Samsung finally unleashes the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+

Samsung today officially launched the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones at their Unpack event. This comes in the wake of constant rumours,speculations leaks of the device and their capability. Finally today all has come to pass and we now know what the Korean behemoth has been working on. So without further ado, lets get into the meat of it.

Hardware and Features

We’ve moved past the S8 onto Samsung’s virtual reality platform. A new version of the Gear VR was announced earlier this year - the change is that it comes with a motion sensitive controller.Tie-ins with the new Ghost in the Shell movie, UFC fighting and Live Nation are being touted by Samsung’s Jemma Jones.

Bixby

Bixby, like Siri, Cortana and the Google Assistant, is Samsung’s new personal assistant and it’s built into the heart of the S8. It will learn what you like as you use the phone and try and refine its suggestions to help you based on your location and recent usage.

when using a Bixby-enabled application, Samsung’s personal assistant can support almost every task that the application is capable of performing - so you don’t have to remember which features work with voice command and which don’t.

As was rumoured prior to the reveal, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ feature iris recognition which debuted in the now discontinued Samsung Galaxy Note 7. A biometric recognition module scans the users iris to unlock the phone, verify their Samsung account and more. It is an optional security feature that users can choose to enable. Both the devices will also feature the now common fingerprint scanners on the back.

On the hardware design front, Samsung has continued to further a higher screen-to-body ratio. It has completely eliminated side bezels by placing an aggressively curved 2.5D display that is directly fused with the back of the device which it calls the Infinity-Edge-display. Moving the aforementioned fingerprint scanner to the back of the device permitted the company to cut down on the chin of the handsets as well. On the Samsung Galaxy S8 we see a 5.8-inch super AMOLED panel displaying at a 1440 x 2560 pixel resolution. The elder sibling features a slightly larger 6.2-inch super AMOLED panel at the same resolution. At the heart of the device resides either Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 835 SoC or their in-house Exynos 8895 SoC depending on your region. Both processors are expected to be clocked at 2.35 GHz. Both handsets feature 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage which is expandable via a microSD slot.

On the camera front, the smartphones have a 12-megapixel ‘Dual-pixel’ rear camera with an f/1.7 aperture, optical-image stabilisation and LED-flash. The selfie shooter up-front is an 8-megapixel shooter with an f/1.7 aperture. Both camera modules front and rear also support phase detected auto-focus (PDAF). And finally we come to the battery and Samsung has endowed the Galaxy S8 with a 3000mAh non-removable power-pack while the S8+ gets a 3500mAh reserve tank thanks to its slightly larger frame.

Pricing & Availability

Samsung did not announce the pricing of the new flagships at the Unpack event but The Verge managed to source it from telecom operators. The smartphones will go on pre-order from 0001 Hours ET on 30th March from Verizon, AT &T and Sprint Mobile starting at $720 (~₹46,665) for the Galaxy S8. The Galaxy S8+ is expected to be pegged at $840 (~₹54,430). Every pre-order will be eligible to receive a free Gear VR with Contoller and Oculus content pack OR can choose instead for a $99 “experience box” with Gear VR and controller, Harmon Kardon headphones and a 256GB microSD card.