Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy S8 Review: The Ultimate Smartphone?”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and a couple years ago, in 2014, samsung made a surprise product announcement called the galaxy note edge with this crazy display hanging off one side and for a random, unexpected phone. It got a lot of attention since then. That product has evolved again and again into samsung’s entire flagship lineup, which brings us to the galaxy s8. So this new phone looks awesome and that’s its hallmark.
Headlining feature is how good it looks and how well it’s designed and then, of course, being a flagship. It has all the bleeding edge specs inside and the hardware you’d expect from a premium android phone. So is this the complete package, like the ultimate smartphone? Almost it’s almost it’s almost there.
So let me start by saying i love this phone’s build like pretty much everything about the outside of this phone is premium and well-built and awesome the display up front sort of melts over both sides, and it does so smoothly into the back frame. While last year’s phone did it more sharply, and if you want to talk about modern or about the future of smartphone design, this year has been a shift to these really tall displays. Making these slightly taller candy bar shaped phones. Now the best part of these super thin bezels on all sides is that the footprint of the phone shrinks a lot, so the 5.8 inch and 6.2 inch displays, respectively, on the s8 and s8 plus, don’t feel like huge phones, even though they have huge screens.
In fact, the s8, i think, is a great size because it’s so narrow i might have big hands, but i think even anyone with regular hands can reach across to the other side of this display. Just maybe not all the way up to the top, and i think the best indicator for this is the fingerprint sensor. Obviously, there’s no more room to put it up at the front of the phone, so they moved it around to the back, but instead of putting it somewhere in the middle of the back, they put it right up there next to the camera. Now, with most back fingerprint sensors they’re a little lower on the phone for reachability, just the way you hold the phone makes it easier. Now i think the top fingerprint sensor might look a little bit better in some cases, but it is definitely harder to reach even with my larger hands.
I legit dislike this location. I hold the phone with my right hand, so i’m reaching the maximum distance up and over across the phone over across the camera. With my finger – and often i don’t quite make it or i touch the camera glass instead or i only partially cover the fingerprint sensor and the reader doesn’t unlock, it doesn’t work. So this is through a week of using the phone. I’M sure i could get used to it eventually, but for most people this just makes it a two-handed phone and then you can end up just using the phone with two hands all the time now to be fair, the glass over the camera actually does a good Job deflecting smudges that come from errant, fingerprint unlocks, but honestly a clever way to get past.
This is with a case or better, yet a skin actually. So this is the skin from dbrand, and not only is it better for gripping this all glass phone, but the tiny depth difference actually lets. You better distinguish the fingerprint sensor from the camera on the back, so fun fact highly recommended either way. Samsung’S word on this is now they provide you with a bunch of other ways to unlock your phone biometrically that don’t use a fingerprint sensor, mainly being the iris scanner and the face unlock.
Now. I didn’t expect to like this answer, mainly because the face unlock can literally be tricked with a picture of you. So that’s no good and the iris scanner usually requires you holding it up at a weird angle that you don’t normally hold your phone, which is a little awkward, but this iris scanner. I think it might have a wider angle lens, or the sensor has improved something about. It is better because i don’t quite have to hold it up at that awkward angle anymore, and it does a pretty good job of unlocking my phone when i’m not like trying to i set it up. I didn’t expect to use it, but a lot of times.
I just hold the phone up and start using it and it would unlock for me so that actually turned out to be a pleasant surprise, either way. Aside from the awkward tallness of the phone and the fingerprint sensor, the galaxy s8 is the best industrial design of any smartphone in a long time. In my opinion, even though there are other phones out now and coming soon that do the tall display thin bezels thing, you still got ta add on all metal and glass still has expandable storage through a micro sd card slot still fully water and dust resistant ip68. Certified so you can spill water on it and it’s cool. It still has usb type-c with quick charge. Still has wireless charging still keeps the headphone jack and the speaker is below average and downward facing it might be the worst part of the phone’s build, but that comes with the territory when there’s no room on the front and you kind of want to water seal.
Your phone so back to the screen, it’s incredible it is, i would say, the best display on any smartphone again it gets extremely bright, so it’s visible outdoors or whenever and it’s an oled. So, of course, it has fantastic color and contrast ratios and dynamic range, and it’s super high resolution too we’re talking 2960 by 1440 on both phones. Actually. So all that makes for an awesome media experience, a great web browsing experience and great scrolling through twitter and instagram and seeing a lot of stuff at once. Experience and all of samsung’s software obviously supports it perfectly now. Not every app in the app store fills the display right now right out.
The box, like a lot of games, especially, will have to be updated or may just never fully support that so you’ll either have the black bars on either side or you can punch in and of course, most videos also aren’t in this aspect ratio either. So when watching a video you’ll get the black bars as well, unless you hit the button in the software to punch in a little bit, but then you lose some of the frames. So it’s kind of your call.
It’S give a little take a little for the slightly taller display, but overall i’ll take it. I think the screen is awesome and with its curved edges and curved corners, i’m a fan, and then there is the inside of the phone. And since this is a flagship, samsung is again pushing things to the highest end of what’s available, except for one particular area.
But there’s some pretty high end specs in here: snapdragon 835, adreno, 540 gpu, four gigabytes of ram at least 64 gigs of storage, which, like we said, is expandable, and this is the first phone to ship with bluetooth 5.0, which i made an entire separate video about That just dropped highly recommend that so the performance aspect is pretty much taken care of the same way. It always is great specs, great speed and animations out the box, but nobody has used this phone for a year or two yet so we’ll have to see how the samsung software ages and that’s just what it is. It’S samsung software on top of android 7.0, and it has its pros and cons.
I actually like that. It’S adapted to be more like nougat, with the swiping app drawer and the cleaner overall look, especially of the settings app. But it’s really obviously still samsung eyes with all the colors and some interesting quirks here and there with the paginated app drawer and a couple extra animations, nothing too crazy or extra, but it’s not necessarily better than not having it.
The edge screen has gotten better. There’S now a couple features like from the note with smart select and the gif maker, where you can select part of your screen to make an animation or even take round screenshots all kinds of stuff that we didn’t have before. So you know there’s interesting stuff. You can put in there. I really like the extended screenshot feature where you can take a screenshot, but then it gives you the option to scroll down and extend that as much as you want. So i’m really glad that made its way back into this phone, but yeah.
Overall, it’s familiar to anyone. Who’S used a samsung phone in the last two or three years, both aesthetically and functionally. Now, one of the biggest new features in the software department of the galaxy s8 is called bixby. You may have heard of it.
It’S the virtual assistant, that’s built for this phone. That just does a lot of what google assistant does now. The circumstances surrounding it are interesting because samsung put a dedicated button on the side of the phone just for launching it a bixby button. Now a lot of people didn’t like this for fair reason, whether they didn’t like bixby or didn’t want it.
So they found a way to use an app to remap the bixby button to do whatever they want, probably should have been in the samsung settings. In the first place, you can make it the default for the button sure, but in in regions where people don’t use, bixby or bixby is not supported or language support’s, not there yet or it’s incomplete. Let them go on the settings and remap it to whatever they want. It could be a legitimate, useful, separate feature well yesterday, samsung actually patched that up and blocked any remapping of that button at all on the galaxy s8.
So it’s definitely now just a bixby button. So, understandably, again, people got kind of angry about that. Nobody wants accidental triggers of the app they want to never use, but a couple of people were asking: well hey what, if what if bixby is actually really great? What if bixby, is amazing? What, if it’s better than google, so i gave it that chance.
I didn’t remap my bixby button and i was using bixby alongside this phone for the past week and i’ll. Give you that so, first of all, the voice feature is not activated yet and it won’t get added till later this year. So that’s a pretty rough start, but aside from that, it does show you some cards, your gallery. Your upcoming calendar events, maybe some weather some frequent contacts, but then that pretty quickly devolved into a bunch of samsung apps like themes and wallpapers and flipboard and a bunch of stuff. I don’t use so really it’s working in catch-up mode to be able to do all that google does with gmail and navigation cards and flight status, and all that now the one place it did do some interesting stuff is in the camera app in the viewfinder.
There’S a bixby button that, if you press it it can recognize images in the viewfinder and search for them, whether it’s images or if it’s a product, it will get you amazon, search to maybe buy it. I’Ve seen google goggles try this a couple years ago and with bixby it was about the same pretty hit or miss. Sometimes they would get it and it would be pretty useful, especially when there’s a lot of text to it, that it can recognize it just searches that text. So it makes sense that it would work there other times when i thought it might get it.
Nothing came up or it got it wrong with this bluetooth speaker for example. Sometimes it got nothing. Sometimes it thought it was a baseball hat. I don’t know not sure how to get it to work better, but no dice. So, aside from this biggest new software feature being kind of a swing and a miss on this phone, i’m totally fine with the software on the s8, it’s cleaner, it’s much more refined it’s out of the way i like it now the camera on the back. This has also been a bit of a source of discussion at first.
It wasn’t really talked about and we kind of assumed it was literally the exact same camera as last year. It has the same specs, no dual cameras like some of its rivals. It’S a 12 megapixel, f, 1.7 aperture, dual pixel, auto focus optical image, stabilization top-notch stuff again, but yeah same as we’ve already seen but turns out. This is a slightly updated sensor with newer optics, so the images will look slightly different from the galaxy s7. Honestly, most of the difference will come from better image processing, but the photos and 4k videos from galaxy s8 look fantastic, as you would expect.
Maybe leave a comment if you want a direct comparison to its predecessor, but you can imagine you can see the samples great detail. Great contrast, color and sharpness are excellent and pretty aggressive, auto hdr modes, so dynamic range is also pretty wide. Rarely blows out the highlights like a lot of other phones, would so, of course, it’s a pleasure to take photos and videos with such a nice screen as a viewfinder, we often say the best camera is the one you have with you. I think this is no exception. With this phone it’ll be one of the best cameras you can put in your pocket again this year now, battery life is one area where i would have wanted just a little bit more now. This is samsung we’re talking about here, and they just had one of their phones last year literally start exploding when they tried to push the battery to the limit. So i almost can’t blame them for playing it safe this year, but yeah the three thousand milliamp hour battery on the galaxy s8. I was testing pretty much barely got me through the end of the day. Maybe ten percent left when i’m done and to be fair, i’m pretty heavy on it.
I use it a lot bright screen lots of video watching taking pictures etc for the review, but there are phones with definitely better battery life, as i suspected. The upside, though, is that it charges ridiculously fast. I had a night where i went to sleep with 22 and i woke up in the morning with 8. So that’s pretty terrible standby time and i was going to start the day with the battery dead. But i threw it on the charger for about an hour. Left with a hundred percent battery no problem, so you kind of pick your battles there, uh samsung just played it safe with the battery.
So, at the end of the day, the galaxy s8 is awesome and it’s so samsung that this this project was born from the crazy, like back burner pet project. That was the galaxy note edge and now every phone like this has this crazy edge display and i’m glad they keep doing that stuff and you got to give samsung credit for making a phone that can stand out for how good it looks in an era. Well, this little mini era where so many phones are accused of all looking the same, this one actually does stand out in a pretty awesome way, and i, like that, a lot about it. There may be little things you don’t like about it.
Little unmappable buttons little software quirks here and there, maybe the speaker is not the best but as a complete package. This is an awesome phone. I recommend it. I’Ve said the word awesome so many times. You probably can understand that i like this already and i’d, recommend it i’ll have links below for other stuff. You want to check out, but that’s pretty much it.
Thank you for watching talk to you guys in the next one peace. .