samsung galaxy s8 review

A couple of 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 USA. So this new phone looks awesome and that's his 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.Almost it's almost it's almost there. So let me start by saying I love the Suns 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 found it a 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 vessels on all sides is that the footprint of the phone shrinks a lot. So the five-point eight inch and six-point two-inch displays respectively on the essay and essay plus don't feel like huge phones even though they have huge screens. In fact the essay 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. Oh, the phone with my right handsome 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 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 at 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 the deep brand 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 biometrics key that doesn't use a fingerprint sensor Mainly being iris scanner and Face Unlock. Now I didn't expect to like this answer mainly because the face on a lock can literally be tricked with a picture of you. So that's no good. And the iris scans usually require 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 is 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 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 it actually turned out be a pleasant surprise. Either way aside from the awkward toughness of the phone and the fingerprint sensor the Galaxy estate is the best industrial design of any smartphone and a long time in my opinion. Even though there are other phones out now and coming soon that do the tall display thin Basil's thing you still got to add on all metal and glass still has expandable storage through a micro sd card slot still fully water and dust resistant IP 68 certified so you can spill water on it and it's cool it still has USP 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 still 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 old. So, of course, it has fantastic color and contrast ratios and dynamic range and it's super high resolution too. We're talking nine sixty by fourteen forty 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 slowly to have the black bars on either side. Or you can punch in and of course most videos. Also 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 gives 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 inspects here Snapdragon 835 adrenal 540 GP 2 4 gigabytes of RAM at least 64 gigs of storage which as we said is expandable and this is the first phone to ship with Bluetooth 5.0 which I made an entirely separate video about that just dropped. Highly recommend that. So the performance side is just about taken care of an equivalent manner it perpetually is.And that's just what it is it's Samsung software on top of Android seven-point O and it has its pros and cons actually like that it's adapted to be more like New get 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 quartz here and there with the pageant aided app drawer and a couple of extra animations.Nothing too crazy or extra but it's not necessarily better than not having it the edged screen has gotten better. There is now a couple of features like from the note with smart select and the Jif maker where you can select the 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. 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 RSA 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 a 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 regions where people don't use Bixby or Bixby is not supported or language supports not there yet or it's incomplete. Let them go in 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 ASAP. So it's definitely now just a Bixby but 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 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 one 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 may be 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 Bigsby button that if you press 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 of years ago and with Bixby, it was about the same pretty hit or miss sometimes they would get it and we'll be pretty useful especially when there's a lot of text to it that it can recognize it just searches that text. So 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 his Bluetooth speaker for example. Sometimes I 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 essay. 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 F1 point seven aperture dual-pixel autofocus 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 S 7. Honestly, most of the difference will come from better image processing but the photos and Faulkner videos from Galaxy S 8 look fantastic as you would expect maybe leave a comment if you want a direct comparison to it.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 to this phone. It will 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 million power battery on the Galaxy aside I was testing pretty much barely got me through the end of the day maybe 10 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 et cetera 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 percent and I woke up in the morning with 8 percent. So that's pretty terrible standby time and I was gonna start the day with the battery dead but I threw it on the charger for about an hour left with 100 percent battery no problem. So you kind of pick your battles there. Samsung just played it safe with the battery. So at the end of the day the Galaxy yes 8 is awesome and it's so Samsung that this. This project was born from the crazy like backburner 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 arrow where so many phones are accused of all looking the same.And I like that a lot about it. Or maybe little things I don't like about it. Little unmatchable buttons a little software quirks here and there and maybe the speaker is not the best. But as a complete package, this is an awesome phone. I recommend it. I said the word awesome so many times you probably can understand that I like this already and I'd recommend it. Have links below for the stuff you want to check out but that's pretty much it.