S7 Edge Review: Everything No One Told You About The Edge Screen

How's it going guys? Eric here from TechEssodeTV, and I've been hard at work on the Top 100 Features Review for the S7 and S7 Edge. But while I was working on it, I realized something. There's no way I could cover all of the Edge-specific features and the rest of the 100 awesome features in a single video and have it last a reasonable amount of time. So I decided to break the Edge features off into their own separate 16-plus minute video where I cover literally every single thing you can do with the Edge screen on the Galaxy S7 Edge. So if you're wondering what the difference is between the S7 and S7 Edge, the S7 Edge has everything the S7 does, plus everything you're going to see in this video. Before we dive deep into the Edge panels, I want to point out that the Edge screen has three other uses. If you go to Settings, then Edge Screen, you'll find something called Edge Feeds. This gives you a quick glance at notifications, news from Yahoo, stocks, current scores of your favorite teams, your total steps for the day, trending tweets, news from CNN, and any RSS feeds you set up. Eventually, you'll have even more options when you tap the download button. For now, you just get the CNN News Feed and the RSS Feed options, both of which are free. If you tap More in the upper right corner, you get the option to reorder the feeds or uninstall any that you don't want anymore. You can also change how long the feed will stay on when you activate it. The default is 30 seconds, but you can set it all the way up to 10 minutes. To use the feeds, just rub your finger along either edge of the screen when it's off, and the feed will pop up along that edge of the screen. Now just swipe up or down to cycle through the feeds. If you tap a feed, it will take you to any relevant information for that feed. So if it's news, it'll take you to the news article, and if it's steps you've taken, it'll take you to the S Health app. Back in the Edge Screen settings, you'll see another option called Edge Lighting. This just makes the edge of the screen light up when getting a call while the phone is face down. If it's someone you have in your People Edge panel, which I'll show you in a bit, it will light up with that person's color. If it's someone who isn't in your People Edge panel, it will light up green. You can also add an option to reject a call and send a preset text message simply by placing your finger on the heart rate monitor for two seconds. The third edge screen use is found under your display settings, and it's called Night Clock. If you turn this on, the edge screen will show the current time, the next alarm time, and the battery percentage on the edge screen for whatever time period you set up. This is great if you want to use your phone as a bedside clock at night, but don't want to use it always on display. Alright, now let's take a look at the edge panels. To use the edge panel, just swipe in from the right side of the screen. You'll see a small white bar showing you where to swipe from. You can access this bar from the lock screen, the home screen, or any app screen. The only places you can't access this is from the always on display, or in any app where you have the screen rotated sideways. Once you open the panel, you can swipe either left or right to reveal other panels. You can also tap the circles on the bottom to skip straight to a panel that's further down the list. To exit the panel, just tap the empty space to the left, or press any navigation button at the bottom of the phone. If you tap the settings icon, you'll be taken to a screen where you can select which panels you want to use. You can select up to 9 panels total, and if you tap more in the upper right corner, you can reorder these panels, or uninstall any that you don't want anymore. If for some reason you don't want the edge panel at all, you can just tap the toggle at the top right to shut it off. Down at the bottom, you get settings to adjust the panel handle. You can change its position to the left side if you're left handed, change its size, change its transparency, and change its vertical position along the edge. Taking a look at the panels, you get an apps edge panel, which gives you quick access to your favorite apps. You can even add folders, which hold a seemingly unlimited amount of apps per folder. Combine the folder capability with a total of 10 slots, and you'll never need to go to your home screen again. Except to check widgets, of course. The next panel is the tasks edge. These are action shortcuts to do things like open your camera and switch to selfie mode or maybe panorama mode in a single tap, add an alarm, create a contact, create a memo, and much more. At first, you'll only see Samsung specific shortcuts, but if you add an action to the home screen from a downloaded app, you can add that same action to the edge panel. And once it's in the edge panel, you can delete it from the home screen, and it will stay in the edge panel. This works great for apps like Trigger or Tasker, which allow you to make shortcuts to do almost anything on your phone. There are 10 slots, but you don't get folders in this panel, so you're limited to 10 actions. The people edge is a contact shortcut for up to 5 contacts. Each contact gets a customizable color associated with them that shows up on the edge screen when they call you while your phone is face down. Opening the panel itself shows you your 5 contacts, and if you tap one, you get quick access to calling, texting, or emailing them. If you ever miss a call, text, or email from one of these contacts, a small tab with their color will appear on the edge of your screen. You can pull this out to see more information about the message, call, or email, and quickly respond. The people edge also has OnCircle, which allows you to send fun animations to a friend who also has a Galaxy Edge device. So this includes the S6 Edge, the S6 Edge Plus, and the S7 Edge. I'm not sure why Samsung limited it to only Edge devices at the moment, but I'm hoping they release an app for other people to use. Otherwise, this is an extremely limited feature. But if you do happen to have a friend with an Edge device, and have them as an Edge contact, you'll get three more options when tapping their avatar. The first is to quickly send a drawing that disappears over time as you draw it. The second gives you a few choices for what to send. You can send a new or old picture that you can draw on, or a short GIF that you can't draw on. Both of these can even use a bunch of preset effects, including two of my favorites, Minecraft, uh, I mean Mosaic, and Ripple, which is like an underwater effect. You can also just send an animated drawing from this section. When your contact receives it, it'll play back in the same amount of time it took you to draw it. The third option is to send one of many preset animations. The last cool feature on the People Edge is that it reminds you of important dates like a contact's birthday with a little icon. When you tap the avatar, it brings up more details about the event. I've only seen this work for birthdays so far, but if you see it work for a different event, let me know in the comments below. The My Places panel gives you location-specific apps and shortcuts that you set up. If you tap the location title shown below the My Places text, you can share your GPS location or share a recent journey using Glimpse. You can also get a traffic forecast, see a list of nearby places including food, attractions, fun things to do, and more, set up your settings to change whenever you get to the current location. This includes things like toggling your Wi-Fi, auto-brightness, Bluetooth, screen rotation, power saving mode, and smart stay on and off, as well as changing the sound mode to sound, vibrate, or mute. Further down the page is a memories section which shows you any pictures taken nearby in the past based on location tags in your photos. If you tap the edit icon at the top, you can change the order of the sections or toggle them on and off. If you tap more from the main screen, you can manage your places by adding up to four shortcuts, choosing whether or not to change your phone's settings when you get to that location, and change your location detection methods. These methods include geographical locations, Wi-Fi networks, and Bluetooth devices. If three locations isn't enough for you, you can add a seemingly endless amount of locations, each with their own shortcuts and phone settings. You can have one with a gaming or sports app when you're at a friend's house, one with a restaurant-specific app for each restaurant you ever go to, and another with a Bible app if you go to church. The Yahoo Finance panel shows you any stocks you're following, and if you tap a stock, it will take you to the Yahoo Finance report for that stock. The Yahoo Sports panel shows you the current scores for a large range of sports teams, and if the game is already over, it will show you the final score for the last game played by that team. The Yahoo News panel is hit or miss. It currently isn't customizable, at least not that I could find without creating a Yahoo account, and will sometimes give you useful news, but most times you only get tabloid-esque news. The Quick Tools panel acts as a compass, flashlight, or ruler. The only thing I'd like to see added here would be the option to have the ruler include the length of the S7 itself, so you can measure things like the distance something is from a wall. The Calendar panel shows any upcoming events. If you tap an event, it takes you to the details for that event. If you don't have any events, you can tap anywhere on the side to see the full calendar, and in case you're wondering, tapping empty spaces when you do have events does not take you to the calendar. I'm not sure why this wasn't included, but oh well. The Internet panel just gives you quick access to either one or two columns of internet bookmarks that you set up. The Weather panel shows you the date, time, current temperature, basic weather like raining, sunny, cloudy, and so on, the high and low for the day, chance of rain, and the UV level. If you tap the panel, it takes you to the weather app where you can see an hourly and daily forecast. You can also see any other cities you have set up by swiping left or right. I should also point out that the panel only shows the weather from your topmost city. So, if you want the panel to change based on where you are, long press on a city, then drag the one with the GPS icon to the top. Last but not least, you get the Milk Music panel. This is essentially Samsung's version of Pandora and works in a very similar way. Tapping start will open the Milk Music app where you can select a station you want to listen to or make your own. Once you've started playing a station, the panel will change to show cover art for the current song and give you the option to play or pause the music by tapping the cover art. Further down, you get an option to skip the track or favorite it. Tapping anywhere outside of those areas takes you back to the Milk Music app. And tapping the M at the bottom does… nothing. Not sure why Samsung excluded the only part of the panel that would make sense to take you to the Milk app, but oh well. Now that you've seen all of the built-in Edge panels, let's take a look at all of the currently downloadable Edge panels. First up is the Messages panel for $1.50. This panel is effectively your whole messaging app in an Edge panel. You can choose from three different themes at the moment, white, pearl, rose gold, or transparent. You can also switch between a circle avatar, a normal avatar which is just a square avatar, and no avatar for the message. You also get the option to choose whether to show the panel in the lock screen or not. This is a great privacy feature if you don't want everyone to see your messages when your phone is locked. And lastly, you get a Templates section where you can write a bunch of quick responses to use right from within the panel. The panel itself uses the default messaging app you have installed, so you're not limited to Samsung's built-in Messages app. The panel loads the last 15 conversations, and if you tap one, it will show the last 20 messages from that conversation. At the bottom of the conversation, there are three options. The first is to go directly to the message in your Messages app, the second is to use any quick responses that you set up, and the third is a voice-to-text option which even recognizes special characters like Smiley Face. Further down, you get an arrow to go back to the conversations list. Tapping the icon at the top of the conversation list takes you to your default messaging app. This panel works pretty well, but can occasionally take a couple seconds to load. Granted, it's always faster than navigating to your home screen, then entering the Messages app that way. Next up, we have the File Manager panel for another $1.50. This does exactly what it says, gives you a file manager in a panel. This one currently has three different color options, yellow, transparent, and custom which gives you limitless color selections. In the settings, you can change the icon pack from KitKat to Lollipop, change the default folder for when you first pull the edge panel out, you can choose the default folder which is just the top folder in your internal storage, a specific folder, or continue where you left off. You can also change the sorts type, the order, and choose whether or not to show this panel on the lock screen so you can keep things more secure. The last option is whether or not to show a thumbnail for images. The panel supports SD cards, but you need to set the SD card as your default folder in order for it to work properly. Hopefully, the developer will update this in the future. The best use I can see for this is to have the default location be where your recent downloads are so you can quickly access any PDFs or images you downloaded from the internet. Leave a comment below if you think of another good use for this panel, and we'll see if we can get a list going. The multi-window panel is another $1.50 panel. This panel quickly opens multi-window apps in pop-up mode. This is most useful for things like a calculator when you want to quickly add some numbers up. If you go into the settings for this app, you can even change the default size of the pop-up window in case you want something bigger. The fast message panel for Galaxy Edge allows you to quickly see WhatsApp messages and reply to them using your voice. And that's about it. This isn't nearly as robust as the messages panel, but it's the only panel that can show you WhatsApp messages. I didn't download it because I don't use WhatsApp and wouldn't be able to show you anything anyway. The $1.50 quick settings panel is exactly the same as pulling down your notification shade with one finger twice or with two fingers once. You get all the same toggles, but some of them take you to the settings for that toggle due to permission issues. I suppose this panel is handy if you have really small hands and can't easily pull down the notification shade with one hand. Outside of that, I recommend giving this panel a pass, unless you can get it for free later. The CNN panel is the best news panel at the moment, mainly because you can edit the panel to show only the news topics you're interested in and even customize the number of stories to load per category. Being CNN, you also get more newsworthy articles as opposed to the Yahoo panel which mainly consists of celebrity gossip and other senseless articles with an occasional real news story. The free League of Legends panel gives you lots of, um, stuff. I've never played League of Legends, so I have no idea what's going on with this panel. You get a list of your favorite summoners, you can change the website, add new summoners from all over the world, and view champs that you can tap on to get more details about them. None of this made any sense to me, but I hope this made sense to you League of Legends fans. Twitter Trends lets you see what's trending on Twitter, and if you tap a tweet, it'll open up Twitter and take you right to the tweet. You can also tap a Twitter handle or hashtag and be taken to that person's profile or a hashtag search. The RAM Status panel shows your RAM usage over time. This is handy for seeing how different apps affect your RAM usage. The Data Usage panel is a quick way to see how close you are to reaching your data limit for the month. Tapping the bars at the top take you to the Data Manager in your settings where you can adjust your start and end dates for data usage, as well as a warning level and hard limit that will automatically shut your data off when you reach that limit. These options are always available in your settings regardless of whether or not you've downloaded this panel. The $50 Color Note panel allows you to quickly add notes that stay in the panel. If you tap a note in the panel, it will show you the contents of that note. If you tap it again, you can edit the note. From here, you can change the color of the note, decide whether or not you want to hide the note from the Edge panel, add an alarm for the note, or delete the note. To add a new note, just tap the plus icon. If you tap the words Color Note in the upper left corner while looking at the panel, you'll see all of your notes in a full app view. From here, you can rearrange your notes, delete them, choose which ones are visible in the panel, add a new note, and edit the notes. You can also go into the settings and change the way the notes look in the panel, decide whether or not to allow the Notes panel to work on the lock screen, and lock the app with a fingerprint in case you have a private note like a Christmas shopping list and you don't want your family members to see it. The $50 Shortcuts panel gives you app and action shortcuts from a single panel. Think of this like merging the Tasks and Apps edges into a single panel. You can add a shortcut to any app, add the usual shortcuts like Direct Dial and Messages, a shortcut to a specific folder on your Google Drive, and more depending on which apps you have installed. You can also add function shortcuts, which are honestly a bit useless. You get Recent Apps and Home, which I suppose is good if you have really tiny hands and can't reach the Recent Apps button easily. There are a few Volume and Brightness controls, which can also be accessed by pulling down the notification shade. You also get Music Shortcuts, which, again, will be in the notification shade if you're currently listening to a song, and that's about it. This panel doesn't support folders, but you can add a seemingly endless amount of apps and shortcuts that you can scroll through in the panel. Next we have the Call Log panel. This $50 panel is pretty simple. It just shows a list of your 30 most recently contacted numbers. If you tap on the avatar, it will automatically call the person, and if you tap on the name, it will bring up their contact information. You can also tap the phone icon at the top to go straight to your call logs in the phone app. You get three different color options to choose from, Transparent, White Pearl, and Rose Gold. The last downloadable panel is Klein Park. I have no idea what this does because it's in a language that I can't read. So if you know what this is and can translate it, go ahead and leave a comment below letting us know what it is and what it does. So now that the Edge review is done, you guys may be wondering what's up with all of these cases sitting on my desk. Well, that's because I'm doing a Top 10 S7 Edge case review real soon, but not only am I reviewing the cases, I'm giving all of them away. So if you guys want one of these awesome cases, definitely subscribe to the channel so you can see right when I post that video and get details on how you can score one of these for yourself. Lastly, if you guys have any questions about what you saw in this video, don't forget to hit me up on Twitter at Tech-a-Sode TV because I do get Twitter notifications immediately, so you get a much faster response off of a Twitter post or tweet than you would off of a comment on a YouTube video or something off of Facebook. Those notifications come in a little bit lagged, it's only a few times a day that I get those notifications. So if you want a quick response, definitely hit me up on Twitter. That's it for this Tech-a-Sode, I'll see you guys in the next one.