And while the days of a separate app launcher seem to be numbered, Samsung still felt the need to fiddle with it. You can still arrange apps in alphabetical order or cook up a convoluted scheme of your own, but now you also have the option of searching for a specific app from the top of the screen. The same goes for the Settings page, actually: Thanks to Marshmallow, you can just search for options instead of rooting through everything.

The list goes on, but Samsung's approach to TouchWiz is clear: It's mostly cosmetic changes that don't represent a huge departure from previous versions. That said, I'm also a little concerned about the effect TouchWiz has on the S7s' overall performance; the phones are generally very snappy, except for sporadic (and puzzling) cases of interface lag. Swiping into Flipboard Briefing -- a news-heavy home screen that's off by default -- can be jerky as all get-out, and sometimes swiping through home screens leads to noticeable stuttering.

So that's TouchWiz in a nutshell. If you've picked up a Galaxy in the past 12 months, you'll feel right at home ... though this year gamers are getting more attention from Samsung than usual. One new feature, Game Launcher, consolidates all your games into a single spot for easy access. It's a simple enough concept, but it can be a little dumb, especially when it tries to automatically detect installed games. While I was setting up both new phones for testing, Game Launcher added the messaging app Slack for reasons I couldn't quite understand.

Beyond the occasional fit of stupidity, Game Launcher smartly offers easy access to popular YouTube gaming videos, and videos related to the games you have installed on your phone. From there, Game Tools takes things a step further. After you've enabled it and started playing a game, a small red button will hover in a corner of the screen. Tap it to bring up a list of convenient options, from a kill switch for alerts and a lock for the phones' touch keys to shortcuts for taking screenshots and recording in-game footage. I'm about as far removed from the Let's Play generation as a 27-year-old can be, but I can already tell more than a few people are going to love this.

Then there's everything else. The fling with Microsoft that saw Office apps preloaded onto Galaxys seems to be over, as they're nowhere to be found on our review units. These particular units are meant for use on Verizon (Engadget's parent company), which means there's a folder full of eight preloaded apps, which some will undoubtedly find useless. Oh, and Verizon's Go90 video streaming service is here too, which is problematic for a few reasons. I don't want to watch anything on it, for one, and Verizon isn't charging Go90 streaming against customers' data caps, which would seem to run afoul of net neutrality principles.

The S7 Edge

The S7 Edge, meanwhile, has all of that and then some. As always, the biggest software difference is the Edge UX, also known as "that menu thing you have to swipe the edge to access." By default, you'll have four panels ready to go. Apps Edge will feel plenty familiar to people who had the last-generation model; you'll still use it to quickly access apps you use frequently, but Samsung doubled the size of the panel to accommodate ten shortcuts instead of just five. People Edge still only has room for five shortcuts, though it carries over the OnCircle feature from the S6 Edge+ that most people never used. Great!

Tasks Edge is a fascinating addition to the mix. Rather than give you quick access to apps, it lets you perform specific actions within those apps with a single touch. The "take a selfie" task launches the camera and switches to the front-facing shooter; all that's left for you to do is hit the shutter button. It works surprisingly well for certain situations, but I was hoping we'd be able to create our own tasks involving third-party apps, like crafting macros for PCs.

Alas, while I can create an email addressed to my boss with a single touch, I'd have to use apps like Tasker to cobble together more complex actions. Rounding out the default Edge panels is Yahoo News, which displays stories in a scrolling stream. There are a few other Edge panels waiting for you too, like a compass, calendar, weather report, stock prices and sports scores from Yahoo.

Personally, I find some of these panels straight-up useless, but at least Samsung is trying to expand what its curved screen is good for. We're starting to see third-party developers build their own Edge experiences, too. A team called Sally Labs has a few available already, including handy monitors for RAM and data usage. Only a few big-name companies, like Twitter and CNN, have built Edge panels, with a scrolling list of trending topics for Twitter and a sort of vertical news ticker for CNN.

The Edge keeps its original curved-screen tricks too, like allowing you to view your notifications by rubbing an edge while the screen is off. Adding your friends to People Edge still assigns them a color that makes the phone's sides glow if they call while the device is facedown. It's a neat trick, but my neurotic nature keeps me from ever leaving a phone facedown on a surface anyway.

Samsung's decision to make the S7 Edge a physically distinct phone was a smart one: It's different enough from the regular S7 that people will want one for reasons beyond the curved screen. Still, make no mistake: The S7 Edge's big advantage over competitors still mostly comes down to its looks. These new Edge experiences are inching closer toward actual usefulness, but it's not like Samsung had some amazing software ideas that could only shine with the help of a curvy display. No, it's obvious that Samsung is trying to cook up software to better justify the screen's existence. As far as I'm concerned, though, there's nothing wrong with designing something beautiful for the sake of beauty.

Camera

Don't let the dip in megapixels fool you: The 12-megapixel cameras in the S7 and S7 Edge are no slouches. I spent much of my week testing the S7 siblings against the iPhone 6S Plus. The comparison seemed especially apt, since Apple also recently bucked the high-megapixel trend; its newest iPhones have 12-megapixel sensors, whereas many other phone makers are aiming for 16 megapixels and beyond. Anyway, in most straight shoot-outs, the S7 family did a better job capturing fine detail, from the lumps on a slapdash paint job to the meticulous fur etchings on a tanuki statue.

Colors also came out punchier with the S7 and S7 Edge, though never to the point of being imprecise. In fact, most of my test photos looked vivid, even when the sun was hiding behind some clouds. We can peg part of that on how the S7 and S7 Edge process photos, but the f/1.7 aperture lens and the larger pixels on the sensor itself deserve some credit too. Combined, these two features increase the amount of light the sensor absorbs, resulting in brighter, more appealing photos. Oh, and the 5-megapixel selfie camera made me feel attractive, so there's that.

The S7 series cameras also focused faster than other devices I tested them against. Rather than use, say, a laser autofocus module, Sony -- the company behind this so-called DualPixel sensor -- brought a sophisticated focus system to a smartphone. To make a long, jargon-filled story short, every pixel on the sensor has two diodes that are used to help figure out how to focus on the subject. The result is crazy-fast focus speeds -- my finger was barely done tapping the screen before the camera finished locking onto my target.