Justin Formentin
Design
The Galaxy S8 is a beautiful phone. The Galaxy S7 Edge was so popular that Samsung brought us the wonderfully futuristic edge to edge, bezel-less display. And don’t be worried about accidentally touching buttons while holding the phone, we haven’t noticed that being an issue in all our tests. Speaking of the screens edges, the whole phone is sealed so it’s water resistant, a great feature that many phone manufacturers have started picking up.
All the buttons are satisfyingly clicky, and in intuitive positions. The power button is all alone on the right hand side – a good idea to be in a prominent location. the volume rocker is on the left hand side above the “Bixby” button, the button to open the digital assistant. And there’s just no nice way to say this, Bixby is just not good.
The software just isn’t there yet to be useful, and the button is in an annoying location so you press it by accident when you’re trying to adjust the volume. Thankfully, Samsung has allowed you to disable the button completely. Unfortunately, keeping with the theme of being annoying, you can’t remap the button to anything else. It’s either Bixby or nothing. Hopefully Samsung sees the light and changes this in future updates.
Specs
We just have to say one more time, this screen is amazing. You’ll notice it the second you pick it up, if you can’t tell by all the pictures already. It has a 5.8 inch 2960×1440 AMOLED display with 570 ppi. The Camera is also one of the best in any smartphone today. The rear camera features “dual pixel” 12MP AF, F1.7 aperture, 8x digital zoom (sadly no optical zoom), pixel size of 1.4µm, and OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). The front camera is 8MP with the same F1.7 aperture, but the pixel size is even smaller at 1.22µm.
This camera records 4K video at 30 fps, 1080p at 30 or 60 fps and 720p at 30 fps. It has digital image stabilization, 8x digital zoom, slow motion, continuous autofocus, face detection, tracking AF, and 9MP stills while recording in 4K.
It has the Snapdragon 835 processor – an Octa-core 2.3GHz Quad + 1.7GHz Quad, 64 bit, 10nm cpu, and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. this phone is fast. We tried to throw everything we could at it like multitasking, filming 4K, or anything, and the Galaxy S8 handles it perfectly.
It has expandable memory up to 256GB, Bluetooth, UHQ 32-bit &DSD support for excellent audio playback, and a 3000mAh battery. The battery gives up to 14 hours of Wi-Fi internet use, 12 hours of 4G internet, 20 hours of talk, 16 hours of video playback, and 67 hours of mp3 playback. Speaking of the battery, the Galaxy S8 also has added some nice touches. It has wireless charging compatible with WPC and PMA, and Fast Charging compatible on wireless and wired.
It also has a bunch of sensors. Iris, Pressure, Accelerometer, Barometer, Fingerprint, Gyro, Hall, Proximity, RGB Light, HR, and Geomagnetic, if you wanted to know. The fingerprint sensor can be used for security, but you can also use the iris scanner to unlock your phone.
Camera
The camera on the Samsung Galaxy S8 is a thing of beauty. It’s seriously one of the best cameras around. It has the ability to capture just about any image you want. You even have the availability to take photos in RAW, so you can edit them in professional software afterwards. Color, light, sharpness are all incredible with it’s 12MP rear camera and the upgraded 8MP camera on the front. Both work very well in low light, giving less noise with better brightness and detail than even the iPhone 7 Plus when judging comparison shots.
Though, the camera is just one of the many amazing features. The most important part of the phone is how you interact with it, how yo use it day to day – the interface. The controls are very intuitive, you can tap the power button to instantly start up the camera app, and many controls are activated by swiping which lends itself to comfortable one handed use. Swiping down gives you the selfie camera, swiping left gives you display options and swiping right gives you the filters to chose from. there are so many options and settings that just playing around with everything can be fun.
While we were never once disappointed with how a picture came out, our only issue is that the images often looked better on the camera than they did once you put them on the computer. Samsung spent so much time getting the low-light setting perfect (which they absolutely did), photos in bright light suffer. The Galaxy S8 seems to slightly overexpose some pictures, but this can be remedied with editing, so it’s really not a huge deal.
Final Thoughts
There isn’t much more to say if you’ve been reading. This phone’s shortcomings are absolutely dwarfed by the massive amount of incredible features. The screen, the camera, the cpu, just everything. This is truly one of the best smartphones you can buy today. After testing this phone out, I’m actually switching to it, and keeping it for daily use. That should tell you how much I like it.
