How to Read Ebooks on Samsung Galaxy S8

Samsung sets the step for smartphone power in 2017 with the Galaxy S8 ($750 as tested). It's the best telephone at well-nigh everything it does, whether it'southward connecting to the internet, making calls, playing games, taking photos, or watching large-screen video. The S8 isn't leaps and bounds alee of other top choices similar the Google Pixel, but it's the overall most capable telephone on the market, and our Editors' Choice.

Carriers and Pricing

This is a review of the smaller Galaxy S8. There is also a larger Galaxy S8+ model, with a half-dozen.2-inch screen and a larger battery.

The Milky way S8 is available from every major carrier in the Usa and several prepaid carriers. While information technology's only available from carriers correct now, an unlocked version will follow in May or June.

Prices in the U.s. vary from $659 on Walmart's Total Wireless, to $750 at AT&T, Dart, and T-Mobile (I tested the telephone on Dart and T-Mobile). You may besides exist able to go a promotional bargain at large-box retailers like Best Buy or Target. We accept a full rundown of the different prices and deals for the S8, and MobileSyrup has a good overview of Canadian prices.

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It's also worth mentioning that this is a review of the US and Canadian unit of the phone. Other countries have a different device with a dissimilar Samsung Exynos processor that may function differently.

Physical Blueprint

"The core idea behind the Galaxy S8...has been to deliver the biggest screen in the smallest device possible," Robert Kim, vice president of Samsung's global product strategy team, told me at Samsung's headquarters in Korea. "The contradiction is that [customers] want to accept a bigger screen size simply a modest form cistron," Kim added. By shrinking bezels and bending edges, Samsung makes that happen.

The Galaxy S8 ($163.95 at Amazon) is proportionately tall and narrow. It's also very slippery, and then yous'll want a case. It measures 5.86 by 2.68 by 0.31 inches and weighs 5.47 ounces. That's taller than the Milky way S7 (5.61 by two.74 past 0.31 inches), but narrower—and remember, the S7 only has a 5.i-inch screen to the S8's 5.8-inch panel.

The thought is you're going to use information technology in one hand. It'due south easy to wrap your fingers around the S8, fifty-fifty if you have relatively pocket-sized easily. Just you're still going to be shifting it up and downwardly in your manus more ofttimes than you would with the S7 or the iPhone 7 ($163.95 at Amazon) , to accomplish all of the vertical stretch of the screen.

Almost all of the forepart face up is the 5.8-inch, ii,960-by-1,440 Super AMOLED brandish, which Ray Soneira at DisplayMate has said in a comprehensive report is the best one on the marketplace. It'southward bright and glowy, with saturated colors and great blacks.

It's also a picayune smaller than Samsung says it is, because of the new 18.five:9 attribute ratio. Most phones are sixteen:nine, so the S8 is taller and narrower than they are. It's even narrower, proportionately, than the LG G6, which is ii:1. The S8's screen is thirteen.23 square inches—I call that SQUID, or square inches of brandish.

On a standard 16:9 aspect ratio phone, you lot get the same real estate in a 5.6-inch screen. So I call up you should consider the S8's screen on par with the five.5-inch, xvi:nine displays on the Galaxy S7 Edge and iPhone 7 Plus.

To a higher place the screen, a notification LED blinks if you take unread notifications or a depression battery. There'southward a new button on the left side. Information technology's in that location to activate Bixby, Samsung'due south phonation assistant. On the bottom there'south a single speaker, along with a USB-C port and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. The speaker sounds richer and less tinny than the S7'southward does. It's also about 1dB louder at its maximum volume.

The phone comes in 3 colors: black, gray, and silver. I received black review units, and they get very smeary on the back. Information technology's peculiarly an consequence considering the fingerprint sensor is on the back correct next to the photographic camera lens, and while at that place'due south a slight ridge between them, it's almost unnoticeable. That means you will definitely smear the photographic camera lens when yous go to use the fingerprint scanner.

The phone is waterproof, which will be a relief to many. But the all-glass body seems a fleck fragile. Samsung said that by using Gorilla Drinking glass v with a more gentle curve than on the Galaxy S7 Border, it'southward made the phone more durable. At its manufacturing plant in Gumi, Korea, it showed me a four-foot drop exam. Still, though, that glass back will be inherently more brittle than a metallic dorsum, and Samsung'due south curved drinking glass is expensive to supercede.

"Compared to the S7, component wise, [durability] is a 40 pct improvement," Kim said. "Device-wise, it's around twenty percent."

Using the Screen

The Milky way S8 has no physical home button. Instead, you press on the screen where you see a habitation push button icon, and you feel a picayune chip of haptic feedback. It works just fine. The app drawer icon is gone, too—to become the app drawer, you swipe up from the home area. It takes a footling getting used to.

The aspect ratio definitely creates problems with third-political party apps. YouTube videos, for instance, either accept black bars on the sides, or get zoomed and cropped into total-screen mode. Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Koh said Facebook has already updated for the new size, and, "All of our major partners are working on it."

On a settings screen called Full Screen Apps, I found that many text-oriented information and social networking apps, such as Microsoft Part, TripAdvisor, and Curiosity Unlimited, are optimized for the tall screen, while virtually games are non. Everything runs, it but might not apply the whole display. Launching an un-optimized game such as Mini Metro displays the game with blackness bars on either side of the screen.

21:nine wide-screen movies expect great, with less letterboxing than on the Galaxy S7. sixteen:9 Idiot box shows, on the other manus, take visible pillarboxing. Launching a xvi:9 video in YouTube gives y'all the pick to pillarbox the video, or to zoom and ingather into full-screen mode, but that forces part of the image off of the screen. This is similar to the experience on the LG G6 ($163.95 at Amazon) .

Phone Calls, Networking, and Storage

Yeah, the Galaxy S8 makes phone calls. Information technology has whatever your carrier'due south latest phone-calling techniques are (like HD Vocalisation, VoLTE, and Wi-Fi calling) and calls audio articulate, with ambitious noise cancellation in the microphone. I was especially impressed with the speakerphone volume when the Extra Book button is pressed—the voice blasting out of the bottom-ported speaker is easily hearable outdoors.

The rest of the networking alphabet soup is supported as well. There'due south dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, which I institute worked near equally well with our Netgear router equally the Galaxy S7 does (which is to say, very well). The phone has NFC and MST, then y'all tin can practice mobile payments even with old school magnetic credit card readers that don't support tap-to-pay. Pismire+ is on board for certain smart abode devices.

This is the starting time phone with Bluetooth five, which tin potentially transmit to devices 120 anxiety away, also as to two sets of headphones at once. However, at that place are no other Bluetooth v devices out there to test the S8 against yet.

The phone comes in one size, 64GB with 4GB RAM, and there's as well a microSD carte slot tucked in with the SIM slot, which can handle 256GB cards. Samsung still doesn't support Google's Adoptable Storage fashion, so the carte du jour will appear as a split storage device. But yous can move apps to the SD card from ane of the settings pages. About 10.7GB of the phone's storage is taken up by the system and not-deletable apps.

Bombardment Life

Bombardment life is far better in existent-earth practice than it is in our benchmarks. With the same size bombardment as the S7 (iii,000mAh) driving a larger, brighter screen, I got considerably shorter time on our screen-blasting LTE video streaming test: 5 hours, 45 minutes on the S8 compared with the S7's nearly 9 hours. That fabricated me uncomfortable, so I tried another scenarios. Dropping the screen resolution to 1080p got 7 hours, 39 minutes. Dropping to half effulgence got twelve and a half hours.

In real-life use over several days, with the screen generally at around one-half effulgence, the S8 had no problem lasting through the day each fourth dimension. In general, I ended upwards with virtually thirty percent bombardment afterwards a 12-60 minutes day before starting to charge again, with the shortest run-out time at near 16 hours and the longest well over 24 hours.

The Google Pixel ($163.95 at Amazon) has a 1080p screen, and if you lot set the S8's screen to the same resolution, yous become nigh the aforementioned usage fourth dimension. But the Pixel is better at not draining battery in standby. The iPhone vii has shorter screen-on usage time, but information technology's more efficient in standby and playing audio.

The practiced news is that the S8's quick charging feature is very quick. The phone charges from nix to 100 percent in about an hour and a half. I got to 15 percentage accuse in 15 minutes, and 30 pct in one-half an hour.

Samsung Mobile R&D VP Bookeun Oh told me, "I focused on maintaining the immovability of the battery over the long term, over hundreds of charging cycles. For example, after approximately half dozen months of normal usage, the battery in the S8 will outperform previous batteries. While most batteries concord about 80 percentage of their charge after ii years in usual cases, this bombardment should be capable of 95 percent of its original capacity."

I'g likewise confident this phone won't explode. I took a trip to the factory where AT&T and Verizon units are made, saw Samsung's array of new tests, and spoke to the company's battery informational council. Samsung is taking bombardment rubber seriously in a fashion that it didn't with the Milky way Note vii, and these phones are very extensively tested. Using a smaller battery than information technology could accept, I'm sad to say, is also part of the new focus on prophylactic.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835: Snappy?

The S8 is the get-go US phone with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. Qualcomm has been making a big deal about calling its chipsets platforms rather than processors, and some of that is because about of its improvements are in areas like DSPs, graphics, and modem capabilities, and not the individual CPU cores.

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You run into this in the benchmarks. First of all, benchmark results change depending on what you accept the screen resolution fix to. Looking purely at the CPU, the single-core Geekbench score of 1,836 isn't whatever better than the Snapdragon 821-powered LG G6, at 1,811. The multi-core score of 5,960 outpaces the G6 (4,195), but simply matches the Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P10.

But the 835 pumps a lot more graphics horsepower than those competitors do. On the near advanced GFXBenchmark Car Crash examination, the Galaxy S8 pushed 12fps onscreen and 22fps offscreen at WQHD resolution. That'due south around double the G6 or P10'south functioning. Down at 1080p resolution, it scaled to 43fps onscreen, double the Google Pixel'south result.

Left to right: Samsung Milky way S8, Galaxy S7

Using the Snapdragon 835-optimized Samsung spider web browser gives the S8 superior JavaScript and web performance, likewise. It scored 71 on the JetStream Javascript benchmark, to the LG G6's 54 and the Google Pixel'southward 55. On the Browsermark web test, the Pixel scored 118 while the S8 made information technology to 145. That means snappier spider web page performance overall.

Betwixt this and the modem advances (described beneath), the benchmarks deport out Qualcomm's contention that device operation is more than simply individual processor cores. Of course, that cuts both ways. While our exam S8s were fast and shine, Samsung devices have a reputation for lagging badly after a twelvemonth or so (that'south certainly happening with my S7). Because that lag is frequently solved past a factory reset, it's articulate that the trouble is in software, not hardware.

Samsung has sworn upward and down that the S8 won't have the creeping lag issues that previous models did. Of course, it's sworn the aforementioned matter earlier. In that location'southward no way to tell during the first week of utilize, alas.

The Modem: The S8's Secret Weapon

Smartphones aren't much use if they don't connect. The S8's invisible, secret weapon is that it'southward the first US phone with gigabit LTE and HPUE, combinations of iv technologies that can improve performance on all four networks. I tested the phones on Sprint and T-Mobile, and found singled-out improvements over the Milky way S7.

Samsung says all the carrier versions of the phone are identical, frequency band-wise. That ways all U.S. Galaxy S8 phones will work on all the U.S. and Canadian carriers, too as roaming globally. However, foreign phones may have some strange LTE bands which are not common in the U.S.

On Sprint, the S8 is the 2d phone (after the LG G6) with HPUE, which improves connectivity in weak bespeak weather condition, especially with upload speeds. Information technology delivers as promised. Over 34 tests in extremely weak signal weather condition, merely viii failed on the S8 while 24 failed on the S7. That'due south a major divergence. In 48 tests of slightly better but however bad conditions, I got 2.33Mbps uploads on the S8 and only 1.3Mbps on the S7 (downloads were pretty much the aforementioned between them).

As signal quality gets ameliorate, the S8's reward fades. With decent point, the S8 got nine.83Mbps down and 4.69Mbps up, while the S7 showed seven.41Mbps downward and 4.79Mbps up. In our strongest signal test, both phones had no trouble hitting 120Mbps speeds right by a Sprint cell site. HPUE doesn't heighten the roof—it raises the floor.

The outcome for Sprint users: If y'all are frustrated with Sprint connectivity in a place where Sprint is supposed to have LTE, getting a Galaxy S8 will go a long manner toward curing your expressionless-zone trouble.

The S8's advantage on T-Mobile is dissimilar. It combines several unlike technologies to potentially double download speeds. In T-Mobile's case, the difference should get more dramatic as speeds get improve and faster, the opposite of the Sprint situation.

I only ran ten tests on T-Mobile because of data limits, but I still saw the difference: xv.36Mbps down and 11Mbps up on the S8 compared with eight.65Mbps downward and 10Mbps up on the S7. In congested areas, the S8 is the third phone (after the LG V20 and G6) to utilise its new Band 66 LTE network, which should prevent speeds from crashing too depression.

The telephone should better performance on AT&T and Verizon, as well. AT&T has called the S8 its start "5G Evolution" telephone, which means it has the aforementioned three technologies that T-Mobile terms "gigabit LTE." AT&T's rollout is going a little more slowly than T-Mobile's, with Austin and Indianapolis getting the network outset.

Verizon has stayed irritatingly coy nigh its plans for gigabit technologies, but the same three elements should work on its network, besides. In late 2016, Verizon said it had 3x carrier aggregation and 256 QAM, and it said it was deploying 4x4 MIMO more a yr ago. Verizon wouldn't ostend whether 4x4 MIMO is activated on its version of the phone, though.

The S8 is also the outset phone with LTE-U, a new form of LTE that uses Wi-Fi airwaves to heighten chapters in crowded areas. I haven't seen much in the way of LTE-U buildouts yet, but AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all working on it.

Software: Taking Android to the Border

Samsung does non leave Android lone. Yous have to be OK with that to relish Samsung phones. The Galaxy S8 runs Android vii.0 Nougat, simply with Samsung's icons, home screen, and apps added to Google'due south. And not but Samsung'south: Our Dart unit of measurement came with 6 Amazon apps, six "featured" apps, and viii Dart apps for a total of twenty chunks of carrier bloatware. Fortunately, those are uninstallable.

Samsung is also keeping its custom camera, gallery, music, and phone apps, although the music app is a downloadable option. The phone app now integrates a sticker and GIF messaging function that's tied to your Samsung Business relationship, which volition be able to be used if your friends also have Samsung accounts.

The "always-on" forepart display has a more than visually appealing design than on the S7, with a colorful spray of stars beyond the screen. Like on the S7, information technology shows the time and date or a calendar, also as notification icons. Double-tapping on a notification icon shows yous more than information, or takes you to the app which was sending the notification.

The actually alpine screen allows for a neat multitasking trick: You tin select a chunk of an app's screen and pin information technology to the top, running other apps in the bottom one-half. That lets you watch a video while sending texts nigh it, for instance.

You can swap the order of the dorsum and multitasking buttons in the software. Press down on a dwelling screen icon, and y'all get Google'due south Quick Option carte, letting y'all articulate notification badges and uninstall the app.

Samsung'southward edge functionality is improve than always. You swipe in from the right-hand side of the screen to come across app shortcuts and your favorite contacts by default, and there are more than than ii dozen other Border Panels you tin can download. There'due south a agenda, a calculator, a annotation-taking app, messengers, and system condition widgets. They're genuinely useful.

Also useful, but perpetually hidden in stacks of settings screens, are all of Samsung's custom settings options. Desire to modify the screen color gamut? The society of the virtual buttons at the bottom? Want to change what's shown on the always-on display? Samsung'southward phones have e'er been highly customizable, unless you're talking nigh getting rid of the Samsung stuff entirely.

Three Ways To Show Yourself

Since Samsung seems to realize that putting its fingerprint scanner spot right adjacent to the camera isn't the best idea, information technology offers up a cafe of other ways to authenticate yourself. The two more exotic ones are face and iris recognition.

Face recognition is quick and easy. In our tests, it worked flawlessly and nearly instantly. But it also isn't secure, Samsung warns. I couldn't get information technology to unlock using a picture of my face, but others have been able to do and so. That ways information technology'll defeat casual attempts to unlock it, just not a determined antagonist who knows who you are.

Iris recognition is more secure. It's also far pickier. Samsung advises that users take off their spectacles to unlock their phones, which I'm happy to say isn't necessary. But iris recognition only worked eight out of 10 times for me, information technology's slower than other methods, and I was frequently bombarded by prompts to move the telephone higher and farther away.

Complicating things, you tin can use your iris or fingerprint for Samsung Pay, but not your face.

I started out not using the fingerprint scanner, but after a few days, I was using information technology regularly. The change happened when I put the S8 in a Caseology Legion case, which has a slanted cutout for the fingerprint scanner and photographic camera. The example cutout gave me the tactile cues I needed to hitting the fingerprint scanner without smudging the photographic camera.

Bye Bye Bixby

Samsung's flagship new service, Bixby, tin't be tested nevertheless. It won't exist launched until May. The thought behind Bixby is that you button a dedicated push button on the side of the phone and you're able to command it by vocalism, for example, to send a photo you just took to someone in your contact list.

According to Samsung Mobile CTO Injong Rhee, Bixby will initially work with 10 congenital-in apps, including camera, contacts, gallery, telephone, reminders, and settings, but notably not the browser, calendar, or email. Rhee said those will come in the second batch of x, and the visitor has 32 apps targeted.

"Right now, our focus is on the device interface and awarding controls," Rhee said. "As Bixby's ecosystem expands, clearly there'southward an overlap between what Bixby can pursue and what Google Banana can pursue. Nosotros are working with Google...so we can actually benefit from both." For the tape, "OK Google" works merely fine on this phone.

Pressing the Bixby push right now takes you to "Hullo Bixby," Samsung's answer to Google Now's stack of personalized cards. By default, it shows your nigh recently taken photos, reminders, weather, and a news feed, although with fourth dimension it'south supposed to prompt you with apps and information information technology thinks you might desire—pushing Uber at you if you take an Uber at the same fourth dimension each day, for instance.

Other much-heralded new software remains similarly elusive. Samsung Connect is supposed to bring together all of your (new) Samsung appliances and SmartThings Hub functionality. Information technology doesn't piece of work yet, so I tin can't approximate it. Samsung's Dex, a organisation to turn your phone into a desktop PC, besides isn't ready nonetheless. Encounter our in-depth await at DeX for more details.

Best Photographic camera Always

The Galaxy S8 has a 12-megapixel camera, just like the S7. Simply information technology'due south better. I took side-by-side images with the S7 and S8 in a variety of modes, and the S8's pictures are clearer and brighter, with more detail and less artifacting. While the S8 doesn't have dual principal cameras, there's a software-based Selective Focus mode to create bokeh, and a pretty good Pro fashion that includes Raw capture and manual shutter speed.

Depression-low-cal performance has taken a step upward, too. Compared with the S7, shots taken in very depression calorie-free show noticeably more detail on the S8. The S8 outpaces the Pixel in depression light, likewise, with sharper particular, less artifacting, and slightly better colors. I'thousand comfortable maxim that the S8 has the best phone photographic camera I've seen, although I'thou besides going to plow the phone over to our camera analyst for a longer look.

The front-facing camera has improved from 5MP to 8MP, and it'due south gotten autofocus. In practice, that means sharper focus on faces, with backgrounds going slightly out of focus. That makes photos of yourself look great, just it means that if you're used to taking photos of yourself in front of things—famous buildings, for instance—you lot'll have to make sure to lock focus on the distant object to get the same fixed-focus look you're used to.

Equally light gets lower, the forepart-facing camera gets a flake soft, merely information technology keeps peel tones warm. I prefer this approach to what the Pixel does, which makes my face look stake and dirty as it tries to dramatically brighten my features. Bodily exposure isn't necessarily better than the S7, but y'all have more pixels, so things don't look quite as soft.

Both cameras record video besides, of course, to true 4K with the chief camera, and 2,560-by-one,440 with the front end photographic camera, both at 30fps in all circumstances. There's also a 60fps 1080p (barely) slow-mo option. The master camera has OIS and the front end camera doesn't, but in general, they're both first-class video cameras, much as the S7'south was as well.

One new gimmick, Bixby Vision, isn't a peachy differentiator. It'southward a mode in the photographic camera that tin can shop for products or translate text based on a picture you lot have. But it'southward no better than Google Translate or Microsoft Word Lens (in fact, the translator but uses Google Interpret). Information technology's not a minus, information technology's simply not much of a plus.

Comparisons and Conclusions

Phones are connected devices. That'south besides what they exercise: connect usa, to each other and to the cyberspace. We create things, whether they're words or pictures, and nosotros share them. The Milky way S8 is the best telephone available for creating things yous want to share, sharing them, and experiencing things shared past others. It's the nearly connected device possible.

That said, the Google Pixel is less expensive than well-nigh S8 carrier models at $649. While the S8 is slightly amend in many ways, the Pixel has a cleaner interface, more frequent Android updates, and longer standby battery life. For AT&T and Verizon users, meanwhile, the unlocked ZTE Axon 7 and OnePlus 3T deliver all of the power most people want for around $400.

The S8 securely kills the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in our eyes, though. While the iPhone SE ($163.95 at Amazon) is still an splendid value, platform lock-in is pretty much the only reason to get an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus over this device—the idea that you've spent so much fourth dimension and money learning Apple tree'southward apps and using iMessage that it would exist too much of a bear to leave.

But the phone is expensive enough that I would hesitate to upgrade from an S7, unless you recall the better modem will aid you connect where you couldn't before. The S8 is better than the S7 in every way except battery life, but it's a lot of money for incremental improvements.

I prefer the S8 to its larger sibling the S8+, though. This is purely a gustatory modality issue, as I love how the S8 is comfortable in one hand, even with a case on. The S8+ adds a chip more battery life and a bigger screen for $100 more, just doesn't add any other functionality, and I don't think the trade-off for usability is quite worth it. People with large hands, of course, may disagree.

The Galaxy S8 is the most luxurious, best performing telephone on the market correct now. It's on burn down, and I don't mean that literally. Maybe it's more telephone than about people need. But information technology'due south well-nigh certainly ameliorate than the phone you have. And for that reason it's our Editors' Choice.

Samsung Milky way S8

The Bottom Line

The Samsung Milky way S8 is a gorgeous big-screen phone with a comfortable unmarried-handed feel, and information technology'due south packed with summit-notch components and promising new software.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-s8

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