The Samsung Galaxy S8: so what’s it really like?

Curiosity over Samsung’s new flagship phones, coming as they do after the company’s fiasco with the Note 7, is at an all time high. Once you get past the explosion jokes, it’s obvious that consumers are more than willing to give the Korean giant another chance.

If you get your hands on the Galaxy S8 and S8+, you’ll probably notice the back first. Looking at the blue or even the pale gold, I found myself thinking it looked like pure silk. I next noticed the camera and fingerprint assembly on the top. They really are very close together and every time I later tried to use the fingerprint sensor, I did end up touching the camera lens, so I resorted to taking a look first. Eventually I opted for other ways of unlocking the phone because the fingerprint sensor is at the best of times, difficult to reach with one hand on the S8+, which is the review unit I used.

The other thing you’ll notice is that though the phones look tall, specially the S8 because of its narrowness, neither phone looks or feels outsized. At 5.8 and 6.2 inches (S8+), they should be, but somehow Samsung has hit upon ratios that make the phone seem smaller than it is. Next to the S8+, the S8 does look small, but it’s actually more than the 5.5 inch standard that we’re used to. The devices are light, thin, and very easy to hold.

You would absolutely need a case to protect the glass body of the phone and sadly, hide away its beauty. But that does hold true for all phones these days.

The next thing to notice comes along when you switch on the device. And that’s when you see it — the Infinity Display. On the sides, the screen wraps over the edges and on the top and bottom, there are barely any bezels. The result is a seamless expanse of screen, which is very beautiful. Turn a video on and you find a button to adjust the ratio to take up the entire screen — and that’s a real treat to look at, specially as most people agree that Samsung makes the best looking displays, vivid, clear and bright.

To make that display seamless, Samsung removed the physical home button to make sure nothing was in the way.

Using the display, I haven’t found any accidental touches — not any more than any other phones. Thin bezel phones have been a worrying thought just because of the difficulty they could cause with the touch of fingers trying to hold rather than touch, but I’ve found no instances where it didn’t seem to understand what I wanted. A longer period of usage may show otherwise, though.

Like me, many people find the camera a deal breaker on a new smartphone. Coming to the S8’s camera (and I mean both the phones) from anything other than the S7, Pixel, iPhone 7 Plus or a handful of other phones that excel in the camera department, the S8 will be a marvel. Through 2017, it’s bound to remain among the top two or three best camera phones.

In comparison with all three of these phones mentioned, the S8’s camera is as good with improvements in some areas. It’s very fast — image processing has been sped up, specially on the rear camera. Low light photography is also better with the richness of colours Samsung was already known for maintained.

There are a number of other features that you can immediately see at work. For instance, there’s multiple face recognition now.

If you take a photograph in which there’s more than one person, you'll see faces clearly because of the focus points. Selfies are more detailed and brighter. The cameras are not, however, a step change over the S7’s so may not mean someone with the previous flagships needs to upgrade on that account.

Samsung’s interface on the S8 phones is refined over previous takes and is clean and detailed. Users will find a lot to explore. While some have often accused Samsung of having a case of feature-itis, I have always thought it’s just fine to put in features and leave it to the users to play with them. As long as it’s not a drain on the interface and performance.

This time, Samsung has added its own virtual assistant, Bixby, to the mix. Pressing the virtual home button (which leads to a short push-back sensation) triggers up the Google Assistant, so one can go ahead and wonder why Samsung would need to put another assistant on the phone. Bixby, however, is no replica of Google Assistant and does other on-board things.

Swiping left to right on the home screen shows you a Bixby dashboard of your agenda, weather, places around, news and more. Bixby is supposed to get more intelligent as we go along and it learns, but one can’t see that in action yet. What it does do efficiently enough is to take any image you show it and quickly get you related pictures. And this is easily done via Bixby Vision — which could well have just been called Bixby. This feature also lets you translate text. I aimed it at my French book whereupon it asked me to run my finger over the part I want to translate — and promptly does so. The text selection process, however, isn’t always flawless.

In this age of big battery phones, you might feel that the 3,000mAh cell on this one is not a lot for a phone of this capacity. But Samsung doesn’t disappoint and the battery lasts you long enough even with multitasking. The fast charging is an added bonus.

The S8 and S8+ are beautiful phones and in line with what flagships cost — and there's no doubt that these two phones are currently the ultimate flagships.