Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review: A step too far for Samsung’s range?

In some senses, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus doesn’t really deserve its own review. It’s much the same as the Samsung Galaxy S8. It has the same features as its (slightly) smaller sibling; the same internals, camera, storage options, and screen aspect ratio and resolution.

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What makes it different, of course, is the sheer size of the thing. The Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus’ screen measures 6.2in across the diagonal. This would make a regular phone practically unusable – but the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is no regular phone.

That’s mainly because the 18.5:9 aspect ratio allows Samsung to add extra screen real estate without expanding the physical width of the phone too much. This means the S8 is actually no less usable than the Huawei Mate 8 I spent three months with last year. Indeed, it feels quite comfortable to hold and use in one hand, which is quite the surprise.

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Looking objectively at the numbers, though, this should come as no real surprise. The Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is a mere 73.4mm wide, which works out at only 0.8mm broader than last year’s S7 Edge. It’s noticeably taller at 159.5mm (compared with 150.9mm for the S7 Edge), but thanks to incredibly narrow top and bottom screen bezels, it isn’t as unwieldy as it could have been.

Despite this, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is still not the most pocketable of smartphones. Despite the narrow bezel, this phone is taller than the Google Pixel XL by nearly half a centimetre and it’s pretty hefty, too, at 173g. You’ll need to plan on keeping it in a jacket pocket – or get handy with a needle and thread and add extensions to your jeans pockets.

In terms of practicality and looks, these are pretty much the only differences between the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus and the regular S8. They’re both available in the same range of colours – silver, blue and black – and both look and feel glorious. There’s Gorilla Glass 5 on both the front and rear, although the lack of bezels means it probably will smash if you drop it anyway. It’s IP68 dust- and water-resistant, though, so when you get caught out in a rain shower or drop it down the toilet, it should continue to work.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review

Just like its little brother, the S8 Plus also has a microSD slot, and it has a fingerprint reader that’s been repositioned at the rear as well. That’s poor positioning, in my view, because it means you frequently smudge the camera lens with your finger trying to locate it. At least there are other ways to unlock the phone, although both the iris recognition and new facial recognition are less convenient to use because you have to lift up the phone to engage them.

However, there’s no denying that this is one handsome smartphone, largely due to the lack of bezels and the gorgeous curved edges that run up the S8 Plus’ flanks. No other smartphone looks this good; it’s a pleasure to pick up, use, stroke and fondle – a jewel of a smartphone that’s one step ahead of the rest of the market.

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Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review: Performance and display

Performance-wise – yep, you guessed it – the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus offers much the same as the regular S8, which means to say it’s superfast. You get a 10nm Samsung Exynos 8895 (or Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 if you live in the US) and this is paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of UFS 2 storage.

Above are the benchmark graphs for your reference. As you can see, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus matches the regular S8 test for test – hardly surprising given the identical internals.

The Galaxy S8’s display, too, is just what you’d expect from Samsung, which has become a pass master in this area in recent years. It’s an AMOLED panel, so it has perfect black and its performance in every test we put it through was superb.

Colours are perfectly poised – not oversaturated yet still vibrant – and it goes just as bright as you need it to. We usually measure brightness by switching off auto-brightness and then sliding the adjustment all the way up to the maximum; however, with Samsung phones, the maximum brightness can only be achieved by enabling auto-brightness and placing the phone in high ambient light.

In these conditions, with a full white screen, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is able to push screen brightness up from a maximum of 347cd/m2 to 554cd/m2, which means it will be bright enough to read in most conditions.

That’s still not the full story, however. Since the screen is HDR Premium certified, it should be able to reach higher peak brightness than this and so it proves. With only a small patch of white pixels displayed on the screen, the S8 Plus pushes peak brightness up to a searing 912cd/m2.

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It’s one hell of a display, then, but there are practical issues to contend with. That long-tall screen aspect ratio (or short-wide, depending on how you look at it) means that not all apps and content adapt perfectly. I came across a number of games during testing that left thick black borders at the top and bottom of the screen and, when you turn the phone on its side, it’s a similar situation with movie and TV content.

While YouTube and Samsung’s own video player let you stretch content to fit the wide screen, other apps don’t yet offer the option to do this. Fire up a movie on Netflix, for instance, and you’ll have to put up with black bars to the left and right, with no way to either zoom or stretch the video to fill the screen; perhaps we’ll just have to be patient on this front, but at the moment it’s a little disappointing.

The one area of performance where the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus has the potential to be different from the regular S8 is battery life. With a larger 3,500mAh capacity, you’d expect stamina to be longer, although there is the compensating factor of that larger screen.

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Anecdotally, this is a long-lasting phone. I’ve been using it for around a week now, and I regularly get longer than a full day out of it. If I go to bed, having taken it off charge at around 6.30am, it will typically still be running the next morning if I forget to plug it in overnight. This is with moderate use: no heavy-duty gaming, GPS or VR.

Our video-playback battery test backs up this experience. With the phone set to its default screen resolution (1,080 x 2,220), the screen calibrated to 170cd/m2 and flight mode engaged, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus lasted 20hrs 33mins before running dry. That’s a pretty decent result, and places it a long way ahead of the Google Pixel XL, LG G6 and the regular S8.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review: Cameras

On paper, the rear camera isn’t much to shout about. It has the same resolution as last year’s Samsung flagships, remaining at 12 megapixels, and the secondary specifications are a match as well, with optical image stabilisation, dual-pixel autofocus and a bright aperture of f/1.7.

The only difference on paper is that the camera, via the S8 Plus’ ISP (image signal processor), captures not one but three frames in rapid succession every time you shoot, combining them together in a bid to create sharper images.

It’s like HDR for every shot you take and is Samsung’s attempt to match the Google Pixel phone’s HDR+ technique, which captures up to ten images and combines them in a similar way. What effect does this have on captured images?

Surprisingly – as with the S8 – it improves things significantly over the S7 and, in good light, the S8’s images compare well with the Pixel’s. The main difference is not in detail capture, but exposure, where the Pixel captures much more naturalistic images than the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, which has a tendency to slightly overexpose and oversaturate images.

I also noticed in a couple of examples that the S8 Plus is applying significantly more noticeable sharpening than the Pixel. This is evident only on very close inspection, but it means that the S8 Plus’ images, in some circumstances, can look sharper.

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^ The Pixel XL on the left produces more balanced, natural-looking shots than the S8 Plus, which has a tendency to blow out highlights

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^ There’s a more yellowy, over-saturated look to the S8’s shot (right), where again the Pixel produces more realistic images

In low light, however, the win goes more clearly to the Pixel XL. Its pictures look a little grainier than the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus’ images, but that means it’s better at retaining details. Once again, there’s slightly more naturalist colour capture as well. The Google Pixel is clearly still the king of smartphone photography.

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^ In this low-light image, the Google Pixel XL (left) gets white balance under fluorescent lighting spot on while the S8 Plus’ image is slightly too yellow. Close inspection also shows the Pixel’s shot to be grainier, but slightly better in terms of detail preservation

If you value your front-facing camera as much as your rear, though, you’ll be very satisfied with the S8 Plus’ snapper. It has a much better selfie camera than the S7 Edge (8 megapixels vs 5 megapixels), although it’s again a close-run thing with the Google Pixel XL. The S8 Plus’ f/1.7 aperture lets in much more light than the Pixel’s f/2.4, but the Pixel tends to exposure images more accurately and ends up capturing more natural-looking snaps as a result.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review: Software, Bixby and DeX

The Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus runs Android 7 Nougat, which is hardly surprising, and this is overlaid with the usual Samsung launcher software. You might find this intrusive, with its slightly different icons and laundry list of extra features, but I don’t. It’s different, but not unpleasantly so, and although there’s quite a long list of preinstalled apps, the 64GB standard storage allocation and microSD slot mean this isn’t the problem it might have been.

The big selling point of this particular iteration of Samsung’s software is supposed to be Bixby – the firm’s answer to Alexa and Siri. Despite not being available on the phone at launch, Samsung  released its smart AI assistant on both the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus in more than 200 countries in August. This includes the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Galaxy S8 and S8+ users can now use Bixby by pressing the Bixby button and updating the app. To activate Bixby, hold the dedicated button on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ phones, or say “Hi, Bixby.” 

There’s an automatically curated feed of personalised news and info to the left of the homescreen that looks uncannily like the Google Now, and Bixby Vision – a plugin for the camera that analyses what you’re pointing the lens at and attempts to provide useful information, be that shopping links for products or information on people and landmarks.

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I can’t see myself bothering with either of these in the long run, but since I’m reviewing the phone, I’ve been taking the opportunity to test the features out over the past few days. I can’t say I’ve been impressed.

The newsfeed works well enough, but I can see no practical reason for reinventing what Google Now does. Bixby Vision is of little to no use at all. The shopping aspect I could never get to work; nothing I pointed it at brought up any kind of recognised product. The image recognition was patchy at best. A photo of the BT Tower matched a bunch of towers across the world, but a snap of my face brought up wildly inaccurate match list, topped by a story about Robbie Williams. I’m not sure if I should be offended by that or flattered.

The Place option seems the most useful, but how many times are you going to find yourself in a place wanting to know something about a building that looks famous? I’m guessing not often.

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Samsung DeX, on the other hand, is considerably more impressive. This is Samsung’s answer to Microsoft Continuum: slot the phone into the DeX dock (a rather costly £129 extra), connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor, and you’ll be able to use your phone to run a complete windowed desktop environment.

It’s surprisingly snappy and capable, too. I was able to work perfectly happily on just the phone for almost a whole day – until I needed to use Photoshop to do some RAW file editing. It’s certainly a big improvement on Microsoft’s rather sluggish effort.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review: Verdict

In essence, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is the same phone as the S8, with all the things that make that phone great, but with a bigger screen, a bigger battery, a more unwieldy profile and a higher price.

Is it any better, though? In my view, the answer to that question has to be no, and that’s mainly due to the 6.2in Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus’ size: it’s just one step too far. Although it isn’t over-wide, it’s too tall and although I’d be happy to carry around the regular Samsung Galaxy S8 in my pocket day to day, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus doesn’t quite get it right in the same way.

We’ve been here before with big phones, of course. I remember reviewing my first 4.5in smartphone and thinking that ludicrously big at the time, so my opinion might change (as long as my pockets do at the same time). Of course, you do get better battery life than the Galaxy S8 as well.

But given the choice, and considering the price differential – the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus costs a hefty £779 to the S8’s £679 – the Samsung Galaxy S8 is the phone to choose from this pair.