Antonio Villas-Boas/Tech Insider
The Samsung Galaxy S7 is the best smartphone I've ever used.
Not only is it powerful with its VR capabilities and the best smartphone camera ever made, but it's also a gorgeous device. That slender, low-bezel frame. That metallic finish. That ultra-high-contrast, milky-smooth screen. Plus, you can leave it in a jug of water for the length of a phone demo with no ill effects. And it runs Android - a contentious operating system (that's a whole other post,) but the one I prefer.
But recently, I've given mine up in favor of a boring, bulky, less cross-compatible iPhone 6s Plus.
The reason is simple: The iPhone's got a crazy-long battery life. And on the most important computer a person interacts with in a day, that's incredibly important.
If I were a light or even medium user, the S7 would be perfect for me. It does everything I want incredibly well, and turns on to the incredibly useful (if mildly creepy) Google Now main page.
But I'm a heavy user, sometimes taking hundreds of photos in a day, as well as constantly Googling facts for articles, recording phone interviews, testing out apps, listening to podcasts, and navigating to unfamiliar parts of the city. And day after day, the Galaxy S7 was dying around 5 p.m.
Not so with the iPhone 6s Plus.
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider
The iPhone 6s Plus has a 2,750 mAh battery, which is actually smaller than the Galaxy S7's 3,000 mAh battery. (You don't have to know what those numbers mean, just that one is bigger than the other.) But the iPhone's operating system and software are much better optimized for their hardware, and allow the handset to chug along much longer. And for me, no matter how fantastic a phone is, if I can't turn it on at 7 pm it's no good to me.
So, with a heavy heart, I've switched back.
