Samsung really needs the Galaxy S8 to be a win. Here are my first impressions
NEW YORK—Samsung took the wraps off a premium smartphone that it hopes will at long last get you to stop talking about that other smartphone. Two premium phones, actually.
The highly anticipated new S8, and its larger sibling the S8+, are fast, sturdy, good-looking curved glass and aluminum phones, with 64GB of expandable storage, large and stunning displays (5.8 inches and 6.2-inches, respectively), iris scanner, water and dust resistance, and a new artificial intelligence assistant named Bixby. It's all packed in a relatively compact design. They'll cost around $720 on up.
While the S8 and S8+ carry some of the same DNA found in that other device—the Note 7 phablet that badly burned Samsung’s reputation and coffers—Samsung is counting on the fact that none of the shared genes will cause its latest flagships to literally catch fire.
The shame of the whole Note 7 fiasco was how well received the phone was reviewed by folks like me, weeks before the battery flaws surfaced.
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Now that I’ve gotten to touch and feel the S8 and the S8+, my expectation is the new phones will engender praise, too, though I haven't been able to take the phone home for a more thorough review.
Samsung points out that the devices underwent the rigorous 8-point battery safety test that it put in place in the aftermath of the Note debacle, the same test it has been advertising on television. Suffice to say, the company has no margin to mess up again.
Samsung starts taking preorders on March 30. The new phones will go on sale April 21. Folks who preorder get a free version of Samsung’s new Gear VR headset, including its new controller and some Oculus content. The S8 will start around $720; the S8+ around $840. After the promotion, Gear VR (including the controller) will cost $129.99. You can also buy the controller as an accessory for $39.99.
*The basics. The first thing that gets your attention is the design: Samsung has managed to produce a symmetrical curved glass form factor with a phablet-sized 5.8-inch display on an S8 on that is thinner, narrower, and just a tad taller than the S7 that it replaces. That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the S7 had a 5.1-inch display and a half-million fewer pixels. The weights are comparable.
For its part, the S8+ has a 6.2-inch screen; its predecessor, the S7 Edge, had a 5.5-inch display. Both new phones still offer secondary content on the curved edge of the display.
Samsung accomplished this by dramatically reducing the size of the bezels, following the path taken by Korean rival LG on its own recent flagship the G6. The physical home buttons on the S8 phones have been removed in favor of pressure sensitive buttons that reside beneath the screen. The screen to body ratio—that is the percentage of the front of the phone that’s taken up by the screen—is over 83% on both new devices.
The phones will come in five colors globally, three in the U.S.: a silver, a black and gray. Samsung will include AKG earbuds, made by Harman, a company it is in the process of acquiring.
As with its predecessors, the S8 devices are water and dust resistant—and yes, a handset survived when I dropped it into a tank of water. These are not, though, ruggedized phones that you’d want to intentionally drop onto a hard surface.
The phones run Android 7.0 and include 64GB of onboard memory, expandable through optional memory cards. Inside are octa-core processor which should make the phones plenty snappy. The phones have big batteries and connect through USB-C. You can wirelessly juice up the phone with an optional charger.
And one carrier, T-Mobile, says the new Galaxy will be the fastest phone on its network.
*Cameras. The rear camera on both phones is a 12-megapixel dual pixel shooter with optical image stabilization and an F1.7 aperture. Samsung says image processing has been improved, leading to shots with less blur and less “noise.” I haven’t yet been able to put the cameras to the test.
The front facing camera 8-megapixel camera has also been bolstered, Samsung says, and includes a facial detection feature that can automatically focus on your mug during a selfie.
You can also use facial recognize to wake up the device just by staring into the screen, something I was able to successfully do in a brief test.
Samsung added iris scanning for a more secure biometric authentication solution, a feature brought over from the Note 7. Folks who prefer unlocking the device via a fingerprint sensor can do so as well; that sensor is now on the back of the phone. Samsung is relying on its Knox framework for security.
*Bixby. Ahead of Wednesday’s proceedings, Samsung pre-announced Bixby, an AI-voice assistant you can summon by pressing a button on the side of the device. It replaces the S Voice feature on prior Samsung phones, and does not yet incorporate the smarts from Viv, the company Samsung bought last year that was co-founded by the guys behind Siri.
Samsung says that the goal for Bixby is that whatever you can do with touch, you can do with voice. On the phone, you might utter commands such as “turn blue light filter on,” or “send the last photo to my spouse.” Bixby will presumably comply.
Samsung refers to Bixby as an “umbrella” brand around an “intelligent user experience,” that goes beyond voice. It can also use the phone’s camera to incorporate vision. So you can use it for translation (in 52 languages), to scan business cards, read QR codes, to tell you about landmarks and products, and so on. This vision thing reminds me of a feature Amazon pushed in its failed Fire phone.
Bixby can also send reminders by learning your behavior over time. Samsung has hinted that Bixby, at least the voice element, is still a work in progress, however, so we’ll have to see how it measures up to Siri, Cortana, Alexa, or the Google Assistant.
*The Galaxy ecosystem. One thing Samsung is emphasizing with the Galaxy S8 is its place as part of the broader Galaxy ecosystem. There’s the Gear VR virtual reality headset, as well as connected Samsung TVs and appliances. Samsung is also pushing various services including Samsung + (providing service and support) and Samsung Pay, of which the company is now approaching one-quarter of a billion transactions globally.
The S8 will feature a Samsung Connect app that will let you marry the phone to Samsung IoT devices, as well as brands connected through the Samsung Connect Home smart Wi-Fi system.
Along those lines, Samsung Wednesday also unveiled a new combined mesh networked-based Wi-Fi router and SmartThings hub. No pricing or availability has been announced yet.
One other extension of the Galaxy experience is called Samsung DeX, a docking station for the S8 that connects to a TV or monitor via HDMI to bring an Android or Windows desktop experience to that larger screen.
With the S8 and S8+ Samsung may have indeed produced the smartphone it so desperately needs to change the conversation and regain consumer trust.
“This is a journey. We’re rebuilding the brand,” says Samsung Electronics America president Tim Baxter. “And we feel very confident about the progress we have made to date and we’re very excited about the Galaxy S8 as another major step in that advancement. Our goal isn’t necessarily to get back to where we were last fall. We think this is an opportunity to get to a higher and better place.”
I’m looking forward to putting the new devices to the test.
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Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter