Visual consistency Samsung Galaxy S7 Oreo improvements Samsung's take on Oreo, first shown off with the Galaxy S9, isn't for everyone. But as far as Samsung's software goes, it's the best it's ever done and a nice improvement in design and functionality over the Nougat builds before it. And a huge benefit of this Oreo update for the two-year-old Galaxy S7 series is that it's near-identical to what comes out of the box on the Galaxy S9.

There isn't a whole lot to talk about here, particularly since you've already been using your Galaxy S7 or S7 edge on Nougat for a year now. Things haven't changed all that much visually with Oreo, but you get a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements. There are new background limits for apps that help improve battery life, notification channels to give you better control over what apps notify you, and the biggest of the group will be the new Autofill APIs that let apps pull usernames and passwords from the cloud to speed up sign-in processes. This is a near-perfect recreation of the Galaxy S9's software, and battery life hasn't taken a nosedive. The biggest difference in the Oreo update compared to the Galaxy S9 is the camera interface, which has stuck with the Nougat-style interface rather than the new tab-style interface that lets you swipe between modes. You also don't get AR Emoji, but you probably don't care about that. Camera quality remains unchanged as far as I'm concerned — it's still surprisingly good for a two-year-old phone, but nobody would confuse it for one of the 2018 flagships. Battery life hasn't changed appreciably for me, which is a positive — I wasn't expecting battery life to improve, but I was definitely fearing that it'd degrade. We're bound to hear many horror stories about how Galaxy S7 battery life takes a nosedive after the Oreo update, as is the case with every major platform upgrade, but that hasn't been my experience. As you'll read below this may be a result of my choice to factory reset my Galaxy S7 edge after the update, which at this point I'm recommending everyone do on their phone if they can stomach the time it takes to set up your phone again. Samsung Galaxy S7 Oreo update: Which versions have received it My Verizon-branded Galaxy S7 edge updated to the April 1 security patch, which is (somewhat hilariously) a month ahead of the U.S. unlocked Galaxy S9 at the time of writing. I wouldn't expect Samsung to keep rolling out security patches for the Galaxy S7 series for too much longer, but knowing that you at least get a somewhat up-to-date patch on such an old device is good.