Samsung Galaxy S8 review
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: ahead of the curve
The new S8 and S8 Plus aren't perfect, but they are proven close:
People "aren’t excited by new phones anymore."
That’s the first thing Samsung’s
product manager said to me before introducing the company’s new flagship
Galaxy S8 last month. He’s not wrong: the modern concept of the
smartphone has been around for a decade now, and the differences between
devices are exceedingly incremental. It doesn’t help that virtually
every smartphone looks the same, too.
So for the Galaxy S8, Samsung made an effort to do
something different. It combined everything it did in the past few
generations of its phones and added some new ideas to produce something
different from everything else on the shelf of the average phone store
today.
Of course, Samsung had to do this, because for
the past six months it’s been dealing with the biggest public crisis any
electronics company has faced in modern times. The Note 7, the last
major phone it released, had a crucial design flaw that caused its
battery to spontaneously catch fire. Samsung had to recall the phone
twice and then was finally forced to cancel the Note 7 entirely.
Now Samsung faces two challenges with the Galaxy S8: create a new phone that will get people excited, and at the same time make them forget about all of those other phones catching fire just last year.
After using both the $720 to $750 Galaxy S8 and its
larger sibling, the $840 to $850 Galaxy S8 Plus, for the past week, I
can say with certainty that these are phones worth getting excited
about. They are easily the best phones released so far this year, and
may turn out to be the best phones of the year, period.
They might even be good enough to make you forget all about the Note 7 and its fiery batteries.
Design and display
The most common reaction I heard from people who saw the
S8 units I’ve been testing is "wow." That’s because the S8 is a stunning
device to look at and hold. It truly doesn’t look like any other phone
you might have used before, and it’s refined and polished to a literal
shine.
The big reason the S8 looks so different from any other
phone is its new screen, which Samsung has dubbed the "Infinity
Display." It features a new 18.5:9 aspect ratio that’s similar to the
18:9 screen on the LG G6, but taller and skinnier than the traditional
16:9 screens the vast majority of other smartphones have. On the Galaxy
S8, it measures 5.8 inches diagonally from rounded corner to rounded
corner; on the S8 Plus it expands to 6.2 inches in the same dimension.
The taller aspect ratio means that in terms of raw screen
area, the S8 and S8 Plus aren't as big as their diagonal measurements
imply. But don't let the complicated math
take away from the bottom line: they are huge screens in very small
bodies. Putting an S8 side-by-side with an iPhone 7 almost feels unfair
to the iPhone — the Samsung’s screen is just so much larger, yet the phone’s overall dimensions are practically the same.
That screen is pushed to the outer edges of the phone’s
frame, taking up 83 percent of the front panel and leaving very little
bezel above and below it. In addition, the sides are curved, finishing
off the infinity pool effect and making it feel like you’re holding just
a display. Samsung is going all-in on curved screens this year — it’s
the company’s big differentiator — and you can’t buy a "flat" version of
the S8 at all.
The company’s commitment to curved screens serves both
aesthetic and practical purposes. Not only are the curved edges
beautiful to behold, they allow Samsung to make the phone narrower than
if it had a flat display. A narrower phone is easier to use in one hand
and both the S8 and S8 Plus are much easier to handle than other phones
with similar-sized displays.
Earlier Samsung phones with curved screens had a tendency
to register touches on the sides of the display when you didn’t intend
them, making the curved design more frustrating than it should have
been. But the company has largely addressed this issue with the S8, as
the curves are not as aggressive and the glass blends seamlessly into
the metal frame of the phone. I didn’t have an issue with errant touches
with either the S8 or the S8 Plus in my time with them.
That new taller and skinnier screen shape does cause some
problems, however. I appreciate the narrower width overall, but the
height of the screen can make it difficult to reach the notification
tray with my thumb, even on the smaller S8. And then there’s the issue
of app compatibility. Many apps work just fine on this new screen shape,
but a number of popular ones, such as Pocket, Netflix, Speedtest, Dark
Sky, and Spotify don’t automatically stretch to fill the screen, leaving
black borders above and below the app. You can force these apps to fill
the screen with a couple button taps (recent apps, then the circular
button that appears on the app in the carousel) and I haven’t seen any
issues with most regular apps.
Games, on the other hand, are a bit different. Super Mario Run,
for example, does not use the entire screen, and if I force it to,
elements will be cut off on the left and right sides of the screen,
making it hard to hit some of the buttons in the menus and non-gameplay
areas. My colleague Vlad Savov experienced a similar issue on the S8
Plus with Egg Inc. Playing a game in the 16:9 aspect ratio it
was designed for is not a terrible experience — you still have quite a
large display canvas to play on — but until developers update their apps
and games for this new tall and skinny world, you won’t be able to make
use of all the screen you’re buying with the S8. Fortunately, Google is
encouraging developers to get on board, as it seems like this shape will be popular with phones going forward.
Samsung bills the new aspect ratio as better suited for
watching widescreen video, and notes that the viewing area is 36 percent
larger on the S8 compared to the S7 playing the same 21:9 video clip.
Sure enough, watching the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer
on the S8 is an impressive experience, as the content spans edge to edge
on the phone’s screen. The S8 can automatically detect 21:9 video and
present it as large as it can be without cutting off any of the content,
but I only found it working on clips I watched in YouTube. Movies
played in Google Play Movies did not automatically use the full screen,
though I could hit a button to do so, while video in Netflix remained
locked to 16:9 no matter what. As with games, this is an issue that will
probably be solved in due time, but if you’re an early adopter of an
S8, most of the video you’re likely to watch on it won’t be taking
advantage of all the screen has to offer.
Despite those early-adopter issues, I’m a fan of the new
shape and the fact that it lets me have a much larger display without
making the S8 too unwieldy to use. On top of that, the Quad HD Super
AMOLED panel is wonderfully vibrant and sharp, and it’s very bright,
even outdoors under direct sunlight. It’s no exaggeration to say this is
the best smartphone display I’ve ever seen.
The new screen shape
dictates many of the other hardware features on the S8. Because the
screen dominates the front of the device, there is no room for Samsung’s
traditional home button, so the company followed the path of almost
every other Android smartphone maker and utilized on-screen virtual
buttons for home, back, and recent apps on the S8.
Samsung also made the area of the screen where the home
button appears pressure sensitive, so you can push harder on it to wake
the display or go back to the home screen at any point, even in
full-screen apps where the home button isn’t visually displayed. It’s
not unlike the iPhone’s Force Touch feature, but it’s limited to just
the spot where a home button would have been if the screen wasn’t there
taking its place. It’s a clever solution and provides virtually the same
experience as a physical home button, so longtime Samsung users should
feel... right at home with it.
Of course, without a home button, there’s no fingerprint
scanner on the front of the phone. Samsung addresses this by putting the
reader on the back of the device, which is something Google, Huawei,
LG, and others have done for some time. But instead of placing the
fingerprint scanner below the camera, near the middle of the phone where
your index finger naturally rests, Samsung installed it far up the back
of the phone and right next to the camera.
The high placement of the scanner makes it difficult and
awkward to reach with my index finger, even on the smaller S8. I have to
practically perform finger stretches before I can reach it with any
sort of regularity on the S8 Plus. Second, because it is right next to
the camera and has a similar shape and feel to the camera module, I
frequently touch the camera lens instead of the fingerprint scanner,
smearing the lens with all of my lovely finger oils. The placement is a
real shame, because otherwise, the fingerprint scanner is one of the
fastest and most responsive I’ve used. Samsung has also included
Pixel-like gestures on it, so you can swipe down on the scanner to
reveal the notification tray, provided you can ever actually reach it.
To make up for the fingerprint scanner’s exceedingly poor
placement (Samsung told me that it is where it is because the battery
prevented it from being put below the camera), the S8 has two other
biometric means of unlocking the phone. The iris scanning that first
debuted on the ill-fated Note 7 makes its return, and while I'm sure
it's very secure, it’s awkward to use, requiring me to hold the phone
uncomfortably close to my face and open my eyes comically wide to
trigger it.
New for the S8 is a face-scanning feature that is
supposed to be the most convenient method of unlocking the phone. I say
"supposed to be" because in practice, it almost never worked for me,
despite being very impressive in demos before the phone’s launch. More
often than not, the face scanner would not see me at all, leaving me
staring at the phone awkwardly, waiting for something to happen, before
eventually capitulating and putting my pattern in. Samsung also says the
face-scanning feature isn’t as secure as the iris or fingerprint
methods, so not only is it slower and less reliable to use, it’s less
secure, too.
Aside from that major stumble, the rest of the S8’s
hardware is practically flawless. The fit and finish is unparalleled,
and the curved display is matched by a symmetrically curved back glass
panel. All of this glass does make the phone a bit of a fingerprint
magnet, and it’s going to be more prone to scratching and damage than an
all-aluminum phone. But the glass back allows for Samsung’s wireless
charging, and like last year’s S7, the S8 is water resistant to IP68
standards, so it can withstand 1.5 meters of submersion for up to 30
minutes at a time. In practical terms, that means you don’t have to
worry about your phone getting ruined when one of your tipsy friends
spills their beer all over it at happy hour.
The S8 and S8 Plus use USB Type-C ports for wired
charging and data transfer, and both phones include a standard 3.5mm
headphone jack. Samsung is also throwing in a set of AKG-branded wired
headphones with the S8 models (the company recently purchased AKG’s
parent company, Harman), which sound fine. They are better than Apple’s
EarPods by a good mile, and are comfortable and easy to wear. But the
headphones are more like a nice bonus than a reason to buy the phone,
and they are certainly not worth the $99 Samsung claims they are.
Overall, apart from the fingerprint scanner, the theme of
the S8’s hardware is polish, both literally and figuratively. It’s a
glossy, metal-and-glass monument to Samsung’s manufacturing
capabilities, and it’s just really, really nice.
Software
Software is where Samsung
is known less for polish and more for clumsiness. In a refreshing change
of pace, the software on the S8 is, dare I say, good. It’s not
perfect, but it doesn’t send me running to the Play Store for a new
launcher and icon pack the instant I turn the phone on.
Built on Android 7.0 Nougat, the S8’s software is
remarkably restrained for Samsung. This is reflected by the simple home
screen, which features just a handful of app shortcuts and a nice big
weather widget front and center. A quick swipe up and I’m in my app
tray, a swipe up again and I’m back to the home screen.
The settings menu is similarly straightforward and easy
to navigate, and includes a search function to find anything within it.
Should you dig deep into the settings, you can find an endless array of
options and configurations, from customizing the order of the on-screen
buttons to themes that can alter the appearance of virtually every
aspect of the phone. (There are plenty of Pixel-style themes already
available if you aren’t a fan of Samsung’s default color palette.)
Other touches, like the slick, pill-shaped notification
bubble that pops up at the top of the screen when an alert comes in, or
the customizable always-on display are things I wish were available in
all versions of Android, not just Samsung’s.
The big new software feature for the S8 is Samsung’s riff
on a virtual assistant, called Bixby. Samsung thinks Bixby is so
important to this device that it put a dedicated button on the side of
the phone that only launches Bixby. That would be fine if Bixby was anything to get excited about, but in its current state, it doesn’t do much at all.
Pushing the Bixby button twice will launch Bixby Home, a
home screen panel that displays various cards and information based on
your routines and interests. It can plug into third-party services such
as Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Foursquare, and can tell you the
weather, upcoming appointments, news updates, or reminders you’ve set.
Unfortunately, none of this is hugely different from what we’ve seen
from Google, HTC, and others doing on their home screens for years.
Samsung says Bixby is designed to learn your habits and will adapt over
time, but it’s likely that I haven’t been using the phones long enough
for this to take measurable effect, because I haven’t really seen much
in the way of personalization.
Bixby also shows up in the camera and gallery app,
providing functionality that’s very similar to what Amazon already
offers in its app and what Google Goggles has done for years. Called
Bixby Vision, it uses computer vision to identify an object or text and
then links you to similar images on Pinterest or options to buy more of
the same product from Amazon. It uses Google Translate to translate
text, much like how the proper Google Translate app does. It can also
identify landmarks and provide links and facts about them or tell you
all about the bottle of wine you’re about to open.
I pointed the S8’s camera at a banana and launched Bixby
Vision and a few seconds later, it provided me with a list of ways to
buy more bananas from Amazon. It did the same for a bag of Tostitos
chips. Pointing Bixby Vision at a succulent led me to a list of images
of similar plants on Pinterest.
All of that is exactly what Samsung says Bixby Vision would do, but I’m struggling to figure out just why
I’d ever use it for these features. It’s often just quicker to search
Amazon directly for the product I want or use Google to find images of
something.
Bixby’s real promise is that it will be a new kind of voice assistant,
one that will help you do things on your phone quicker and easier. But
Bixby’s voice features are not available on the S8 yet, and I have not
been able to test them. Samsung says that voice control will arrive
"later this spring," but has not put a firm date on when exactly that
is.
Adding insult to injury, it’s not possible to remap the Bixby button on the S8 to do something more useful. (I was unable to get this hack working on my T-Mobile review unit.)
Some of Samsung’s bad software history shows up in other
ways on the S8. The company has been criticized for years for
duplicating many of the same apps Google offers, and the S8 has many
redundant apps. I’m of two minds about this: believe it or not, some of
Samsung’s apps are actually better than Google’s (I’ll take Samsung’s faster, more extensible
browser over Google Chrome any day of the week, and Samsung Pay has
legitimate advantages over Android Pay), but many are not. I certainly
don’t need two app stores, two email clients, or two gallery apps on my
brand-new phone. A simple solution to this would be to let me choose
which versions I want, by either adding a step during setup or letting
me fully uninstall the unwanted apps, but neither option is available.
(You can disable the apps you don’t want, but you cannot fully remove
them from the phone.)
On top of all that, my T-Mobile review units include six
more preinstalled apps, the worst of which is the insidious and useless
Lookout security app that pops up a notification every time you install a
new app until you dig into its settings and turn it off.
I will note that these things don’t completely ruin my
experience with the S8, and many of them are easy to live with or
ignore. The forthcoming unlocked version should address the carrier app
issue, at the very least. But the S8 would be even better if it didn’t
still have these annoying software problems.
Performance
Unsurprisingly, the Galaxy
S8 and S8 Plus have a veritable murderers’ row of specs and features on
the inside, some of which are so forward-looking you can’t even take
advantage of them yet (and I was unable to test). The models sold in the
US and a handful of other Western markets are the first phones to
feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor, while the rest of the world
gets Samsung’s own similarly equipped Exynos processor. Either
processor makes the S8 fast and responsive, but so is virtually every
other premium phone you can buy, and the S8 isn’t noticeably faster or
quicker than a Google Pixel, LG G6, or iPhone 7. The big question is how
fast will the S8 be after a few months of use, as Samsung phones are
notorious for slowing down over time, but I can’t answer that yet.
That processor is paired with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of
internal storage, a microSD card slot for expansion, and a radio capable
of both gigabit LTE and gigabit Wi-Fi. The S8 is the first gigabit LTE
smartphone you can buy, but until we have actual gigabit networks to use
it on, that doesn’t matter all that much. (US carriers are expected to
deploy their first gigabit networks before the end of this year.) The S8
is also the first phone to come with Bluetooth 5.0, which promises
better range and the ability to deliver audio to two different Bluetooth
devices at the same time. I was able to get the same song from YouTube
to simultaneously play out of two sets of Bluetooth headphones, though
you could also use it to have two Bluetooth speakers play the same
audio.
One spec that hasn’t changed since last year is the S8’s
main camera, which is a 12-megapixel sensor behind a f/1.7 optically
stabilized lens setup. Samsung has beefed up its software processing,
using similar techniques as Apple and Google to provide better detailed
images in low light, but the differences between this year’s camera and
last year’s are negligible at best.
That’s not a bad thing at all, as the S7 had one of the
better cameras you could buy in 2016. The S8 continues that, and is
capable of taking tremendous images in both good and poor lighting. The
camera opens very quickly (double tap the power button to open it from
anywhere), it focuses exceptionally fast, and is able to balance tricky
exposures well. A backlit portrait of my young daughter that tripped up
the iPhone 7’s metering system was handled by the S8 just fine,
producing an image with a bright face and evenly exposed background,
compared to the darker, flat picture the iPhone took.
Samsung’s camera app is simple to use, yet loaded with
powerful features if you want them. It’s easy to use one-handed, as you
can drag the shutter button left or right to zoom in or out or swipe up
or down to switch between front and rear cameras. Various filters and
manual controls are a horizontal swipe away — including Snapchat-like
lenses built right into the camera app, which are simultaneously
terrifying and endlessly fun.
The front camera did get a hardware improvement, stepping
up to a higher-resolution 8-megapixel sensor and gaining autofocus,
which is apparently something that front-facing cameras have always
lacked and nobody realized it. Autofocus is great, it ensures that your
face is in focus whether you’re taking a solo selfie close up or putting
the S8 on a selfie stick to capture an entire group. If anything, this
year’s camera updates speak to how important the front-facing camera is at this point, as it’s frequently used more often than a phone’s rear camera.
While Samsung loaded the S8 up with forward-looking specs
and hardware, it (understandably) was more conservative with the
batteries inside the phones. The smaller S8 has a 3,000mAh battery,
while the S8 Plus jumps to a 3,500mAh cell. Both of those are actually
smaller in capacity than the battery in last year’s S7 Edge, but Samsung
says they feature a new design that allows them to maintain their
charge capacity for much longer than older batteries. That means that
two years from now, the S8’s battery should still provide 95 percent of
its stated capacity. Of course, I have not been able to test this claim.
Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus camera samples:
I did test the battery life between charges and found the
S8 to be on par with last year’s S7, while the S8 Plus provided about
the same stamina as the S7 Edge. The smaller model can last an entire
day between charges if you’re a light user, but if you use your phone a
lot, you will likely have to charge it at some point in the day. The
larger S8 Plus might be the better option for heavy users — it was more
likely to last me a full day before it needed to be plugged in. Both
phones include fast wired and wireless charging, which makes it
convenient to charge them when necessary, but neither really pushes the
boundaries of smartphone battery life as we know it.
Many people simply want to know if these phone’s
batteries will succumb to the same issues as the Note 7’s, and to be
perfectly honest, I don’t know if that will be the case or not. However,
I’d be surprised if they did catch fire — Samsung has put a lot of
time, money, and effort into making sure the S8’s battery is safe, and
if the Note 7 situation were to repeat itself, the company would be
facing a death sentence in the court of public opinion.
That court of public opinion is extremely important to Samsung, as it tries to move out of Apple’s shadow and stand out on its own.
Luckily for Samsung, the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus are
excellent devices to begin the work of rehabilitating its image. They
are the best Android phones you can buy right now, with stunning
displays, beautiful design, and great performance.
They aren’t perfect, though. There are few things that
might make you think twice about upgrading, such as that terribly placed
fingerprint scanner and only average battery life. But the
shortcomings, as notable as they are, are far outweighed by achievements
like its toweringly large screen and reliably good camera. I wouldn’t
hesitate to recommend these phones to anyone in the market for one.
There's an irony in Samsung's fundamentally iterative
design: it's so very well executed that it has a chance to win over
people who "aren’t excited by new phones anymore." Overall, the S8 is a
relatively conservative and predictable device — anyone that has been
paying attention to Samsung’s designs over the past couple of years
could see that this is where the company was headed. But it did take
risks by pushing forward with an unproven screen shape and going all-in
on curved designs, which haven’t been universally liked in the past.
Now it just has to hope those risks doesn’t literally blow up in its face.
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