Samsung Galaxy S7 Active: The Olympic performer

Gallery

The TouchWiz gallery orders photos by time, but you can switch to folder-based Album view. Thumbnail sizes can be resized with a pinch gesture and the album selection pane on the left can be hidden.

TouchWiz Gallery

Sharing options include wireless printing, Android Beam and Wi-Fi Direct, but no DLNA (or other way to send an image to your TV). Several image editing tools are available - from basic cropping, to collage making, to a more capable editor (which supports image correction, effects and drawing).

Viewing an image • Image details • Sharing options • Powerful editor

Music player with advanced EQ features

Google Play Music is the default player for your tunes on the Galaxy S7 active. The app has been treated to the material design a while ago, and its functionality remains unchanged - it can play your local files, as well as stream music from the cloud.

The Samsung sound enhancements are available, of course, you can access them from Play Music, too. They include the SoundAlive tool, which has an intuitive interface to tuning the equalizer (a manual 7-band equalizer is available for more knowledgeable users).

Music Player

Adapt Sound is even simpler. It tunes the EQ to your hearing and your particular pair of headphones by playing multiple frequencies and asking how well you hear them. Smart Volume automatically adjusts the volume of tracks from multiple sources.

UHQ sound resolution enhancer is available, Surround sound emulation and Tube Amp Pro simulator are onboard, too.

Equalizer controls

Video player

There is no video player app pre-installed and the Gallery handles the videos by default. It has full subtitle support and pop-up player.

Stock video player: options • Full screen • pop-out player

There's an "Editor" option too though that may be overstating it - it just lets you trim the video. If you want a more capable video editor, there is such in the Galaxy Apps store for free, courtesy of Samsung.

Splendid audio output

Going rugged hasn't cost the Galaxy S7 active anything regarding audio performance. The element-defiant flagship performed just as well as its two other S7 siblings and even managed to beat them in terms of loudness (though we're guessing this may have something to do with the lack of any EU-imposed restrictions on the maximum volume of our US review unit).

Anyway, the handset posted excellent scores top to bottom and garnished them with nicely loud output when used with an active external amplifier. There are no weak points to its performance and output is impressively loud - that's really all we can say here.

Plugging in our standard headphones caused a very minor hike in stereo crosstalk, with the rest of the readings remaining just as impressive. The volume stays high too for one of the best performance we've seen.

Anyway, here go the results so you can make your comparisons.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy S7 active	+0.03, -0.01	-94.3	93.4	0.0020	0.0075	-94.5
Samsung Galaxy S7 active(headphones)	+0.02, -0.02	-94.2	93.3	0.0021	0.0076	-76.2
Samsung Galaxy S7	+0.01, -0.04	-92.5	92.6	0.0027	0.0078	-92.7
Samsung Galaxy S7 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.05	-91.9	92.1	0.0044	0.063	-73.4
Sony Xperia X Performance	+0.01, -0.04	-95.2	90.0	0.0038	0.011	-95.1
Sony Xperia X Performance (headphones)	+0.23, -0.17	-93.2	89.3	0.0078	0.174	-64.9
LG G5	+0.01, -0.04	-92.6	92.6	0.0051	0.0096	-93.3
LG G5 (headphones)	+0.05, -0.01	-92.2	92.3	0.0029	0.037	-50.7
Xiaomi Mi 5	+0.01, -0.03	-95.3	95.1	0.0034	0.0065	-95.1
Xiaomi Mi 5 (headphones)	+0.01, -0.03	-95.2	95.1	0.0027	0.013	-71.5
Apple iPhone 6s	+0.03, -0.04	-93.5	93.5	0.0016	0.0075	-73.2
Apple iPhone 6s (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.06	-93.8	93.9	0.0030	0.101	-68.2

Samsung Galaxy S7 active frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.