Samsung Galaxy S8

Like a phoenix, the Korean manufacturing giant has once again ascended to lofty heights of smartphone design. These devices are beautiful and feel natural in the hand, like a polished gemstone. The one you want is the 5,8-inch screen variant with Samsung’s homebrew Exynos 8895 octa-core processor on heavy lifting duty. Samsung has gone full Samsung on the software side with the addition of a new virtual assistant called Bixby that even gets its own dedicated button.

While much of the software seems to rival what is already found on Android 7.0, this year’s Galaxy gimmicks don’t seem superfluous at all. The addition of iris scanning and face detection as screen lock options compensate well for the questionable placement of the fingerprint sensor right next to the rear camera lens. Bixby offers device-level functionality that seems useful.

The Galaxy S8 marches the mobile phone forward with cutting-edge technology from Qualcomm (X16 LTE modem for potential Gigabit data speeds and the 10 nanometre Snapdragon 835 processor in certain territories) and the latest generation Bluetooth (5.0). There’s also mobile HDR certification for the 18,5:9 aspect ratio screen and content from Netflix, Youtube and Amazon to look forward to.

This is definitely the future of the mobile phone and Samsung’s competitors will find the brands unique combination of software and hardware ecosystem integrations hard to live with, if compete against. The price is steep, though, making even less of a case to spring the extra R2 000 for the 6,2-inch screen toting S8 Plus with no significant upgrades.

R15 500, samsung.com