Hot gaming tip: Galaxy S7 has ice water in its veins - CNET

Samsung wants mobile gaming to feel as much like desktop gaming as possible, and with the Galaxy S7 it's pushing to deliver on that mission.

But there's saying "we take games seriously" and then there's delivering meaningful features that make a real difference to what people want to do when playing games. The good news is that in the Galaxy S7, launched at the Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, Samsung has integrated deep hardware and software tools to back up the claim.

Games push processors harder than anything else, so the first big upgrade from Samsung is water cooling like you'd find in a serious desktop gaming system. Obviously the scale is miniature compared to desktop water cooling, but the sealed copper cooling system will still do its best to shift excess heat away from the S7's processor when games push things to the phone's thermal limits.

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In other low-level updates, the S7 also supports the Vulkan API for game development. You don't need to care about the details, but what it means is that many new games are coming soon to take better advantage of mode multicore processors. The S7 is ready to support these games, and when they arrive they should look and play much better than almost anything you've seen on Android before.

Samsung needs the Galaxy S7 to reignite consumers' interest in its phones. Although it remains top dog in mobile, it's not biting off as much of that market as it used to: About 23 percent of all smartphones shipped last year came from Samsung, down from 25 percent in 2014 and 31 percent the year before, according to Gartner. Consumers aren't rushing the way they once did to acquire new phones, and when they do upgrade, they're increasingly opting for cheaper devices from companies like Huawei and Xiaomi.

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