The Samsung Galaxy S, introduced in 2010, was a lot more appealing. Gone was that array of physical keys; now it had just a single home button, along with a touch-sensitive menu button on the left and a back button on the right. It's a design motif that it (and a lot of other Android phones) would return to, time and time again. The Galaxy S had a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen and a 480 by 800 resolution that plenty of people found pretty impressive. Oh, and this was also the first Android phone to ship with TouchWiz, Samsung's proprietary UI. It helped Samsung stand out from the rest of the Android market, but TouchWiz also added a lot of unnecessary bloat, which sometimes made the phone sluggish.
Buoyed by the success of the Galaxy S, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S II (Also known as the S2) in 2011. The S II was thinner, lighter and faster than its predecessor, came in 16GB and 32GB varieties and had an improved display to boot. The 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus was quite a stunner, and our review even described it as "nothing short of spectacular." It also had an upgraded 8-megapixel camera on the back (now with flash!), a 2-megapixel shooter on the front plus a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. It still had that TouchWiz interface, but people must not have minded that much, because it went on to sell millions and millions of units, putting the Galaxy brand on the proverbial map.
Samsung kept up the Roman numeral trend with S III, and it also maintained much of the design elements of its predecessor. The S III had rounder corners and a bigger and better 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, but a lot of the other styling remained the same. It even retained the same 8-megapixel on the back, choosing to ramp up the photo quality through software rather than hardware. It was available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB varieties, and sported a super-speedy (for the time) quad-core 1.4GHz Exynos 4412 CPU. Our review for the S III praised its "big and beautiful" display but did call out TouchWiz for feeling tired and also dissed the design for being a little too samey.
Perhaps learning from the lukewarm reaction to the S5, Samsung decided to shake things up in 2015. The company came out with not one, but two different flagships: a "normal" flat-screened S6, and the much more intriguing S6 edge with its wraparound screen. They each had stunning Super AMOLED QHD displays plus a 16-megapixel rear camera. Unfortunately, the S6 and S6 edge also did away with the microSD card slot and a removable battery. Still, our review was very complimentary of both handsets, calling them "sturdy and stylish" with an "impeccable camera experience." Sure, we also pointed out that the S6 looked remarkably similar to the iPhone at the time, but that clearly didn't hurt the device's popularity.
Since the S6 and S6 edge proved to be such a hit, Samsung stuck to the formula in 2016 with the S7 and S7 edge. They weren't really all that different from their predecessors, and proved mostly to be refinements rather than a full refresh. Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The S7 had a lovely 5.1-inch Super AMOLED screen while the S7 edge's wraparound display measured 5.5 inches. Though the phones came in both 32GB and 64GB iterations, the S7 series also finally saw the return of microSD card slots. In our review, we said the S7 wasn't a dramatic departure from its predecessor, but it was certainly more refined, while the S7 edge was "what Samsung's Edge family should have been from the beginning."
