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- Super AMOLED screen offers great movie-watching experience
- Battery drain minimal in this mode
- Sound quality excellent using headphones, speaker muffled
- Hi-Res audio is supported but still too few files for it to be worth anything
There's no dedicated video player app on the Samsung Galaxy S7, so you'll have to make do with the Gallery app to access any movie files you put on the handset, or Google's Play Movies & TV if you want to access your purchased content, or rent or buy something new.
Playback looks great on the Samsung Galaxy S7, and its brighter display makes watching the latest movie or TV show an enjoyable experience.
Samsung's handy Pop-up feature lets you minimise your video to a small floating window, enabling you to use other applications on the Galaxy S7 without missing any of the action.
The 5.1-inch screen can get a little cramped in this mode – it works better on the larger S7 Edge – but it's useful if you need to fire off a quick email, or ping an emoji to a WhatsApp group.
The only negative point here is the placement of the speaker at the base of the handset. When held in landscape mode I found my hand muffled audio on several occasions, obliging me to adjust my grip to something less comfortable.
This can be overcome by plugging in a pair of headphones (or connecting to a pair via Bluetooth), but it's a niggling issue when you want to share a video with friends and family.
Music
The only music player on the Samsung Galaxy S7 is Google's Play Music app, and that's really all you need.
Google offers its own subscription music-streaming service through the app, as well as enabling you to buy and download tracks from its store, and control your own music loaded onto the phone separately.
Audio quality is also impressive when using headphones, although playback falls down in the same way as video when it comes to the placement of the internal speaker.
I'd have loved to have seen Samsung adopt HTC's and Sony's use of dual front-facing speakers, but alas I'm stuck with a single, downwards-firing solution again.
