I have had my Samsung Galaxy S4 since end of 2013, I love that phone but it is showing it's age. Physically the phone is still in mint condition, always been in a Spigen and more recently in a Speck case. Not a scratch on it. The S4 was rooted and I've been using it as a hotspot router for many years now. About 3 weeks ago, I found a good deal on a Samsung Galaxy S7 for a very good price, so i snag it.
The very first problem I encounter was the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S7 use nano sim cards while the Samsung Galaxy S4 use micro sim cards. I eagerly went to a T-Mobile store to get a new sim card but they want to charge me $25 USD. I thought to myself, what a rip off. At this point i remember I had gotten a few free sim cards in the mail from T-Mobile a couple of years ago. I went home and low and behold, I got two brand new nano sim cards that hasn't been activated.
I felt so relieved that I saved $25 and that now all i have to do was to call T-Mobile and activate it. Well what do you know... apparently the two nano sim card that I have has already been expired since it's only good until 2015, two years too late :(. The T-Mobile customer service representative was nice enough to send me a new nano sim card free of charge and free shipping. The sim card came within 3 days. At this point I realize I'm still going to need to use my old Samsung Galaxy S4 since I need the rooted functionality, used for hot spotting. So how do i use both phones? I had to buy a nano-to-micro sim card adapter. I bought one for around $5, works great!
I knew that the adapter was a temporary solution and that eventually I will have to root the Samsung Galaxy S7 as well. Well that time has arrived and my first attempted failed. I am using Chainfire's Auto-Root method. I muck with it for about 4 hours and gave up for now. I have to do further research in getting the S7 to root. In the meantime, I will have to swap the simcard between the S4 and the S7. One thing I love about GSM is you can swap phones using the same sim card. I remember the days of CDMA where you have to call your provider if you want to switch phones. What a hassle that was!? amirite?
The phone is significantly faster than my S4, however, i did some research and found the US version of the S7 comes with a qualcomm's SnapDragon which is slower than Exynos processors. One of the biggest reason I want the S7 was the speed improvement as well as the nice camera with the ability to shoot 4k videos. I will have to play with the phone more to see what it's capabilities are and what's it's limitation is. So far I'm loving it.
To be continue...