Design

The Samsung Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 6s share the same design elements from their makers. The iPhone 6s is an upgrade from the iPhone 6 with only a few changes and additions here and there. And the same thing with the S7 – the overall design of the S7 resembles that of the previous version. The area that seems to have gotten better is the build quality and the handling experience: there are improvements in both devices, but not significant.

The Galaxy S7 retains the metal and glass unibody construction from last year’s model. The curves along the sides in the rear of the flagship as well as its compactness makes it to fit better in the palms of the hand, thus giving it a better and improved handling experience than the previous flagship. The camera protrusion in this smartphone is not as pronounced as last year’s, it molds well with the rest of the body of the phone, thus making for a more aesthetic look. Along with all of that, the Galaxy S7 has water resistances. And compared with the iPhone 6s, it comes with an expandable memory, which was also absent in the Galaxy S6.

The changes in the iPhone 6s is more noticeable than that in the Galaxy S7; it is built with a stronger 7000 series aluminum which offers better build quality. The issue of bendgate that was experienced with the previous model will not be available with this model. Because of the addition of this design element, it can be seen that the iPhone 6s is more thicker, taller, heavier, and wider than the iPhone 6. However, this change is not very pronounced that it will disturb the handling of the smartphone. The iPhone 6s with a display of  4.7-inch is smaller than the Galaxy S7 and certainly its other Android competition. This means that, unlike the Galaxy S7, it can easily be handed with only one hand. This is going to be a positive improvement for the iPhone 6s over the S7 in terms of design.

However, what is clear is that the Samsung Galaxy S7 can be easily distinguished from its predecessor. Samsung has made enough changes to the flagship that it is distinguishable from the Galaxy S6. This cannot be said of the iPhone 6s as Apple failed to make enough changes to make it easy to distinguish it from the predecessor.

Display 

At the beginning, we stated that there are similarities in the design elements of the two smartphones, but as the comparison gets deeper, you will see that there is a lot of difference between them. Starting with the display, we notice the difference clearly. On the iPhone 6s, you have a 4.7-inch IPS LCD screen with a 1334 x 750 resolution. Thus, the iPhone 6s has a pixel density of 326 ppi. The Samsung Galaxy S7 on the other hand is a 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display with a Quad HD resolution and a pixel density of 577 ppi. 

In terms of pixel densities, resolution and size, the two phones are quite different. However, when it comes to the quality of display, both of them are in close proximity. The powerful Super AMOLED display on the Galaxy S7 allows you to enjoy deep, inky blacks, good viewing angles, and vibrant colors. And in terms of sharpness, the Quad HD display gives the S7 an upper hand. However, the display on the iPhone 6s is not that bad. It is bright and capable of giving you good quality display too. 

One design that stills secure the Galaxy S7 in top place is the new Always on feature. This feature allows you to see weather information, date, time, and your notifications without having to wake up your smartphone. 

Performance and hardware 

The processor on the Galaxy S7 is an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 with Adreno 530 GPU and a 4GB of RAM. The new flagship will also be available in the powerful in-house designed Exynos 8890. This is a great feature from Samsung; with this option, we can test how the two software compare unlike the iPhone 6s that will be available in only dual-core Apple A9 processor. The Apple A9 processor on the iPhone 6s Plus will clock at 1.84 GHz, which will be backed by the PowerVR GT7600 GPU. The Apple 6s will only feature a 2GB of RAM. 

When you look at the features above, you would think that the Galaxy Samsung S7 will be much faster and efficient than the Apple iPhone 6s. However, that is not always the case. Even though the specs on the iPhone 6s are  lower, there would not be a significant disparity between the two. The reason is because Apple has control over both the hardware and the software on its phone and the level of customization that can be achieved is higher than that of any Android OEM. 

The two smartphones come with fingerprint sensors, located on the home button in the front. The fingerprint scanner on both phones is fast and they score similar points in that department. According to some experts, there has been some improvement in the performance of the Galaxy S7 compared to what is achievable with last year’s model. 

The Galaxy S7 comes with wireless charging, fast charging capabilities and a whopping 3,000 mAh battery, which is larger than the paltry 1,715 mAh unit on the iPhone 6s. With this, you should expect to get longer usage time with the S7 than the iPhone 6s. Although the latter might get by for a full day, the battery capacity is not comparable to that of the Galaxy S7. 

Camera 

The Galaxy S7 features a 12MP rear camera with an f/1.7 aperture lens while the iPhone 6s also comes with 12MP rear camera but with an f/2.2 aperture lens. Both devices should allow you to enjoy far better performance in low light situations, compare to their predecessors

Conclusion 

As you can see from this comparison, both phones are going to do great in terms of performance. In addition, there are convergence between the two of them in the software and features. For instance, the Galaxy S7 has water and dust resistance rating, wireless charging, fast charging and expandable memory. The iPhone on the other hand features 3D Touch, which is not available with the Galaxy S7. It all comes down to what features you are looking at.