Galaxy S8 review: The beautiful beast
Samsung has managed to leave its smartphone rivals far behind in the design segment. With the new Galaxy S8 flagships, the Korean tech giant showed the world its prowess — smartphones can be powerful, and yet beautiful. Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S8 flagships are beautiful beasts; and although they look pretty delicate, they are significantly tough too.
The S8 sports the best display yet — a stunning, Super AMOLED curved display panel that wraps itself, flushed to the metal frame. The rear panel too gets a similar curve and the two glass exteriors merge with the frame to form one single, seamless chassis. Samsung has managed to keep the devices pretty slim, even though it packs hoards of features within an 8mm-thick body. The S8 packs in wireless charging, NFC and a 3000mAh battery, in a water proof and dustproof IP68-certified body.
The Infinity Display sports 1440 x 2960 pixels packed on a 5.8-inch panel, protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The large display has forced alterations to the front panel — the home button goes under the screen replaced by a soft button on the UI with a haptic feedback when pressing down the home button.
The rear panel sports a 12MP sensor with OIS and LED flash, heart rate monitor and a fingerprint sensor on the sides. Sadly, the fingerprint is oddly placed on the right side unlike the centre like most smartphones. Other modes of unlocking the phone are face unlocking and iris scanning, apart from the usual PIN and pattern unlocking. The iris scanning is quick, secure and efficient and can register only one pair of eyes, and works in the dark too — thanks to a tiny IR led upfront.
Below the hood is Samsung’s latest powerhouse — an Exynos 8895, which is supposedly superior in performance than the Snapdragon variant presently sold in the international market. It features an octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM and a Mali-G71 GPU, which gives the S8 its oomph factor. Internal storage is limited to 64GB, but can be expanded to 256GB with a micro SD card. The S8 is powered by Android Nougat (v7.0) with the cleaner interface.
The S8 is presently the leader with the top SoC in use, and to add to the features, and performance, Samsung has also helped S8 perform similar to a desktop PC. When clubbed with a docking station called DeX, the S8-series can be used as standard desktop PCs by plugging in a monitor, keyboard and mouse.
The camera’s performance is excellent — present contenders are iPhone 7 and Pixel, but Samsung’s flagship phone cameras have shown excellence lately. What’s unique is that it can manage multiframe image processing on a hardware level, unlike other phones use software. The camera takes three shots at the same time and processes them to reduce blur, increase focus and output a perfect shot. This is highly important when shooting a moving object or clicking subjects in low-light.
To wrap up — a unique new display, great camera performance and a new design are the strong points for Samsung and is definitely a must-buy. The features, performance, and aesthetics probably demand a price tag of `57,900; however, the price could be a bit too steep for some flagship hunters.