the lens adjustment gauge on the Gear VR was not enough to create a clear sharp view. This meant the VR experience became average at best. This is a real shame as even based on my experience which was not pin sharp, the wow factor was huge. My wife and I used the Gear VR with bluetooth noise cancellation headphones. I am certain the Gear VR will help Samsung sell loads of these phones.

And then just when I thought everything was working smoothly, I got the same camera force close camera error message. Nothing I tried worked, so I could see another hard reset was going to occur. So I took my sim card out of the S7 Edge and put it back in my iPhone 6S Plus. I also soft reset the S7 Edge and voila it worked again. So maybe there is something wrong with Three UK and / or using my Three Signal Booster? See update at end for actual reason.

Now not wishing to beat the S7 Edge into submission, this is day 1 firmware and hopefully will receive updates to quash the bugs.

So how does it compare to the iPhone 6S Plus. Well android feels liberating and clumsy. iOS has Touch ID that is so well implemented into many apps and makes using these apps much faster and easier on iOS than android. There is no mobile payments option for the S7 Edge yet if you’re in the UK. Then with iOS you have force touch, integration of iMessage and FaceTime and much more with slicker and better designed apps. However, it is not all one sided. There are aspects of android that make iOS seem behind. Let’s not beat around the bush here, the S7 Edge camera is much better than the iPhone camera. iOS has many third party camera apps that squeeze even more performance out of the phone. Android at the moment has no compatible apps that work with the S7 Edge or add any extra benefits. Then again, the S7 Edge camera app is feature rich. And when you look at the basics, the S7 Edge has a much better screen to the point whereby I don’t need to use my reading glasses as much.

So for me there are some amazing highs but also some frustrations especially with the camera app force closing.

Update – I have since discovered that the S7 Edge camera does not like to save photos to a micro sd card and this is an issue several people are having. The solution is to save photos to the internal memory until Samsung hopefully release a fix.

Update 2 – Samsung have confirmed the camera problem is effecting a number of devices.