To infinity and beyond: this Galaxy knows no bounds

If there were a museum dedicated to great smartphone design, the Galaxy S8 would be on a pedestal. In the entrance hall. With a giant spotlight on it. You may not think looks are particularly important, but come on – your phone is on near-constant display: held aloft at gigs, furiously tapped on the bus, Instagramming your Friday night burger. So it really ought to look good. And boy, does the Galaxy S8 look good.

There’s substance under all that style too. The S8 introduces live-in phone butler Bixby, gives us Samsung’s best take on Android to date and packs in more power than you could possibly need thanks to a homegrown octa-core Exynos 8895 processor. So great is its muscle, it can even become a simplified desktop PC if popped into a DEX Station. The misplaced fingerprint sensor is our only mark against it, and even then it’s mitigated by the addition of iris and face scanning.

Even though battery capacity stays the same as last year’s Galaxy S7, all-day battery life isn’t out of the question and wireless charging makes top-ups a breeze, so there’s no need to go on a daily rummage for cables.

It might not be brand spanking new any more, and it might have been surpassed in one or two areas by increasingly competent competition, but the S8 has a design that’s still head and shoulders above every other smartphone. You just won’t want to stop looking at it.