Samsung Galaxy S8
Stellar design and a brilliant performer, the S8 is the best of the best – but it comes at a huge price
The battle to be the world’s best Android phone has never been so fierce. For a few years Samsung appeared to be king with barely any effort: a minor update was all it took. Now, it must wage war with brilliant handsets such as the Google Pixel and rescue a reputation tarnished by the burnt-out corpse of the Galaxy Note 7. Add a SIM-free price of £689 and the S8 must not only be good – it must be brilliant.
Its design certainly lives up to this description. By removing the physical home button, adding height and making curved edges ubiquitous, Samsung has created a thing of beauty. And, just as important, it’s extremely comfortable in the hand.
I use a Galaxy S7 as my main phone, itself a slim and attractive handset, and the Galaxy S8 leaves it in the dust. Putting them side by side, the differences are obvious. It isn’t much bigger, but it uses space much more effectively with around 84% of the front occupied by the screen – a big upgrade on the S7’s 72%. It’s only 3g heavier and 0.1mm thicker.
The phone inherits three design features from the previous generation: it’s IP68-certified, which means it’s waterproof in 1.5m of water for up to half an hour; it supports wireless Qi and PNA charging; and it has expandable storage for microSD cards up to 256GB in size, should the 64GB of onboard storage prove insufficient. USB Type-C is in, which is better in the long run – but awkward if your house, like mine, has become a retirement home for micro-USB cables. There’s even room for a 3.5mm headphone jack.
There are two legitimate issues you can have with the design. The first is that a whole button is dedicated to Bixby, Samsung’s AI assistant, which doesn’t do a great deal right now. That makes it essentially a second home button, but the fact that Samsung has given it such prominence suggests it will become more useful in time.
The second is harder to defend: the location of the fingerprint scanner. It’s right next to the camera lens on the rear of the device. That means you often find yourself touching the lens, rather than the scanner, so you’d best get used to giving it a good polish before you take a photo.
Slim screen
The S8’s screen looks different to current phones: it’s long and thin. While most phones work to a 16:9 aspect ratio, the S8 increases this to 18.5:9, with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,960. That’s a slightly taller ratio than the LG G6 ( see p76) with its unusual 18:9 mix. The idea, according to Samsung, is that you can get more screen real estate in a handset that will fit in smaller hands.
But it isn’t without its flaws. For starters, most apps currently black out the bottom of the screen, leaving the familiar Android buttons in place. That means that the job could be done just as well by a bezel for the most part.
The real advantage is for pictures and video, but there are issues there, too. 16:9 is the universal standard for video, so you have to decide between black bookends at each end, or cropping off the top and bottom of the screen.
In terms of quality, this AMOLED screen meets Samsung’s usual high standards. It reaches a pretty bright 415cd/m2 peak brightness on manual mode, and a searing 569cd/m2 in automatic in the right conditions. In addition, the screen covers 99.9% of the sRGB spectrum.
That’s considerably brighter than last year’s model and closing in on the scores obtained by the IPS screens of the iPhone 7 and LG G6.
Turbo boost
“The year-old Galaxy S7 remains a fast phone, yet the G8’s selection of newer components still delivers a healthy kick”
The year-old Galaxy S7 remains a fast phone, yet the G8’s selection of newer components still delivers a healthy kick. Inside its thin frame sits 4GB of RAM and a 2.3GHz octa-core Exynos 8895 processor. This chip uses a 10nm manufacturing process, which promises to improve efficiency and battery life, while providing stellar performance.
And the Samsung Galaxy S8 is superfast. Every benchmark revealed speeds at the very top of the class: in the Geekbench 4 multi-core test, it smashed past the iPhone 7 and LG G6, with only the Huawei P10 coming close. It was a similar story for graphics performance, with the S8
a powerhouse for mobile games as shown by the graphs opposite.
Providing juice for all of this is a non-removable 3,000mAh battery. That’s the same size as the Galaxy S7, and in our battery tests the extra demands of the screen proved to be a bigger factor than the more efficient processor. While it couldn’t match the S7’s 17hrs 48mins, a time of 16hrs 45mins remains excellent.
Better still, the phone comes bundled with a fast charger. In half an hour, the phone went from flat to 37%.
Smart software
The Galaxy S8 comes with Android N, coated with a thin film of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin. It’s far less intrusive than it used to be: this phone feels as much a Google product as a Samsung one, with each company granted a folder in the app drawer. The Google folder contains Drive, Play Movies, Duo and Photos, while Chrome, Play Music and Gmail are left floating in the app drawer. Microsoft also gets a folder of its own with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and Skype all installed by default.
It isn’t bloated, but plenty of this will be unwelcome on your brandnew phone. Google apps can be uninstalled freely, but around half of the Samsung apps and all of the Microsoft ones can only be disabled, not properly uninstalled, which is poor since they run into the hundreds of megabytes.
There are a few other things worth bearing in mind. As noted above, the screen’s curved edges are now the default, which hopefully means that Samsung and its developers will have more incentive to use them inventively. For now, the “Enhanced Edge” functions are pretty familiar – think notifications, news updates and the latest scores. Kind of useful, kind of gimmicky.
Then there’s face unlock, an addition to the fingerprint- and iris-recognition available on the Samsung Galaxy S7. Register your photo with the S8, and you should be able to unlock the handset without having to find the fingerprint reader or tap in your password. It works better on bright days, I’ve found, but when it does it feels magical.
Finally, there’s Bixby: Samsung’s AI. At this point, Samsung making such a song and dance about it feels like a misstep, because at launch it’s pretty limited. That’s the thing about AI, though: its abilities organically grow over time. Just take a look at the Amazon Echo, which does significantly more today than it did at its American launch back in 2015.
For now, the button effectively functions as a second home key. The Bixby screen feels a little like HTC’s old BlinkFeed system, drawing in news, photos and apps from your system. Bixby does invade other parts of the Galaxy S8, however. On the camera, you can focus on an object, and then let the AI look for shopping results or image results. Suffice to say this is a work in progress, with a picture of my PlayStation controller misrecognised as a hole punch.
Samsung says that American English and Korean voice controls will be coming later in the spring, which makes the whole Bixby package a disappointment for now. But two things about that: the first is that the software is something that will improve over time. The second is nobody is looking to buy this phone based on AI software.
Same old snapper
Fully aware that the S7 camera was one of the best out there, Samsung has made minimal changes. It’s still a 12-megapixel affair, with a f/1.7 aperture, 1/2.55in sensor and 1.4um pixels. While the hardware is the same, there are other upgrades afoot: the most obvious of these is that it now takes three shots in quick succession and combines them into a better picture.
In conditions with plenty of light the pictures are sharp, vibrant and full of detail. In trickier, low-light conditions, the Galaxy S8 copes brilliantly. Again, no surprise given its predecessor was also a stellar performer. Zoom in and differences are noticeable: the S8’s contrast is slightly better, and the colours feel a touch richer. It’s not night and day, but this edges it closer to the Pixel.
The software has been tweaked to make it easier to use onehanded: you can now drag the shutter button up and down to zoom in and out, and the mode buttons and live filters are clustered at the bottom of the screen when you use the phone in portrait mode. Digging under the surface, the Pro mode has focus peaking – an aid to manual focusing where you can see what’s in focus with a green outline. Very neat indeed, but as with the LG G6, this feature isn’t available while shooting video, which is where it would be most handy.
The front-facing selfie camera gets a bigger upgrade. This has gone from five megapixels to eight, and the results are suitably sharp. Plus, you now have Snapchat-style filters.
Time to upgrade?
The Samsung Galaxy S8 is comfortably the best phone I’ve ever used. It’s fast, looks great, has a fantastic camera and includes a spectacular screen that will do justice to any captured scenes. There are a couple of missteps – the fingerprint scanner is in a silly place that will lead to many a smudged lens, and Bixby currently feels underdeveloped – but these are drowned out by everything Samsung does right. The design, that screen, the speed, the battery life, the camera. If you want the best of the best, you’ll have to pay the Samsung tax once again.