Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Design
There will be no Samsung Galaxy S8 Edge this year. Why? Because the Samsung Galaxy S8 is the device the S8 Edge would have been. Samsung’s new flagship is a phone with curved edges; and there’s no alternative.The result is the best-looking phone on the market. Samsung has created an 18.5:9 “Infinity Display” that looks like no device you’ve ever seen before – well, none since the LG G6, anyway. The front of the phone is 100% glass, with the slimmest of bezels nestled above and below, resulting in an impressively high screen to body ratio of 84% (the Samsung Galaxy S7’s screen-to-body ratio was 72%).
This is a phone that feels great in your hand. It’s slim, smooth and light. However, it's also slightly over-engineered. It’s a tall phone, which causes some problems during use. Hold the phone in your hand as if you want to unlock it using the rear fingerprint sensor and you’ll struggle to reach the home button without readjusting your grip. Grasp the device so you can reach the home button, however, and icons at the top of the screen become unreachable.
There is, at least, a 3.5mm headphone jack here, which is refreshing to see in the light of many rivals removing it. To take advantage of this, Samsung is also including a rather nice pair of AKG earphones in the box. These are certainly a cut above the no-brand earphones normally included with your average smartphone, delivering music with a clean, balanced sound that's very pleasing to the ear.
They're comfortable, don't leak sound unduly at high volumes and, depending on how much you care about sound quality, could be all the headphones you need. Although it's a small thing it's good to see such attention to detail from Samsung.
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Display
- Size: 5.8in
- Pixels: 1,440 x 2,960 pixels (570 ppi)
- Super AMOLED
- Always-on display
Perhaps more significant is that it’s the only mobile phone screen currently that’s been certified by the UHD Alliance to the Mobile HDR Premium standard. That means, like a high-end TV, it’s capable of playing back HDR (high dynamic range) video content, meaning brighter highlights – up to 1,000cd/m2, according to DisplayMate – for an ultra-realistic image.
As I’ve already mentioned, the screen is curved along both long edges on the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ phones this year and this brings into play similar screen functions to previous Samsung Edge phones. Swipe a finger in from the right and you can access shortcuts to your favourite apps and contacts, plus various other Edge screen apps, including a compass and news feed.
More significant is how the curved edges result in a wider display on a thinner phone. Edge apps are gimmicky; a display without bezel is genuine innovation.
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Camera
Scroll up and look at those specs again. Notice anything unusual about this year’s camera? Yep, it’s exactly the same as the S7 – at least the specifications are. In an odd move, Samsung has stuck to the same 12-megapixel rear snapper complete with f/1.7 aperture, dual-pixel phase-detect autofocus and optical image stabilisation. The ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mantra rings true here.There's one teensy difference that sets it slightly ahead of its predecessor, though. Chipset improvements have seen an interesting new feature brought to light, in the form of multi-shot image processing. Every time you press the shutter button, the camera captures three frames, merging them together to form the sharpest image possible.
In terms of quality, there is a difference. In good light outdoors, noise handling sees as a slight improvement, there's a tiny bit of extra contrast at the pixel level resulting in crisper-looking shots, and a refinement in colour reproduction. You have to look pretty hard to see the differences, though.
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Security
There are six secure ways to unlock the S8:- Fingerprint
- Face recognition (new)
- Iris scanner
- Pattern
- PIN
- Smart Lock – (unlocks at trusted locations)
To be frank, none of the Samsung’s biometric unlocking schemes is particularly convenient. Technically, they work well, including the face recognition (most of the time). The problem is that you have to manipulate yourself to fit their requirements, which is more effort than it should be.
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Battery and fast charging
We all know the trouble Samsung has had with batteries of late, so maybe that goes some way to explaining why the battery performance of the S8 has gone backwards (compared with the S7 and S7 Edge).The new battery is less effective than the S7, but not by much. In our battery test – playing a looped video with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness in flight mode – it lasted 16hrs 45mins. While that’s still impressive, it’s nearly an hour worse than the Samsung Galaxy S7 (17hrs 48mins) and two hours short of the S7 Edge (18hrs 42mins).
Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Performance
You’d expect a new Samsung flagship to have the fastest, most advanced internal components available– and that’s most definitely the case here. Us Brits and the rest of Europe get the S8 equipped with Samsung’s very own Exynos 8895 processor, while in the US handsets are equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.Both of these are the first ever mobile phone chips to be manufactured on a 10nm process, which promises greater efficiency and potentially faster performance, and both offer the possibility of connecting at up to Gigabit 4G/LTE speeds as and when the networks upgrade.
So how does the Galaxy S8 perform? Well, you won’t be surprised to discover that it feels super-fast to use and that it tops the tables in all the benchmarks as well. In the Geekbench 4 multi-core test, it raced past the LG G6 and iPhone 7, with only the Huawei P10 Plus coming close.
To be clear, these graphical tests are intense, with cheaper handsets routinely getting single-figure frame per second scores. While most 2017 smartphones will handle the majority of games on the marketplace, it’s pretty clear that the S8 offers far more future-proofing than any other device we’ve seen to date.
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