Samsung Galaxy S8 Most Indepth Review & Price

Minuses

1. Slippery and heavy housing
2. The fingerprint reader is unsuccessful
3. Bixby is imposed by the manufacturer, but almost useless
4. The main camera from last year, twice cheaper S7 edge
5. High price

Samsung has experienced events that usually fall to a lot of stupid American militants. This is when “the savior of mankind” is first beaten by the main villain, and then the hero gets to his feet and “through I can not” comes out victorious in the fight. Well, who then says that the Hollywood chicles are implausible?

And even after such events, the Korean giant has become more than ever close to the Apple era of early smartphone building. One, but a really high-quality flagship for everything (albeit in two dimensions) – and not so long ago the guard of “steep Samsungs” consisted of S6, S6 edge, S6 edge +, S6 Duos, Note 5 and S6 Active.

Only now Galaxy S7 edge by chance of the case back in 2016, everyone was nagging, so the new generation must be complete, radically different, surprising in everything. At first glance, Samsung did it – the Koreans released a smartphone with a cosmic appearance. So bold that the photos of the body before the presentation seemed to be a fake, and a lot of software innovations.

And at the second glance – we were shown a slightly more “screened” S7 edge, with an old single rear camera, dreary 4 GB of RAM and a modest battery capacity. And that, this is the model with which Samsung had to “take revenge for his brother” and win all? Yes, and God be with them, with benchmarks (Snapdragon 835 today or tomorrow “imported” into cheap china phones, and with a Full HD display they will also be faster) – is the S8 convenient for use with its huge display. We sort things out and bring out a verdict.

Design and Management

“Some big piece of black soap, not a smartphone,” my colleagues scoff at me while I take the film off the case of the test specimen. But endurance is our main weapon. After two minutes I turn on the display, after which the jokers stop, and then they say “wow, well, let’s have a look!”.

And this happens to everyone, because S8 + with the screen turned on is like a kitten – “British” – in any transport or queue the workers look at it, and many ask questions or even ask to “squeeze.” Because the workers will recognize in the smartphone Samsung, and some kind of unprecedented, very cool Samsung.

Only here to give the flagship of Samsung in the hands of strangers do not want to. And not only because it costs 300 thousand Nigerian naira, but because the glossy back cover is always covered with a mixture of dirt and fingerprints. And also because “love from the second glance” to this model is not formed by everyone because as you gradually realize that it is not painful, something light and subtle. No, it’s not hallucinations – if the width of the Galaxy S8 + with its 6.2 inches is equal to smartphones measuring one inch less, then with 8.1 mm of thickness it is close to Redmi Note 4 (8.3 mm) and far from the flagship “less than 7.5 mm” In the iPhone or Xiaomi Mi5. And by the weight of the S8 + is comparable with any 5.5-inch smartphone about 4000+ mAh in the battery.

And all this could be forgiven, as they say, for beautiful eyes, if the S8 + was a faceted shiny “brick” like HTC 10. But it looks different, so sometimes you catch yourself thinking that in your hands … even Not a soap, but a soap dish. With delimiters “halves” in the form of volume and power buttons on the skinny and slippery side faces.

Here you understand, what a tragedy of being: when a girl with a big chest wears a tight T-shirt is a wonderful sight. But no one would like to receive a “bonus” detailed views of the second / third chin and folds on the abdomen when looking at the young lady from the side. With the Galaxy S8 + situation, alas, this is the case.

In general, the case is very similar even to the S7 edge, and Galaxy SIII , the first of the kind of “soapboxes” in the Galaxy S series. It is unfortunate that the fans of “aerodynamics” in Samsung defeated the amateurs of corners, and the generous design with smooth faces became history In the Galaxy S6.

And the button for launching helpless in Nigeria voice assistant Bixby is located at the place where it should be a volume down key. The crooks tried to reassign other actions to the key, but with the Samsung firmware update, this hole was covered. The fingerprint scanner at the rear camera is disgusting – the right-handers will always pre-soak the rear camera, and the left-handers will stretch the skin between the index and middle finger, because reaching for the scanner is as convenient as scratching the lobe of the right ear by wrapping the left hand behind the head.

Plus, the new Galaxy S enclosure also has enough:

• The headphone jack is preserved – Samsung did not go on about the general idiocy with the slogan “for this we also have an adapter.” A low bow.
• Curved faces have never been so comfortable – the S8 does not have a “non-edge” design, but a flat S8 is no longer needed because the display can not be accidentally touched either in landscape or portrait mode.
• New ways to unlock are not bad. The retina scanner occasionally bothers with its “turn around, son,” and it does not work very fast, but the face recognition works very well. The screen key “Home” is also excellent – it fulfills pressing accurately, and the vibration output is felt like a heartbeat. Such tricks are used to frighten people, but then you find it a cool innovation.
• Water resistance is present. Not partial, as in Xiaomi Mi6, but “real,” IP68. In combination with the new powerful processor, this is a considerable feat.

In short, the body of the S8 + super-beautiful full-face (in the face, in the face when you look!), But dull (like the S7 edge) on the back side, and in many small things also uncomfortable. At the same time, ergonomics is not so bad as in the Xiaomi Mi5S or Mi Mix, and the iPhone 7 Plus, along with the majority of the flagships released against the background of the S8 +, look like “bricks on cogs” from the distant past. Yes, only the LG G6 with its “plastic glass” and a less spectacular display is already much more convenient to use. But the current iPhone will soon be retired, and something is not very hard to believe that Apple will release a “remnant” with an awkward arrangement of keys and a scanner.

Screen and Sound

Display 6.2 inches in Galaxy S8 +, G6 as mentioned above, grew in comparison with “just smartphones” up and down (the aspect ratio is 18.5: 9). That is, the length of the smartphone is approximately equal to 6-inch models, but without side frames, it is already a centimeter more compact than comparable “shovels” on the diagonal. And in general, the width is equal to the models of the class “5.2 – 5.3 inches”. 

Is there any benefit from the fact that the display was pulled up and down. There is More text in instant messengers, SMS and social networks, it’s a little easier to pacing around sites in the browser, more application shortcuts, more widgets, more information in the notification panel, and the screen trio of keys does not take away the Quad HD resolution. With games, however, things are much worse – almost always you are guaranteed huge unused parts of the display on the sides in a landscape orientation. Tragedies in this, however, no – AMOLED does not “shine” black areas, but at the same time and saves battery charge due to unused pixels.

For those who are particularly concerned with the autonomy of the customers, there is even the possibility to change the resolution for the extended version of Full HD (2220×1080) or HD (1480×720), but the gain in autonomy is not that big, but the picture you “disfigure” significantly, not to mention the blurry text. It’s better to leave WQHD + to use the smartphone for all money.

On display, even there is no reason to speak in “two words,” you can see in one – super! Excellent viewing angles, a reference scale (no overexposed or under-illuminated shades), close to ideal color temperature and not unsaturated colors. This is in the color mode “basic,” which you need to include in the settings also – Samsung specifically keeps it in the firmware for, as you say, reviewers, and photographers who have an academically correct picture more important than its entertainment. And for everyone who needs to be “beautiful,” there is the “Adaptive display” mode, which adjusts the saturation of the halftone and other parameters depending on whether the games/text / movies/photos you see on display.

Finally, in Galaxy S8 +, you can manually adjust the intensity of each of the RGB colors or turn on the “night” mode, which reduces the intensity of the blue hues. Under direct sunlight and with the activated automatic adjustment, the display for a short one can squeeze out ~ 730 cd / m2 of brightness – this is very, very much for the AMOLED display and greatly improves readability (at the cost of wild power consumption, so the option is only short-lived). The mode of Always-on-Display, that is, the display of the date, time and notifications on the locked screen, also did not go away.

There are, of course, information about the red shades in the S8 / S8 + displays, but Samsung has already “repaired” this blunder with the software update, and on the test copy of this problem was not originally.

With the sound in the Galaxy, S8 + things are not bad, but there is nothing to admire. The speaker is legible and very loud, the sound quality has not changed since the Galaxy S6 and S7 – clear sound from high and, to a lesser extent, medium frequencies, but with a “glass-metallic” hue. Put the usual smartphone on the tiled floor – will sound about the same. At high volume, the sound becomes a little shrill and sharp. And the speaker can easily be accidentally blocked, because, in a frameless smartphone, there’s nothing to grab for, except for the top/bottom edge.

The sound in the headphones itself is good, but only if you are satisfied with the standard balance of sound. And the balance is the following: the high frequencies are “clamped,” the sharpness is very low so that the ears are not ringing and the “metallic” tones in the low bitrate MP3 do not cut the hearing, low and medium frequencies equally and moderately, the volume is excellent. Similar impressions remain in high-resistance “monitors,” and in relatively inexpensive “gags” like the Xiaomi Hybrid Pro.

I will not say for the potential of the “naked Snapdragon 835” (in the Galaxy S8 there is installed “some, we will not say which” Wolfson, or Cirrus Logic CS47L91, as in the S7 edge), but the sound quality of the Exynos 8895 still outrun the models based on Snapdragon 821 Without a DAC.

The problem is that “the king is not real,” and almost all the “twists” in the audio settings are fake. You add bass with a round or equalizer – and stay with your nose because instead of coming, low frequencies somewhere “fail.” “Did not hint, they say, Ivan Sidorovich, be simpler Perhaps, the EQ in audio players will be more useful, but now the effect is noticeable only from UHQ upscale in monitors (in vacuums is not noticeable) – it eliminates the lack of detail, and from the “tube amp effect” – to fans of downed sound with the excess of compression.

In general, the sound quality, but very fresh, and from any adjustments to the equalizer or preset, the patient becomes only worse. I can not guarantee 100% of the prescription of events, but it seems that Galaxy Note 4 is based on Android 6.0 – and it sounded a little better. From the guys from Samsung, the owners of Harman (just look at how many audio books it includes!), I expected more.

Iron

Samsung continued to “tune” its proprietary Mongoose cores (now – M1), and this time they shoveled-improved the Cortex-A73, and transferred them to the rails of 10 nm. Improved so that all the new features of the nuclei, like an extraordinary execution of instructions, remained in place, while M1 execute four instructions per cycle, and Cortex-A73 – only two. In Snapdragon 835, the design is somewhat similar, even the amount of L2 cache in both chips is the same – 2 MB. 

But Samsung made a bet on the branch prediction algorithms (did not fall asleep? I explain on my fingers – this is when the processor “guesses ahead” the giblets of the application that launches, and therefore launches it faster) and shoved the Exynos 8895 into playing 4K video at 120 frames per second Second (HEVC) and heterogeneous computing. For the future. 

Qualcomm this time fell behind not only in the processor but also in graphics performance. Yes, Adreno 540 supports OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 12, and Mali G71 supports OpenCL 1.0 and DirectX 11, respectively. But in Android, these matters do not bother us, because it’s only important to support the newest OpenGL (in a cheap smartphone) and Vulkan (in the flagships). For these parameters, the video accelerators are equal.

But Adreno 540 has changed little since the Adreno 530 in Snapdragon 821, in it only a little “brought” the blocks of texture operations. As a result, the Adreno 540 is fast, well-optimized, but architecturally equal to the 16-core Mali-G71 MP16. The Exynos 8895 has the very best, the Mali-G71 MP20, which is faster. One can still croon about an improved LTE modem, but my country is wide-spread, and there is not always a working LTE-Advanced in its present form, so let’s omit such details.

In short: performance suffices for the eyes under any scenario of work, with the Galaxy S8 + even slightly faster than the “simple” S8 (2.5 GHz on Mongoose cores versus 2.3 GHz for S8). Only the amount of RAM is alarming – now 4 GB is enough, but not the fact that they will be missed in a year or a year and a half. There is a risk to run into a situation similar to the Galaxy S5, which is outdated faster than Note 4, not even because of the 32-bit processor, but because of 2 GB of RAM. A version with 6 GB exists, but only for Koreans. From considerations of political correctness, we will not comment on this.

Software

Samsung has many times refined the design of the TouchWiz shell, but never changed it radically and, God forbid, did not rename it. The time for the new name, Grace UX, came with the announcement of Galaxy Note 7, but you do understand why “the people” did not go to change. 

Moreover, in Grace UX in S8 / S8 + completely new – starting with a non-Korean minimalist label design, continuing a new gesture up / down to go to the application menu, ending with a bundle of innovations. “Tape with all the events” (from the alarm clock to the settings and social networks) DayLite, the ability to save screenshots from Google Chrome so that then from the gallery to open the site on which the screenshot is taken. Context menu (as on computers by clicking the right mouse button) to manage application shortcuts, well, ways to scale video to an ultra-wide screen (with games, so it does not work) here as here. There is even an opportunity to amputate the application menu, as it is done in Xiaomi, Meizu, and other “Chinese phones.”

From the unpleasant – a pack of undelete applications Microsoft (Office, OneDrive, Skype) and other Evernote. From the curious – the DeX mode. We connect the smartphone through the adapter to the monitor – and here we are more or less a desktop replacement.

Not for “cartoons on the big screen,” and edit the document or on the Internet to go for a walk with the keyboard-mouse. With the computer, not “android” design and applications – now of these there is only Microsoft Office and Adobe Lightroom. And the adapter costs 150 euros.

And Samsung “dug” the voice assistant S-Voice and in return, he rolled out Bixby. With him, the smartphone should learn to translate text in the camera “on the fly,” to give useful advice before you decide to ask something from the phone, to identify what sight is on the camera and tell about it. Recognize what kind of product you are displaying a smartphone and offer to buy one in an online store. The idea is excellent, but everything is not working perfectly even among English-speaking users. A non-English-speaking fully functional version expects deep in the second half of 2017. But the button under the voice assistant is already now! Samsung Pay, gestures, functions of curved faces, “streamer” functions in games have remained – we know that you are without them anywhere!

Camera

How quickly time flows! If yesterday, on smartphones with two rear cameras reacted with the words “well, and a freak!”, Now the main question to the Samsung Galaxy S8 from those who see it for the first time “and why only one camera behind?”.

The camera’s interface is new, its quick launch is also (now it is necessary to quickly press the power button twice), the camera itself is old, or, as marketers would say, “time-tested and well-proven.”

In general, 2017 is the year of stagnation in almost all smartphones. LG wrapped in a G6 dual camera based on a cheap sensor IMX258 (as in Xiaomi Mi4C!), Greatly improved the quality of large-format shots, but the overall quality of the shooting has grown slightly. HTC, if you still remember such a brand, also just gave birth to variations on HTC 10 with their U Ultra. iPhone and Galaxy S7, as inferior in quality of shooting the “overseas” Google Pixel, and continue to give way after all the firmware updates. 

There is a belief that something new we will see in Sony XZ Premium, but for now only Huawei took a step forward and came close to Samsung Galaxy S7 edge and iPhone 7 Plus on cameras in the P10 model. And now attention, the question: will someone, you lazy smartphone builders, mourn, when the Chinese brands take away the rest of your customers.

Another thing is that the camera itself in the Galaxy S7 edge was super cool in 2016, and after completing the algorithms, it pleases not less and in 2017. Fast focusing, good quality of shooting in the dark (enlarged 1.4 m pixels “shake”), good aperture (f / 1.7), smart optical stabilization, which, incidentally, in S7 worked crookedly and simply “washed up” the picture. 

The signature handwriting of the Galaxy S7 / S8 camera – not to shoot realistically, but to “shoot cool,” in the popular sense of the word. For this reason, the Korean flagship chooses colors at his discretion and very zealously “photoshoot” a picture after the shutter is released. The pictures turn out to be juicy and entertaining, although they are too much like a screenshot from the computer game Electronic Arts. It’s a matter of taste – for lovers to do everything correctly with their own hands, there are Sony smartphones (because the automation of the “Japanese” is lame), all other smart phones in their own way distort the image in auto mode.

But the front camera is a breakthrough! Not only did the resolution of the autofocus sensor grow to 8 Mp, so the aperture now amounts to f / 1.7, like the “adult” rear camera. This means that self-portraits and video communication with instant messengers will look cool even at night than the steep selfie-backgrounds can not boast.

Autonomy

Given: Vasya had a smartphone with a diagonal of 5.5 inches display, a processor based on a 14-nm process technology and a battery capacity of 3600 mAh. Under the terms of the task, Vasya changed this phone to a 6.2-inch display (12.7% larger), which includes a processor made using 10 nm technologies (approximately 25% of the battery saving compared to the old processor) and a battery Capacity of 3500 mAh. How has the autonomy of the smartphone changed.

The correct answer: it became better in the standby mode, it remained the same at a moderate load (video/reading) and deteriorated for game lovers. The last fact looks somehow strange, taking into account that the games are not in full screen, and the processor is more economical. By and large, the day of active use of the smartphone is enough, or one and a half inactive. For everything else, there is a quick charge, with which the S8 Plus replenishes its 3500 mAh in 1 hour 40 minutes.

Conclusions

Most of the claims to S8 / S8 + relate to ergonomics. Samsung did not remove the fingerprint scanner, as Apple removed the audio connector, but it did so that it became inconvenient to use the scanner. And that Bixby, in which the Koreans swelled a lot of money, did not “drown,” it was “nailed” to a separate key and put the volume down buttons in place. If you want – you do not want to, you’ll use it from time to time.

I will repeat once again: Galaxy S8 / S8 + is not S7 “under a new sauce,” it is, in some way, a return to the roots. Because five years ago, passersby just rolled their necks onto the “huge” 4.7-inch HD display inside the glossy streamlined Galaxy S3 casing. In the same model, Samsung first introduced a stupid, as time showed, voice assistant S-Voice and multi-window to resemble a computer (and in S8 “reinvented” Windows Continuum ). And even the “childhood illnesses” with the display were also characteristic for S3 and S8.

I do not like the “soapy” design of the case in the Galaxy S8 +, and I do not like the manner of inconvenience for old ways of using to courageously overcome them with new ones (be it voice assistant or face scanner/iris). Do not like the “fresh” sound in the headphones and last year’s rear camera. I do not like autonomy under load in comparison with an S7 edge. Logically, now I have to say “for the same money it’s better to buy% smartphone%%!” … but there is no such smartphone.

The flagship Sony will appear only in the “bright future, ” and it is not known whether LG will offer a relatively comparable amount of S8 for a relatively slow smartphone with both a screen and optical stabilization, and the front camera is worse. Huawei also did not stand next to either performance, or the ratio of the diagonal of the display to the dimensions of the case, and even on the quality of the cameras a little “did not jump” to last year’s Samsung camera.

In the “godlike” Xiaomi, as practice showed, it’s not enough to compete with the flagships of 2017. Therefore, the Chinese simply wrapped the Snapdragon 835 in an inexpensive package and installed the cameras “slightly better than the iPhone 7 Plus”. Everyone was waiting for a miracle, but they received another powerful “Chinese.”

Yes, what a miracle, when no one (even LG, the giant for producing OLED-matrices) is still able to build an equally bright, colorful and correctly calibrated display, even if not bent How did it happen that Samsung, which even before the S7 edge for the “iron” molded a prescription, built the world’s most powerful processor, steeper than the “craft” chip of the most experienced Qualcomm.

Samsung attempts to build an alternative to Google Assistant and re-invent the TouchWiz someone amuses, but remember that most manufacturers do not care about the software and are content only with what comes to Android from Google’s submission. No one tunes the system as deeply as the Galaxy creators still do. About how much iOS has been developing vigorously for the last couple of years, will we speak. And here for the combination of good iron with enough “toys”, we award the S8 + the “innovation” award. And yes, a thousand dollars for a smartphone – a lot of money. But the flagship is the phone for the rich, and it has always been so.

And the most successful “gravedigger” of the eighth generation smartphone for prudent people will be the S7 edge – now it’s on the “gray” market 2 (!) Times cheaper than the S8 + with slightly better autonomy, almost identical to the camera and cool, though the less extended screen. Here, and rake it, if “there is no money, but you want to hold on” – revolutions in cameras, displays or productivity in 2017, you can not wait.

Pricing and Availability