Samsung Galaxy S7 Launches With Vulkan Support

Samsung kicked off their Mobile World Congress presence by launching the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. While we don't generally cover new Android phone launches, making us excited about the S7 launch today is that it's the first post-Vulkan 1.0 launch and Samsung has made a big deal about supporting Vulkan.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 devices will be shipping with Vulkan API support on Android 6.0 for offering up higher-performance graphics compared to OpenGL ES as is currently the dominant graphics API among Android devices.

The new devices claim microSD card storage expansion support, improved battery life for up to 15 hours of HD video playback on a single charge, IP68 water resistance, and a 5.1-inch Quad HD AMOLED display for the S7 and a 5.5-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display for the S7 Edge. The device is powered by an octa-core Samsung Exynos chipset.

It's great to see Samsung getting excited about Vulkan and will be interesting to see what other Vulkan references there are this week at MWC 2016 in Barcelona.