Samsung's flagship S8 launches later today in New York and though so much is known about the phone already, there seems to be no diminishing of anticipation. Korean media predicts that the demand for Samsung's Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus will far exceed that which the Note 7 had notched up.
As the leaks continue to pour in regarding practically every aspect of the S8 duo, one thing seems pretty certain: the bezels on the top and bottom of the phones will be absolutely thin. The sides of the display are curved in any case, and don't have bezels. This seems evident from a very brief teaser video Samsung has put out on YouTube.
The chipset that is being used on the Galaxy S8, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, has now also been benchmark tested and shown to be supersonically fast. Depending on what Samsung does with the phone, it could be expected to leverage what the chipset has to offer. The 835 is said to take up 35 per cent less space and use 25 per cent less battery. In time, other phones will come up that use the 835 chipset.
Chief leakster Evan Blass has shown in a photo that the S8 will come in three shades called Black Sky, Orchid Grey and Arctic Silver. He also leaked some prices, but India prices are difficult to guess at though they are estimated at Rs 56,000 and Rs 62,000, which is close to what a Samsung flagship costs in any case. One design feature that has people dismayed is that the fingerprint sensor seems to have been placed right next to the camera. It's a fair bet to say that a user will rarely reach precisely for it and will end up touching the camera lens and smudging it. Other phones with fingerprint sensors on the back typically place the button well under the camera.
...and finally: Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus (left to right) in Black Sky, Orchid Grey, and Arctic Silver (top to bottom). pic.twitter.com/pIUJskyFbK
— Evan Blass (@evleaks)March 21, 2017
Other features that the S8s will come with include face recognition which will help with payments and other tasks. But absolutely confirmed is the fact that the phones will come with Bixby, Samsung's new virtual assistant and competitor to Siri, Google, Alexa and Cortana. But Samsung says Bixby is fundamentally different from the other virtual assistants
Jong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung says that devices are getting so complex that users can barely take advantage of their functions. That's where Bixby is supposed to help.
"User interface designers have to make tradeoff decisions to cram many functions into a small screen or bury them deeper in layers of menu trees. Ultimately users are at the mercy of the designers with an increasingly steep curve that makes learning a new device difficult," says Rhee. "This is the fundamental limitation of the current human-to-machine interface." Samsung says it has a conceptually new philosophy to the problem: instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to users. The interface must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added. With this new approach, Samsung wants to employ artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort.
When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (ie. touch commands). Most existing agents currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn’t work by voice command, according to Samsung.
Bixby will also be context aware. "When using a Bixby-enabled application, users will be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will allow users to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously," says Rhee. "Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal."
The new flagships will be larger than the previous duo at 5.7 and 6.2 inches. There will be no hardware buttons. There will be 6GB of RAM to go with that fast processor, an iris scanner and a 2969 x 1440 display.