To Infinity And Beyond

It's no surprise Samsung went all out to make the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ flagships stand out as the ultimate ‘object of desire’ smartphones, to shift the conversation away from the Note 7 debacle last year. The results are a milestone in phone design evolution — expansive big-screen smartphones that feel anything but oversized in the hand.

Consider this — the smaller (if you can call it that) S8 packs in a 5.8-inch screen while the 6.2-inch S8+ both fit comfortably in the hand despite their ostensibly gargantuan dimensions. Here’s the real kicker: I use a 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus daily and the S8+ is actually smaller in the hand! Samsung’s achieved this by making the front almost all screen, and the screen curves around the sides — the smartphone equivalent of an infinity pool — hence the name ‘Infinity Displays’. The effect is gorgeous and luxurious at a level which blows even the already-premium iPhones clear out of the water. Samsung’s expertise in Super AMOLED tech shows —these displays are insanely bright, pin sharp and offer excellent contrast, and if it isn’t already obvious, are the best smartphone displays around. The unusual 18.5:9 tall screen aspect ratio means many videos and third-party apps won’t fit the new screen dimensions (leaving black bars on the sides), but Samsung’s Experience UI atop Android Nougat 7.0 and its in-house apps take full advantage of the new tall displays. If anything, the only half-baked piece is Samsung’s Bixby intelligent assistant, which offers limited functionality at the moment but should be more useful once voice commands are available.

The move to an almost-all-glass front has also meant a few key design changes, starting with the doing away of the iconic Samsung home button, replaced by a pressure-sensitive virtual home button beneath the glass, replete with haptic feedback to register your home button presses. Sans the home button up front, Samsung had to move the fingerprint reader to the rear, on one side of the camera, and its location makes it extremely difficult to sense (without looking) on the S8 and, worse still, to reach on the larger S8+. Granted, there are new face and iris recognition features, but neither of them can replace a well-positioned fingerprint reader. Clearly, a design miss amidst a string of design hits on these devices.

Powering the S8 series is Samsung’s in-house Exynos 8895 chip which has by all accounts matched or exceeded Qualcomm’s latest 835 chip. Coupled with capacious amounts of storage and memory, you’re getting class-leading specs that you’d expect at the price. This range is also the first to sport the new Bluetooth 5.0 standard and the full complement of connectivity and charging options, including the DeX desktop dock I recently raved about. Battery life is acceptable if not ground-breaking. Samsung has bucked the trend of adding dual cameras on their flagship devices, but there’s little to fault the cameras — they’re fast to launch and focus, handle high contrast situations ably, and turn out well-exposed images with stunning levels of detail. Selfie addicts will appreciate the bump up to 8MP sensors on the front cameras too.

With the S8/S8+, Samsung has created a fantastic smartphone experience, raising the bar for premium phone design and it is well worth the price, even if you factor in the few design and software misses.