The screen’s colour and brightness is excellent for an LCD. It isn’t quite as vibrant with deep inky blacks as some high-end OLED screens fitted to Samsung devices, neither is it as pixel dense as all Apple’s rivals or even the iPhone 7 Plus, meaning it isn’t as pin-sharp and you can see the individual pixels. It is better than last year’s model and feels as good as LCD can get.
The 4.7in screen is also quite small for today’s smartphones and makes some things a bit fiddly on poorly optimised websites. Not anywhere near as fiddly as the 4in iPhone SE of course. The small size also means that it’s relatively easy to keep hold of compared to the big-screen phablets with displays over 5.5in.
New for this year is a pair of stereo speakers, one of which is the front-facing earpiece loudspeaker, the other the bottom-firing speaker from previous models. Together they are louder, but lack any sort of stereo separation and couldn’t be described as room-filling.