The Fall is always a time of year that’s dominated by software updates and new releases. In the run up to Christmas, people are looking forward to new hardware hitting shelves, such as Google’s smorgasbord of new releases, as well as breathing a little new life into their older devices, and an update like the jump to Android 7.0 Nougat will no doubt do the trick. We’ve seen today that OnePlus is gearing up for the update, and so too, is Samsung. The Galaxy S7 Edge has been spied in benchmarks running the new version of Android, and now it appears as though its the turn of the Galaxy S7, as it’s been spotted in GFXBench running Android 7.0 Nougat.
The fact that Samsung is already working on the update should come as no surprise, as Google has been releasing Developer Previews of Nougat since the Spring, and it’s been available in its final form since August. Samsung, while not the fastest, has a long reputation of providing solid updates to their flagship devices, and they often add in a few extras as well. This year, the Grace UX that debuted with the Galaxy Note 7 – which has now made its way back to shelves all over the world – is rumored to be making its way down to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, which will certainly breath some new life into some already pretty great devices.
Exactly when the Galaxy S7 is to get the new version of Android is unclear, but given that the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update hit Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge devices around December 2015/January 2016 time, we could be in for a longer wait than we first thought. The fact that Samsung has devices out there already running the update could mean that we see the update before the end of 2016, which will no doubt be a welcome change for Samsung fans. The update to Android 7.0 Nougat doesn’t appear to have as much under-the-hood as Marshmallow had with the permissions update and Google Now on Tap, so we could be looking at a quicker turnaround for Nougat this year.
