Samsung finally admitted the S6 was a mistake, sort of, at MWC last week when they announced the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. And I mean that as a compliment. The headline features people are talking about are a microSD card slot and IP68 water resistance, both of which the S6 dropped last year in the name of looking thinner and more "premium." Congratulations, Samsung, you spent a year and a presumably enormous amount of engineering effort getting back to where you already were in 2014.
I'm typing this on a Galaxy S6 with 32GB of storage that filled up sometime around October, and I have been manually deleting podcast episodes and photos I've already backed up ever since like it's 2009 and I'm managing space on an iPod nano. There is no external card slot. There was one on the S5. There is one again on the S7. In between there was just... nothing, and a lot of marketing copy about unibody design language. I don't doubt the S6 sold fine. I just think a decent chunk of the people defending that decision on forums a year ago have gone quiet now that Samsung itself has reversed it.
The water resistance thing is the funnier reversal to me, honestly, because the S5 actually had it too (that little rubber flap over the charging port that everyone hated) and Samsung ditched it for the S6 for the same "too much plastic, not premium enough" reasoning. Now it's back, rated IP68, no flap needed this time since USB ports and speakers can apparently be sealed properly if you bother to engineer them that way. Funny how that works.
What still isn't back, and probably never will be again on a flagship: the removable battery. You can now drop the S7 in a bowl of water on purpose and it'll be fine, but you still can't pop the back off and swap in a charged spare when the battery inevitably degrades in eighteen months. I get why (sealed unibody designs and swappable batteries don't really coexist, that's just physics and glue), but it's a little funny that "survives being submerged" made the cut before "user-replaceable power source" did. Priorities, I guess.
LG went a completely different direction with the G5, which they also showed off in Barcelona the same week. Modular phone, pull a little tab on the bottom and the whole chin of the device slides out with the battery attached, and you can swap in different "Friends" modules, and there's a camera grip with a real shutter button, a hi-fi DAC module for better audio, that kind of thing. I think it's a genuinely interesting idea and I also think approximately nobody is going to buy the $200 camera module for a phone, but I respect that a company tried something structurally different instead of just shaving half a millimeter off the bezel again. We'll see if it actually ships that way or gets quietly walked back before release, which is usually what happens to the interesting prototype stuff shown off at these things.
Also a lot of eyes were on Barcelona this week for reasons that have nothing to do with phones, what with the Apple/FBI fight over the San Bernardino iPhone still dominating every tech outlet's front page since Tim Cook's letter went up. I don't have anything new to add to that conversation that a hundred other sites haven't already said better, except that it's a strange split-screen experience watching one company get grilled in a legal filing over whether it can be compelled to write software, while two other companies a few miles away in a convention center are demoing waterproof phones and modular camera grips like nothing else is happening. The industry doesn't pause for its own controversies, it just runs two tracks at once.
Anyway. My S6 contract isn't up until next spring so this is all academic for me right now, but I'll be lying if I said the microSD slot news didn't make me a little bit annoyed on principle. Sometimes the upgrade is just getting back what they took away.