Although nothing has been confirmed officially, February 21 is most likely to be the day on which the Galaxy S7 will be unveiled. Being among the most popular upcoming Android flagships in 2016, there have been plenty of "leaks" about its design in the last few months and we will try to list the best ones here.

Samsung' original: The "real thing"

This is the one that most experts and fans think is the most realistic portrayal of the Galaxy S7 yet. The image shows two renders, the smaller Galaxy S7 with a 5.1-inch screen and the curved Galaxy S7 Edge with a 5.5-inch display. This seems to be the most reasonable as it looks quite identical to the S6's design. It only makes sense that Samsung would not reinvent a design completely after it did so just last year when it released the S6 and especially since it was such a hit.

Jermaine Smit and his hyper-realistic renders

If you did not know already, you could easily be fooled into believing that one of Jermain Smit's renders is actually a teaser released by Samsung. His YouTube video looks surprisingly like a Samsung teaser and the beautifully rendered devices that he shows definitely seem to be bordering on the real thing.

Difference in opinion

Other famous concept artists like Hasan Kaymak and Martin Hajek had different ideas and in their own respective visions, the Galaxy S7 was seen in brand new redesigned avatars. Some of them were downright brilliant, but too innovative to be implemented in the S7 this year, while others added more functionality and aesthetics to it in the form of duoscopic camera sensors and a real leather finish.

While Android 6 Marshmallow is apparently reserved only for their latest high end smartphones by Samsung, they have finally decided to roll out Android 5.1.1 updates for the Galaxy Note 3 Neo models in India. Reports of the OTA update first came in from the users and later on, Samsung confirmed the news as genuine. Check if your update has arrived yet by going into Settings>About Phone>System Update>Check for Updates.

Among the changes that this new update will bring to the Note 3 Neo's Indian variants, improvements will be seen in the notifications department as they will become easier to view and access. Before you download and install the update make sure that there is at least 3072MB of free space as specified by the update. Also, once it has finished installation, you should expect almost a gigabyte (950MB) of space to be taken up permanently by the new software installation.

With so much of emphasis on the Galaxy Note 5 and its newer dual SIM variant that was released with 32GB in-built memory for around 51,400 INR last week in India, it is good to see that some of the older and cheaper smartphones are not entirely forgotten by the Korean manufacturer.

If Evan Blass from @evleaks is to be believed, then we finally have two images that depict the upcoming Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. One cannot deny the fact that the images do look like they have been edited here and there. Nonetheless, we must admit that the "leaked" images look very realistic, even if they turn out to be just conceptualizations based on 2015's S6 series.

The first thing that catches the eye when looking at the two images is the dark themed wallpaper. The dark wallpaper looks classy and if we see this in the actual S7 instead of the usual bright wallpapers that Samsung uses with its devices, it would be a welcome change. Next, the home buttons on both the devices seem to be less rounded when compared to current gen smartphones in the series. Displays on both the phones show the date to be February 21, which is unofficially confirmed as the launch date for the Galaxy S7 line up.

If the images bear real similarities with the original S7, then it can be concluded that Samsung is sticking with more or less the same design as last year, but boosting the internals to keep up with the latest hardware and software changes. We have heard enough rumors to know that many fans are expecting the S7 to be water-resistant, and we think that the chances of that happening are not that bad either. Perhaps the two most missed features in the S6 were its mediocre battery life and exclusion of a microSD card slot. The S7 is rumoured to solve both the problems by adding an expansion slot and providing a larger battery. Hopefully, we will get more of our wishes fulfilled in less than a month from now.

Source

Ever since Stagefright came into public limelight in 2015, Samsung had taken up a policy to keep all its top-tier handsets updated with the latest security patches on a monthly basis. This was a step by the Korean smartphone manufacturer to ensure that this chink in Android's armor cannot affect its flagships. So far, Samsung has kept its promise and as a result, all the major smartphones under the company's banner usually get monthly security patches.

2015 is behind us now and the January, 2016 is coming to an end, but Samsung still makes good on its promise as January security patches for the S5, Note4, S6, S6 Active, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and Note 5 are now going live OTA. The update is designed to not only thwart present attacks by hackers, but also has elements programmed into the kernel to prevent attacks that have not yet been exposed.

In fact, the security update won't even have a fully disclosed changelog accompanying it as that would make it accessible to hackers, who can then use that data to penetrate the security system of Samsung smartphones. Nonetheless, Samsung has assured its users that this will fix prime susceptibilities that the aforementioned smartphones may have to remote code execution. Although this is good on Samsung's part, it leaves us with a question, what about the other, cheaper Samsung smartphones and their users?

Source: SamsungMobile.com

Major players in the smartphone market like HTC and LG have already started updating their latest and greatest smartphones with Android M. Samsung however, is a little behind the competition in this regard as final stable versions of the update is not yet made available by them. This does not count the optional Android 6.0 beta update which Samsung has released in certain countries for pre-release testing.

The good news is, according to a source named "XTECH LEAKS," the Android M updates are coming not only to 2015 flagships, but also to slightly older flagships of 2014. The three 2014 models that will definitely be updated by Samsung are the S5, the Note 4 and the Note Edge. All major handsets of 2015, namely the S6, the S6 Edge, the S6 Edge+ and the Note 5 will be updated to Android 6.0 first. All of this was deduced from a leaked screenshot that had Samsung's update schedule on it.

If you own a Galaxy Note 5 or a S6 Edge+, you should be particularly happy as these two smartphones will be the first ones to be updated officially by Samsung in February. The S6 and the S6 Edge are next in line and both should get their Marshmallow updates within a few weeks after the first batch. Finally, the 2014 models will see Android 6 by April. Some have even speculated that the updates released by Samsung could be based on the newer Android 6.0.1 as that would somewhat justify the late release. Although the information seems logical, we will let you know more when the news becomes official.