Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Prime Day makes a great phone cheaper

Rob Leane Read more April 18, 2017

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£689

Price when reviewed

Deal update: Amazon Prime Day has delivered a huge saving on the Samsung Galaxy S8, meaning you can now pick up the SIM-free handset with a 64GB Micro SD card for just £429. The original RRP of this package was £645.99, so you’d be saving a significant stack of cash. The deal will expire at midnight tonight.

Our review continues below.

A few years ago, the race to be the world’s choice Android phone designer was wide open. HTC would win it one year, and then LG would dazzle the next. Recently, the list has become more predictable: Samsung Galaxy S5, Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Galaxy S7, and the Samsung Galaxy S8 is here to make its predecessors obsolete.

READ NEXT: Samsung Galaxy S9 review

Two things have changed to make this less a foregone conclusion than it was a couple of years ago, however. The first is that specifications have improved to the degree that even a cheap smartphone is good enough for most people. The second is the burnt-out corpse of the Galaxy Note 7, removed from the market after less than two months for being just a bit more flammable than advertised.

READ NEXT: Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review

In short, we always knew that the Samsung Galaxy S8 was going to be good, but the stakes have been raised. It needs to be good, and good enough to justify the immense price tag too. It’s £689 SIM-free, with contracts starting at around £45.99 per month with an additional upfront cost. That’s Apple level pricing.

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And it’s good. Very good indeed. The best smartphone you can buy, bar none. Unless you like a bigger handset, in which case there’s always the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus. Whether it’s worth the cost, though… that’s strictly between you and your wallet, but hopefully, the next few pages can at least help you justify the loan to your bank manager. Print this out if you think it will help.

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Design

Let me begin by saying that Samsung’s teaser for the S8 was more than a little overblown. The video, released ahead of the phone’s reveal last month, suggested something that would make you rethink what a phone looks like. The Galaxy S8 doesn’t do this unless you’re terminally devoid of imagination. It’s still a block of metal and glass; it’s just a particularly beautiful one.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2iNTxLXO-Iw

What the video alluded to is that the physical home button is gone. That’s significant, but it isn’t the first Android phone to do that; my trusty HTC One M8 had no physical home button, either. What is different is its dimensions: it’s now quite a bit taller than its predecessors, making it extremely comfortable in hand.

I use a Samsung Galaxy S7 as my main phone at the moment, itself a slim and attractive handset, and the Galaxy S8 leaves it in the dust. Putting them side by side, the differences are obvious. It isn’t much bigger, but it uses its space much more effectively with around 84% of the front occupied by the screen – a not inconsequential upgrade on the S7’s 72%. It’s only 3g heavier and is just 0.1mm thicker – which is odd because if you put them next to each other on a table, the Samsung Galaxy S8 looks substantially more svelte.

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This time around, you’re getting curved edges whether you like them or not, with a gentle radius on either side of the screen that swoops down to meet the phone’s slender metal frame. You can argue about its utility, but you can’t argue that it looks great. Do be sure to get insurance, though, because it looks like it’ll cost a lot to replace otherwise. My initial gut feeling about this has been confirmed by SquareTrade, which reports that the Samsung Galaxy S8 “performed significantly worse than their predecessors” in their hard-to-watch breakability tests.

The phone inherits three design features from the previous generation: It’s IP68-certified, which means it’s waterproof in 1.5 metres of water for up to half an hour; it supports wireless Qi and PNA charging; and it has expandable storage for microSD cards up to 256GB in size, should the 64GB of onboard storage prove insufficient. USB Type-C is in, which is better in the long run – but awkward if your house, like mine, has become a retirement home for micro-USB cables. To make the transition less painful, Samsung has included an adapter in the box, along with the dedicated charge cable, which means that one of your existing cables can make the upgrade, like a pawn crossing the Chess board to become a Queen.

There’s even room for a 3.5mm headphone jack. Odd to think that’s a controversial move, but Apple, HTC and Lenovo’s recent decisions to remove it have made including the 60-year-old port a major selling point in a 2017 flagship. To get the most out of this, Samsung has included some rather nice AKG earbuds in the box. While they’re no substitute for a good pair of over-ear headphones, they are substantially better than the standard pack-in earphones, and the braided fabric cable prevents too much tangling. Samsung has since confirmed that they will be in every box, so worth trying before you return to your old trusted cans.

There are just two issues you can legitimately have with the design. The first is that a whole button is dedicated to Bixby, Samsung’s AI assistant, which at the time of writing doesn’t do a great deal. For now, it’s essentially a second home button, but the fact that Samsung has given it such prominence suggests it won’t be forever, so you can give the company a pass on that. (Previously a handful of apps on the Google Play store promised to let users repurpose the Bixby button for their own ends, but a new firmware update has apparently stopped this mod in its tracks.)

Samsung is also said to be making it possible to disable the Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, but hasn’t made it easy. Firstly, you’ll need to get the latest version of Bixby and Bixby Home via the Galaxy Apps Store in My Apps. Once updated, a new option will appear in the Settings menu (accessible via Bixby via the Settings icon in the top right-hand corner. From here you will be able to disable the feature by toggling Bixby to the ‘off’ position.

The second is harder to defend: the location of the fingerprint scanner. It’s right next to the camera lens on the rear of the device. While I was able to get used to this for unlocking over my time with the Galaxy S8, it was never as comfortable as one placed below the screen, as on the Samsung Galaxy S7 or Apple iPhone 7, or on the side of the device as with Sony’s recent smartphones. Placing it right next to the camera lens also means you often find yourself touching the lens, rather than the scanner, so you’d best get used to giving it a good polish before you take a photo.

By all accounts, this was a late design decision on Samsung’s part thanks to the fact that the technology for embedding fingerprint scanners in the touchscreen wasn’t quite ready for primetime. That feels plausible to me, and I’d be astonished if the fingerprint reader doesn’t move house before the Samsung Galaxy S9 arrives. Maybe even before then, perhaps, in a Galaxy Note 8?

Intriguingly, according to a recent survey – turned into a graph by our friends at Statista – the most appealing of these features is the waterproofing, which has been a feature of Samsung phones for four generations now.In fact, the features which are specifically new to the S8 make up the bottom four of the list, which does suggest that plenty of people would be happy with an S7. Or an S7 Edge if you must have those curves.

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Screen

Once you’re done gawking over the lovely design, the next thing you’ll notice is that the display looks a little different to current phones: it’s long and thin. While most phones work to a 16:9 aspect ratio, the S8 increases things to 18.5:9, with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,960. That’s a slightly taller ratio than the LG G6 with it’s unusual 18:9 mix. The idea, according to Samsung, is that you can get more screen real estate in a handset that won’t be uncomfortable for the small-pawed among us.

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Of course, this isn’t precisely the case. As The Verge points out, a regular 16:9 5.8in handset has a greater area – and, even if you like the newer, tall design, it isn’t without its issues. For starters, most apps currently black out the bottom of the screen, leaving the familiar Android buttons in place. That means that the job could be done just as well by a bezel for the most part.

The real advantage is for pictures and video, but there are issues there, too. 16:9 is the universal standard for video (notwithstanding the circle of Hell reserved for YouTubers, who take video in portrait mode). And if you watch any of those on your S8 then you’re going to have to decide between black bookends at each end, or cropping off the top and bottom of the screen.

Whether or not you think that’s a sacrifice worth making for a stylish, comfortable handset such as this will vary from person to person, but you’ll be unsurprised to hear that this AMOLED screen meets Samsung’s usual standards of high quality. It reaches a pretty bright 415.16cd/m2 peak brightness on manual mode, and a searing 569cd/m2 in automatic in the right conditions. Also, it covers 99.9% of the sRGB spectrum. For comparison, here’s how that looks against its key competitors:

	Pixels per inch	Peak brightness	sRGB coverage	Contrast
Samsung Galaxy S8	570	415.16cd/m2 (manual); 569cd/m2 (auto)	99.9%	Perfect
Samsung Galaxy S7	577	353.74cd/m2; (470cd/m2 auto)	100%	Perfect
iPhone 7	326	540cd/m2	95.8%	1425:1
LG G6	564	492.2cd/m2	93.2%	1678:1
Huawei P10 Plus	540	587.4cd/m2	98.5%	Perfect
OnePlus 3T	401	421cd/m2	93.2%	Perfect

In other words, this is about as good a screen as you can get. It’s considerably brighter than last year’s model and closing in on the scores obtained by the IPS screens of the iPhone 7 and the recently released LG G6.

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Performance

While the year-old S7 still pushes near the top of its class regarding performance, it would be surprising if Samsung’s latest didn’t deliver a healthy performance boost alongside its cosmetic upgrade. This isn’t a Moto G5 situation: Samsung has indeed stepped up to the plate with newer components that deliver a healthy kick.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Galaxy S8 feels incredibly fast and responsive out of the box. That’s partly because no Android handset should feel sluggish from the first boot (although some manage to crash head-first into that insultingly low bar), but also because Samsung has packed the latest technology into its thin frame.

You’re looking at a 2.3GHz octacore Exynos 8895 processor (or Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 for US-based customers), with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage, expandable via microSD card. It’s among the first smartphones in the world to use a 10nm manufacturing process to produce the chip, which promises to improve efficiency and battery life, as well as provide the best performance around.

That kind of technicality is hidden away from sight, but what I can say with certainty is that the Samsung Galaxy S8 is super-fast. Every benchmark revealed speeds at the very top of the class, as you’d expect in a smartphone closing in on £700. In the Geekbench 4 multi-core test, it smashed past the iPhone 7 and LG G6, with only the Huawei P10 Plus coming close:

As for graphics performance, it was a similar story. The S8 is a powerhouse for mobile games:

To be clear, these graphical tests are intense, with cheaper handsets routinely getting single-figure frame per second scores. While most 2017 handsets should handle the majority of games on the marketplace, it’s pretty clear that the S8 offers far more future-proofing than any other device we’ve seen to date.

If you want further proof of how ridiculously quick the Samsung Galaxy S8 is, you should know that it’s powerful enough to run Gamecube games smoothly via the Dolphin emulator – one of the few phones around capable of doing this.

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Providing juice for all of this is a non-removable 3,000mAh battery. For those keeping track, that’s the same size as was found in the Galaxy S7, which raises an interesting question: will it have more or less stamina? The larger screen would indicate less, but the efficiency of components would suggest more.

In the end, the answer is that’s it’s weaker, but not by much. In our battery test – which involves playing a looped video with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness and flight mode engaged – it lasted an impressive 16hrs 45 mins. That’s good, but it’s around an hour worse than the Samsung Galaxy S7 (17hrs 48mins) and two hours weaker than the S7 Edge (18hrs 42mins).

Better still, the phone comes bundled with a fast charger to ensure it won’t take you long to get your phone back up to full power when you do manage to exhaust it. How fast is fast? In half an hour, we observed the phone go from flat to 37%. That’s quick, but not quite as fast as the OnePlus 3T with its promised “day’s worth of power in half an hour”. Perhaps Samsung didn’t want to push it, given the battery problems the Note 7 notoriously endured.

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Software

The Samsung Galaxy S8 comes with Android N straight out of the box, as you’d expect. It isn’t the cleanest version of Android I’ve seen, still coated with a thin film of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin. It’s far less intrusive than it used to be, however, and I’ve found it fine to navigate in my time with the phone.

Regarding software, this is as much a Google product as a Samsung one, with each smartphone behemoth granted a folder of apps in the app drawer. The Google folder contains Drive, Play Movies, Duo and Photos, while Chrome, Play Music and Gmail are left floating in the app drawer. The Samsung apps tend to be duplicates of Google’s: an email app, an internet browser, a note-taking app and so forth. Microsoft also gets a folder of its own with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and Skype all installed by default.

It isn’t too bloated, but plenty of this will be unwelcome on your brand-new phone – and it’s a mixed bag as to how much of the storage you can reclaim. Google apps can be uninstalled freely, but around half of the Samsung apps and all of the Microsoft, ones can only be disabled, not correctly uninstalled, which is a bit unfortunate since they run into the hundreds of megabytes. This isn’t such a big deal with microSD support, but some apps and games are still fussy about being movable to expandable storage.

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There are a few other things worth noting. The curved edges are now the default, which hopefully means that Samsung and its developers will have more incentive to use them inventively. For now, the functions are pretty familiar – which is to say they’re useful-ish but gimmicky. You have a panel on the right-hand side that can be pulled across showing a list of customisable apps, your favourite contacts, or a utility that allows you to capture a bit of what’s going on on the screen as a screenshot, a shaped cut-out or even an animated GIF. It’s probably too hidden away for casual users and unnecessary for power users who already know their way around the various Android shortcuts, but it’s nice if you like to keep a minimalist home screen.

Then there’s face unlock, an addition to the fingerprint- and iris-recognition available on the Samsung Galaxy S7. Register your photo with the S8, and you should be able to unlock the handset without having to find the fingerprint reader or tap in your password. It works better on bright days, I’ve found, and it does feel a bit magical – although there’s been some talk of it being fooled by printed photos, which I suppose makes you marginally less secure if you’re interesting enough to hack. I like it, but I’m glad I don’t have to rely on it as the only way of accessing my phone – basically, it’s a pleasant surprise when it works. Simple things, eh?

Finally, there’s Bixby: Samsung’s AI. To be honest, at this point making such a song and dance about it feels like a misstep, since it feels pretty limited right now. Still, Samsung has at least now rolled out Bixby voice in the UK after initially holding things back and it works in a similar way to Google’s Assistant technology and Amazon’s Alexa. The one key difference is that Bixby can access various phone settings such as Wi-Fi in addition to being able to answer questions, launch apps, play media and carry out basic tasks such as setting reminders and timers and responding to email.

Bixby Voice can be activated saying “hey Bixby” or by pressing and holding the Bixby button on the left edge of the phone. Alternatively, a short click on the button gets you to the Bixby screen, which feels a little like HTC’s old Blinkfeed system, drawing in news, photos and apps from your system. And Bixby invades other parts of the Galaxy S8, too. On the camera, you can focus on an object, and then let the AI look for shopping results or image results. Shopping never worked for me, and image results were a mixed bag. Sometimes, it worked well…

Other times less so…

And at other points, it was just plain baffling:

There’s one more interesting thing that the S8 brings – the Samsung DeX. This is a dock in which the S8 or S8 Plus can sit, outputting to a monitor with a desktop-style experience. Plug in a keyboard and mouse, and you’re away. That sounds a bit like Microsoft’s Continuum, only without Windows 10, doesn’t it? Isn’t that a recipe for failure?

Surprisingly not. It’s remarkably capable and plenty fast. Individual apps appear as windows, allowing you to multitask effectively, and work pretty smoothly. We were able to use the S8 as a work laptop for a whole day, only having to drop out briefly to do some RAW image editing on Photoshop. Other than that, it works better than Microsoft’s effort, which felt a touch sluggish. It does come at a price though: DeX costs £129, which seems a lot for something which is essentially a fancy docking station. And no, you can’t just plug in a generic cable and get the same results. The feature only seems to work with DeX – we did try other connections, and the S8 didn’t respond at all.

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Camera

On paper, the camera is one area that doesn’t receive much attention, with Samsung adopting the “if it ain’t broke, then for God’s sake don’t touch it” approach. That’s sensible: the S7’s camera was about as far from being broke as it’s possible to be, second only to the Google Pixel regarding quality.

So it’s still a 12-megapixel affair, with a f/1.7 aperture with a 1/2.55in sensor and 1.4um pixels. While the hardware is the same, there are other upgrades afoot: the most obvious of these is that it now takes three shots in quick succession and combines them into a better picture. The results are, as you might imagine, outstanding.

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In conditions with plenty of light, the pictures are sharp, vibrant and full of detail. In trickier, low-light conditions, the Galaxy S8 copes brilliantly. Again, no surprise given its predecessor was also a stellar performer.[gallery:10]

(A photo from the S8 is on the left, while the same shot from the S7 is on the right)

It isn’t a huge difference, but zoom in, and it’s noticeable. The contrast is slightly better, and the colours feel a touch richer. It’s not night and day, but this edges it a little closer to the Pixel.
In low light, the performance was even better than the S7, with much less blurring when you zoom in for a sharp, colourful image.

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However, we did notice some strange artifacts on a couple of the shots. Look at the paint pallette on the picture above – now see what happens when we zoom in:

We don’t know what’s going on here. It isn’t always present, and it’s entirely possible it’s an issue with our review handset (our sister site, Expert Reviews, had no such problem with its model), or a software issue that will be fixed by Samsung in the coming weeks. For now, it’s a small but disappointing blight on an otherwise brilliant camera.

Speaking of software, this has been tweaked to make it easier to use one-handed: you can now drag the shutter button up and down to zoom in and out, and the mode buttons and live filters are clustered at the bottom of the screen when you use the phone in portrait mode. Digging under the surface a little, the Pro mode has focus peaking – an aid to manual focusing where you can see what’s in focus with a green outline. Very neat indeed, but as with the LG G6, this feature isn’t available while shooting video, which is where it would be most handy.

It’s also worth noting that if the camera is all that appeals to you, and you don’t fancy a dedicated DSLR camera, the camera module now appears in Lenovo’s Moto G5 Plus, and while the software isn’t as well implemented, the device costs only £250. Obviously, that price comes with other limitations, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

The front-facing selfie camera gets a bigger upgrade. This has gone from five megapixels to eight, and the results are suitably sharp. Plus, you now have Snapchat-style filters, so if you’ve ever wondered what I’d look like as a heavily airbrushed rabbit then today is your lucky day:

So, is the camera an improvement? Modestly, yes, but it isn’t the kind of development that you should cash in your S7 contract for.

Samsung Galaxy S8 vs. S8 Plus

So the Samsung Galaxy S8 is a brilliant but expensive phone – but how does it compare against the S8 Plus? In the past, mini Samsung handsets have disappointed when compared to their larger siblings, after all.

Well, the good news is that the S8 is identical to the S8 Plus, aside from the obvious: the S8 Plus has a bigger screen. The resolution is the same, so it is just for people who prefer more to look at, and more to hold.

Internally the S8 and S8 Plus are identical, other than that, barring a slightly larger battery to cover the extra power expenditure the added size. And yes, the 3,500mAh battery of the S8 Plus did give us 20 hours and 33 minutes of battery in our test – a substantial improvement over the S8’s 16 hours and 45 minutes.

READ NEXT: Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review

Samsung Galaxy S8 review: Verdict

Over 3,000 words later (a personal high-five to everyone who read every one of them), what’s the take home? Well, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is comfortably the best phone I’ve ever used. It’s fast, looks great, has a fantastic camera and has a screen that will do any photos captured justice.

There are a couple of missteps – the fingerprint scanner is in a silly place that will lead to many a smudged lens, and Bixby feels underdeveloped – but for the most part, this is a product from a company at the top of its game.

The question is: do you need this much phone? For most people, probably not – the price is very high, and the gap between what budget and top-end smartphones can do is shrinking by the month.

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That said, if you want the best of the best, then this is it – and the cost is already beginning to fall dramatically. After starting out at nigh-on £700, (as of September 2017) the S8 can be had now for more over £100 less at around £550.

That’s still hardly dirt cheap and, if you want a great phone without the wallet endangering price tag, then the OnePlus 5 is a better bet … just. If you want the best of the best, however, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is the phone for you.