Everything You Need to Know About the New Samsung Galaxy S8

Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus was released early May. There’s alot to be excited about, so we’re here to break down everything you need to know about Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone.

The first thing you’ll notice when you set your eyes on the Galaxy S8 is that screen! It curves around the edges of the phone, measuring 5.8 inches on the S8 and 6.2 inches on the S8+. That’s 0.7 inches more than the S7 and S7 Edge respectively. But despite having a larger screen, the S8 is actually no bigger than its predecessor. This is because Samsung has managed to save room with a sleek, near bezel-less design and by implementing a virtual home button.

A new feature has been introduced on the S8 called Bixby, Samsung’s very own virtual assistant which has been likened to Siri and Google Assistant. Samsung describes its new virtual assistant as “an intelligent interface that learns from you to help you do more. It learns from your routines to serve up the right apps and content at the right time, keeps track of your to-do list, and gives a deeper understanding of what you are looking at.” Bixby can be easily accessed using the S8’s new dedicated Bixby Button on the screen.

Samsung gives us three different ways to unlock the S8. The first is by touching the fingerprint sensor on the back next to the camera. The second is by using the iris sensor at the front of the phone. The third way is to use Samsung’s very own facial recognition system, which unlocks your phone at lightning fast speed. It’s expected to be an improvement on previous face-unlock methods, though we’ll have to wait and see just how secure it will be.

The 12 MP camera is actually the same as the S7, but those who have used the S7’s camera will already know how good it is. It is capable of shooting 4K video and Samsung also says that it has made some improvements to the camera software and image processing, so we can still expect it to take better photos and videos than the S7.

As for the nitty-gritty specs, the S8 will come with 64 GB of internal storage, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Octa core processor and 4 GB of RAM. After the Note 7 incident, Samsung wasn’t too ambitious with its battery this time around, giving the S8 a respectable 3000mAh battery and the S8+ a 3500mAh battery.

There are five different colour options available for the S8: Maple Gold, Coral Blue, Arctic Silver, Orchid Grey and the classic Midnight Black. Pre-orders start here in New Zealand on April 20 and the phones will be on the shelves by May 1.

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