Samsung Galaxy S8

Samsung’s phone offers a bigger sc screen – and it’s a wrap

In the year since we reviewed the Galaxy S7, Samsung became a byword for making things that burst into flames (we’re looking at you Note 7). That’s unfair, though. The S7 was a great phone, and the S8 is even better – in some ways.

The S7’s sister model, the S7 Edge, had a screen that rolled off the sides. This is standard on the S8. It means you get a bigger screen without the phone being any wider, but height is another matter. Samsung has squeezed the empty areas at the top and bottom to a minimum, and stretched the screen to fill the space.

We found if we gripped the S8 high enough to reach the top, we then struggled to reach the bottom. It might have been better to keep the standard 16:9 screen shape and make the phone smaller. Because there’s no room for a physical button, an on-screen Home icon is provided; this responds to a press even when it’s not visible, for example if you’rere playing a game.

And the screen is brilliant. Brightness, traditionally a weakness of AMOLED displays, is now more than adequate. In fact individual pixels can go so bright that it qualifies as an HDR (high dynamic range) screen, and the full SRGB colour range is covered. We still find the features Samsung adds to Android to make use of the edges – like swiping for app shortcuts – gimmicky. But the screen’s curve does look extraordinary.

The Galaxy S8 has a proper headphone port (unlike the iphone 7) and comes with excellent earphones. The camera on the back is almost unchanged from the S7, but the software now takes three pictures at once and merges them to improve quality, which made a noticeable difference to our indoor shots. Optical image stabilisation means you don’t need a super-steady hand.

A fingerprint sensor on the back supports Android contactless payment, as well as Android’s new service, which should have launched in the UK by the time you read this. You can also unlock the S8 using iris scanning or face recognition, or by typing a passcode or tapping a pattern. Should you wish you can make it turn on automatically at trusted locations.

For some reason the S8 in the UK has a different processor to the US model, but they’re both very fast, narrowly beating even the iphone 7. Our video-playback test ran down the battery in 16 hours 45 minutes, which is quite acceptable.

We’re not sure what to make of the S8. It’s extremely impressive, and not seriously flawed, though it is a bit odd. It’s also, continuing an unwelcome trend, crazily expensive, over £100 more than the S7. Bizarrely, there’s a Galaxy S8 Plus with an even bigger screen that costs more.

An excellent wraparound screen, but awkward to use