At Unpacked in Barcelona, Samsung announced the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. Which have been leaked quite a bit in the past few weeks, but it’s finally official. It was quite evident throughout the press conference that Samsung is going full steam ahead with VR. Where everyone at the event had a Gear VR to immerse themselves in the announcement. As well as announcing the Gear 360, which is their 360-degree camera for recording VR. However, that’s not all.
The company also announced that those that pre-order the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge and those that buy it within the first week of availability, will get a free Gear VR along with a 6-game bundle. Which they estimate as a $150 value. The promotion is for those that order between February 23rd through March 18th. It’s a great promotion, especially for those that want to get into VR, but don’t want to pay $100 for the Gear VR virtual reality viewer that Samsung has. The Gear VR was developed with Oculus, which is one of the leaders in the VR field, with their Oculus Rift up for pre-order already.
Samsung’s new smartphones are quite the looker. While they innovated a bit on the new design that they debuted last year at Mobile World Congress, they also brought the latest and greatest specs to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. The Galaxy S7 features a 5.1-inch QHD Super AMOLED display, with the Galaxy S7 Edge sporting a 5.5-inch QHD Super AMOLED display. They are both powered by the Snapdragon 820 processor along with 4GB of RAM. Samsung is only selling these in 32GB variants, luckily the microSD card slot has returned this year. Something that disappeared last year on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.
As of now, it’s unclear whether the Gear VR promotion is for the US only or if it’ll be available worldwide. At this point, we know that pre-orders will start in the US at 8am on February 23rd and will be available on March 11th from all four of the US carriers. Great to see the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge coming so quickly after the announcement.
