By Samsung and LG went toe-to-toe at this year’s Mobile World Congress, and both companies’ baseline flagships are officially revealed. They’ll be competing with each other for dollars for sure, and late 2015 options like Apple’s iPhone 6S are also still making purchase decisions difficult.
LG G5 Announcement | Samsung Galaxy S7 + S7 Edge Announcement
Let’s break down the differences between today’s new contenders. For starters, the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 should both boast similar performance capabilities with identical resolutions, chipsets (for the Snapdragon Galaxy S7 variant, anyway) and RAM. There’s no doubt both of these phones will both perform beautifully, with the biggest difference coming down to whose software is more optimal (both are based on Android Marshmallow, for what it’s worth).
Samsung Galaxy S7
Interestingly enough, Samsung and LG both chose the same year to introduce always-on displays that deliver notifications and other information without having to turn the display on. Always-on isn’t a new breakthrough — Motorola says hello — but it’s nice that they’re finally catching up.
LG G5
Samsung is surely happy to be able to say they can match LG in terms of storage as they’ve finally reintroduced the microSD slot we’ve longed for (and we finally see the return of water resistance, too). That said, the Samsung Galaxy S7’s battery is still non-removable, though at 3,000mAh (3,600mAh for the Edge variant) and with the added benefits of fast wireless charging it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.
Samsung Galaxy S7
LG’s battery, on the other hand, is removable thanks to a slide-out design. This design allowed LG to do something very innovative with their smartphone this year by introducing modular functionality. You can add a camera grip or hi-fidelity audio to your LG G5, if you want, and they’re easily swappable. Good luck finding equal levels of innovation from Samsung’s wares this year.
LG G5
Moving on, the cameras on both devices are sure to impress as the companies have historically placed a great deal of emphasis on this area. Both LG and Samsung introduced nice improvements this year: the LG G5 gets dual-rear sensors (one 16MP, the other 8MP) that allow you to easily switch between normal and wide-angle photo compositions.
LG G5
Alternatively, Samsung only has a single 12MP sensor, but they’re using bigger pixels than previous sensors which makes for much lighting and detail. Samsung is also using a new technology called dual-pixel focus that lets the device focus on subjects almost as fast as DSLR cameras, even in low-light scenarios.
Samsung Galaxy S7
Both devices are a fair bit more impressive than the iPhone 6S, though we’d be worried if they weren’t considering they launched later. The 4.7-inch iPhone can’t compare in many areas other than its beautifully-constructed metal exterior and a pressure sensitive display, but raw performance doesn’t doom it at all.
iPhone 6S
We know the benefits of extremely optimized software and the iPhone 6S certainly benefits from that. We’d be surprised if Apple doesn’t up the ante for the iPhone 7, so we’ll be eager to revisit this discussion once their 2016 smartphone eventually launches.
All in all, today saw the introduction of 2 of the best smartphones that’ll launch this year. Let us know which one you think is stronger in the comments below.
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