Massive batteries planned for forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones

Flagship Samsung Galaxy smartphone to have 3,600mAh battery and dual-photodiode camera sensor

The next Samsung Galaxy S7, the flagship Android phone from the consumer electronics giant, will feature a 5.17-inch display; while the Galaxy S7 Edge, the curved-edged counterpart, will offer a 5.5-inch display.

Both displays will be powered by Samsung's Super-AMOLED panels and offer resolutions of 1,440 by 2,560 pixels. Both devices will also go big on battery, with the S7 offering a 3,000mAh battery and the S7 Edge a 3,600mAh unit. The bigger batteries are intended to address customer complaints that their smartphones are incapable of working even just a day without recharging - a complaint that even Apple is responding to.

That is according to leaks coming out of Samsung's Chinese supply chain, published in Weibo, which also suggest that Samsung is seeking to improve the power efficiency of the units at the same time.

However, Samsung is unlikely to try and compete with Apple in terms of making a thinner device, with the units likely to be built with a thicker chassis, according to other reports.

The devices will be based on Samsung's own Exynos Octa 8890 microprocessors, with four custom cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, with one core running at 2.3GHz and the other at 1.6GHz. This is accompanied by a Mali T880 GPU.

The microprocessor was only publicly announced in November. It is built on a 14-nanometer FinFET manufacturing technology and is intended to compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820. It is based on a first custom 64-bit ARMv8 CPU architecture and also offers a built-in 4G LTE modem. The modem will provide download speeds of up to 600Mbps and upload speeds of up to 150Mbps.

Memory will weigh in at a respectable 4GB, with storage of either 32GB or 64GB. The devices will also come with a 12 megapixel camera built in, offering an f/1.7 aperture - possibly with a dual-photodiode sensor.

The Samsung S7 won't be the first smartphone with such a sensor - the technology was first introduced with the Sony Xperia Z5.

The batteries on the new flagship Samsung smartphones still won't be the largest on the market - the current (cheaper) Samsung Galaxy A9 offers a 4,000mAh unit, while the BlackBerry Priv, launched in November, has a 3,410mAh battery and wireless charging.