Galaxy S8 & S8+ review
Carriers and Pricing
This is a review of the smaller Galaxy S8. There is also a larger Galaxy S8+ model, with a 6.2-inch screen and a larger battery.
The Galaxy S8 is available from every major carrier in the US and several prepaid carriers. While it's only available from carriers right now, an unlocked version will follow in May or June.
Prices in the US vary from $659 on Walmart's Total Wireless, to $750 at AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile (I tested the phone on Sprint and T-Mobile). You may also be able to get a promotional deal at big-box retailers like Best Buy or Target. We have a full rundown of the different prices and deals for the S8, and MobileSyrup has a good overview of Canadian prices.
It's also worth mentioning that this is a review of the US and Canadian unit of the phone. Other countries have a different device with a different Samsung Exynos processor that may function differently.
Physical Design
"The core idea behind the Galaxy S8...has been to deliver the biggest screen in the smallest device possible," Robert Kim, vice president of Samsung's global product strategy team, told me at Samsung's headquarters in Korea. "The contradiction is that [customers] want to have a bigger screen size but a small form factor," Kim added. By shrinking bezels and bending edges, Samsung makes that happen.
The Galaxy S8$720.00 at Verizon Wireless is proportionately tall and narrow. It's also very slippery, so you'll want a case. It measures 5.86 by 2.68 by 0.31 inches and weighs 5.47 ounces. That's taller than the Galaxy S7 (5.61 by 2.74 by 0.31 inches), but narrower—and remember, the S7 only has a 5.1-inch screen to the S8's 5.8-inch panel.
The idea is you're going to use it in one hand. It's easy to wrap your fingers around the S8, even if you have relatively small hands. But you're still going to be shifting it up and down in your hand more often than you would with the S7 or the iPhone 7$649.99 at T-Mobile, to reach all of the vertical stretch of the screen.
Almost all of the front face is the 5.8-inch, 2,960-by-1,440 Super AMOLED display, which Ray Soneira at DisplayMate has said in a comprehensive report is the best one on the market. It's bright and glowy, with saturated colors and great blacks.
It's also a little smaller than Samsung says it is, because of the new 18.5:9 aspect ratio. Most phones are 16:9, so the S8 is taller and narrower than they are. It's even narrower, proportionately, than the LG G6, which is 2:1. The S8's screen is 13.23 square inches—I call that SQUID, or square inches of display.
On a standard 16:9 aspect ratio phone, you get the same real estate in a 5.6-inch screen. So I think you should consider the S8's screen on par with the 5.5-inch, 16:9 displays on the Galaxy S7 Edge and iPhone 7 Plus.
Above the screen, a notification LED blinks if you have unread notifications or a low battery. There's a new button on the left side. It's there to activate Bixby, Samsung's voice assistant. On the bottom there's a single speaker, along with a USB-C port and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. The speaker sounds richer and less tinny than the S7's does. It's also about 1dB louder at its maximum volume.
The phone comes in three colors: black, gray, and silver. I received black review units, and they get very smeary on the back. It's especially an issue because the fingerprint sensor is on the back right next to the camera lens, and while there's a slight ridge between them, it's almost unnoticeable. That means you will definitely smear the camera lens when you go to use the fingerprint scanner.
The phone is waterproof, which will be a relief to many. But the all-glass body seems a bit fragile. Samsung said that by using Gorilla Glass 5 with a more gentle curve than on the Galaxy S7 Edge, it's made the phone more durable. At its manufacturing plant in Gumi, Korea, it showed me a four-foot drop test. Still, though, that glass back will be inherently more breakable than a metal back, and Samsung's curved glass is expensive to replace.
"Compared to the S7, component wise, [durability] is a 40 percent improvement," Kim said. "Device-wise, it's around 20 percent."
Using the Screen
The Galaxy S8 has no physical home button. Instead, you press on the screen where you see a home button icon, and you feel a little bit of haptic feedback. It works just fine. The app drawer icon is gone, too—to get the app drawer, you swipe up from the home area. It takes a little getting used to.
The aspect ratio definitely creates issues with third-party apps. YouTube videos, for instance, either have black bars on the sides, or get zoomed and cropped into full-screen mode. Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Koh said Facebook has already updated for the new size, and, "All of our major partners are working on it."
On a settings screen called Full Screen Apps, I found that many text-oriented information and social networking apps, such as Microsoft Office, TripAdvisor, and Marvel Unlimited, are optimized for the tall screen, while most games are not. Everything runs, it just might not use the whole display. Launching an un-optimized game such as Mini Metro displays the game with black bars on either side of the screen.
21:9 wide-screen movies look great, with less letterboxing than on the Galaxy S7. 16:9 TV shows, on the other hand, have visible pillarboxing. Launching a 16:9 video in YouTube gives you the option to pillarbox the video, or to zoom and crop into full-screen mode, but that forces part of the image off of the screen. This is similar to the experience on the LG G6$650.00 at T-Mobile.
Phone Calls, Networking, and Storage
Yes, the Galaxy S8 makes phone calls. It has whatever your carrier's latest phone-calling techniques are (like HD Voice, VoLTE, and Wi-Fi calling) and calls sound clear, with aggressive noise cancellation in the microphone. I was especially impressed with the speakerphone volume when the Extra Volume button is pressed—the voice blasting out of the bottom-ported speaker is easily hearable outdoors.
The rest of the networking alphabet soup is supported as well. There's dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, which I found worked about as well with our Netgear router as the Galaxy S7 does (which is to say, very well). The phone has NFC and MST, so you can do mobile payments even with old school magnetic credit card readers that don't support tap-to-pay. ANT+ is on board for certain smart home devices.
This is the first phone with Bluetooth 5, which can potentially transmit to devices 120 feet away, as well as to two sets of headphones at once. However, there are no other Bluetooth 5 devices out there to test the S8 against yet.
The phone comes in one size, 64GB with 4GB RAM, and there's also a microSD card slot tucked in with the SIM slot, which can handle 256GB cards. Samsung still doesn't support Google's Adoptable Storage mode, so the card will appear as a separate storage device. But you can move apps to the SD card from one of the settings pages. About 10.7GB of the phone's storage is taken up by the system and non-deletable apps.
Battery Life
Battery life is far better in real-world practice than it is in our benchmarks. With the same size battery as the S7 (3,000mAh) driving a larger, brighter screen, I got considerably shorter time on our screen-blasting LTE video streaming test: 5 hours, 45 minutes on the S8 compared with the S7's nearly 9 hours. That made me uncomfortable, so I tried some other scenarios. Dropping the screen resolution to 1080p got 7 hours, 39 minutes. Dropping to half brightness got twelve and a half hours.
In real-life use over several days, with the screen generally at around half brightness, the S8 had no problem lasting through the day each time. In general, I ended up with about 30 percent battery after a 12-hour day before starting to charge again, with the shortest run-out time at about 16 hours and the longest well over 24 hours.
The Google Pixel$649.99 at Verizon Wireless has a 1080p screen, and if you set the S8's screen to the same resolution, you get about the same usage time. But the Pixel is better at not draining battery in standby. The iPhone 7 has shorter screen-on usage time, but it's more efficient in standby and playing audio.
The good news is that the S8's quick charging feature is very quick. The phone charges from zero to 100 percent in about an hour and a half. I got to 15 percent charge in 15 minutes, and 30 percent in half an hour.
Samsung Mobile R&D VP Bookeun Oh told me, "I focused on maintaining the durability of the battery over the long term, over hundreds of charging cycles. For example, after approximately six months of normal usage, the battery in the S8 will outperform previous batteries. While most batteries hold about 80 percent of their charge after two years in usual cases, this battery should be capable of 95 percent of its original capacity."
I'm also confident this phone won't explode. I took a trip to the factory where AT&T and Verizon units are made, saw Samsung's array of new tests, and spoke to the company's battery advisory council. Samsung is taking battery safety seriously in a way that it didn't with the Galaxy Note 7, and these phones are very extensively tested. Using a smaller battery than it could have, I'm sorry to say, is also part of the new focus on safety.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835: Snappy?
The S8 is the first US phone with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. Qualcomm has been making a big deal about calling its chipsets platforms rather than processors, and some of that is because most of its improvements are in areas like DSPs, graphics, and modem capabilities, and not the individual CPU cores.
See How We Test Phones
You see this in the benchmarks. First of all, benchmark results change depending on what you have the screen resolution set to. Looking purely at the CPU, the single-core Geekbench score of 1,836 isn't any better than the Snapdragon 821-powered LG G6, at 1,811. The multi-core score of 5,960 outpaces the G6 (4,195), but only matches the Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P10.
But the 835 pumps a lot more graphics horsepower than those competitors do. On the most advanced GFXBenchmark Car Crash test, the Galaxy S8 pushed 12fps onscreen and 22fps offscreen at WQHD resolution. That's around double the G6 or P10's performance. Down at 1080p resolution, it scaled to 43fps onscreen, double the Google Pixel's result.
Left to right: Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S7
Using the Snapdragon 835-optimized Samsung web browser gives the S8 superior JavaScript and web performance, too. It scored 71 on the JetStream Javascript benchmark, to the LG G6's 54 and the Google Pixel's 55. On the Browsermark web test, the Pixel scored 118 while the S8 made it to 145. That means snappier web page performance overall.
Between this and the modem advances (described below), the benchmarks bear out Qualcomm's contention that device performance is more than just individual processor cores. Of course, that cuts both ways. While our test S8s were fast and smooth, Samsung devices have a reputation for lagging badly after a year or so (that's certainly happening with my S7). Because that lag is frequently solved by a factory reset, it's clear that the problem is in software, not hardware.
Samsung has sworn up and down that the S8 won't have the creeping lag issues that previous models did. Of course, it's sworn the same thing before. There's no way to tell during the first week of use, alas.
The Modem: The S8's Secret Weapon
Smartphones aren't much use if they don't connect. The S8's invisible, secret weapon is that it's the first US phone with gigabit LTE and HPUE, combinations of four technologies that can improve performance on all four networks. I tested the phones on Sprint and T-Mobile, and found distinct improvements over the Galaxy S7.
Samsung says all the carrier versions of the phone are identical, frequency band-wise. That means all U.S. Galaxy S8 phones will work on all the U.S. and Canadian carriers, as well as roaming globally. However, foreign phones may have some foreign LTE bands which are not common in the U.S.
On Sprint, the S8 is the second phone (after the LG G6) with HPUE, which improves connectivity in weak signal conditions, especially with upload speeds. It delivers as promised. Over 34 tests in extremely weak signal conditions, only eight failed on the S8 while 24 failed on the S7. That's a major difference. In 48 tests of slightly better but still bad conditions, I got 2.33Mbps uploads on the S8 and only 1.3Mbps on the S7 (downloads were pretty much the same between them).
As signal quality gets better, the S8's advantage fades. With decent signal, the S8 got 9.83Mbps down and 4.69Mbps up, while the S7 showed 7.41Mbps down and 4.79Mbps up. In our strongest signal test, both phones had no trouble hitting 120Mbps speeds right by a Sprint cell site. HPUE doesn't raise the roof—it raises the floor.
The outcome for Sprint users: If you are frustrated with Sprint connectivity in a place where Sprint is supposed to have LTE, getting a Galaxy S8 will go a long way toward curing your dead-zone problem.
The S8's advantage on T-Mobile is different. It combines several different technologies to potentially double download speeds. In T-Mobile's case, the difference should get more dramatic as speeds get better and faster, the opposite of the Sprint situation.
I only ran ten tests on T-Mobile because of data limits, but I still saw the difference: 15.36Mbps down and 11Mbps up on the S8 compared with 8.65Mbps down and 10Mbps up on the S7. In congested areas, the S8 is the third phone (after the LG V20 and G6) to use its new Band 66 LTE network, which should prevent speeds from crashing too low.
The phone should improve performance on AT&T and Verizon, as well. AT&T has called the S8 its first "5G Evolution" phone, which means it has the same three technologies that T-Mobile terms "gigabit LTE." AT&T's rollout is going a little more slowly than T-Mobile's, with Austin and Indianapolis getting the network first.
Verizon has stayed irritatingly coy about its plans for gigabit technologies, but the same three elements should work on its network, too. In late 2016, Verizon said it had 3x carrier aggregation and 256 QAM, and it said it was deploying 4x4 MIMO more than a year ago. Verizon wouldn't confirm whether 4x4 MIMO is activated on its version of the phone, though.
The S8 is also the first phone with LTE-U, a new form of LTE that uses Wi-Fi airwaves to enhance capacity in crowded areas. I haven't seen much in the way of LTE-U buildouts yet, but AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all working on it.
Software: Taking Android to the Edge
Samsung does not leave Android alone. You have to be OK with that to enjoy Samsung phones. The Galaxy S8 runs Android 7.0 Nougat, but with Samsung's icons, home screen, and apps added to Google's. And not just Samsung's: Our Sprint unit came with six Amazon apps, six "featured" apps, and eight Sprint apps for a total of twenty chunks of carrier bloatware. Fortunately, those are uninstallable.
Samsung is also keeping its custom camera, gallery, music, and phone apps, although the music app is a downloadable option. The phone app now integrates a sticker and GIF messaging function that's tied to your Samsung Account, which will be able to be used if your friends also have Samsung accounts.
The "always-on" front display has a more visually appealing design than on the S7, with a colorful spray of stars across the screen. Like on the S7, it shows the time and date or a calendar, as well as notification icons. Double-tapping on a notification icon shows you more information, or takes you to the app which was sending the notification.
The really tall screen allows for a neat multitasking trick: You can select a chunk of an app's screen and pin it to the top, running other apps in the bottom half. That lets you watch a video while sending texts about it, for instance.
You can swap the order of the back and multitasking buttons in the software. Press down on a home screen icon, and you get Google's Quick Option menu, letting you clear notification badges and uninstall the app.
Samsung's edge functionality is better than ever. You swipe in from the right-hand side of the screen to see app shortcuts and your favorite contacts by default, and there are more than two dozen other Edge Panels you can download. There's a calendar, a calculator, a note-taking app, messengers, and system status widgets. They're genuinely useful.
Also useful, but perpetually hidden in stacks of settings screens, are all of Samsung's custom settings options. Want to change the screen color gamut? The order of the virtual buttons at the bottom? Want to change what's shown on the always-on display? Samsung's phones have always been highly customizable, unless you're talking about getting rid of the Samsung stuff entirely.
Three Ways To Prove Yourself
Since Samsung seems to realize that putting its fingerprint scanner spot right next to the camera isn't the best idea, it offers up a buffet of other ways to authenticate yourself. The two more exotic ones are face and iris recognition.
Face recognition is quick and easy. In our tests, it worked flawlessly and nearly instantly. But it also isn't secure, Samsung warns. I couldn't get it to unlock using a picture of my face, but others have been able to do so. That means it'll defeat casual attempts to unlock it, but not a determined antagonist who knows who you are.
Iris recognition is more secure. It's also far pickier. Samsung advises that users take off their glasses to unlock their phones, which I'm happy to say isn't necessary. But iris recognition only worked eight out of 10 times for me, it's slower than other methods, and I was often bombarded by prompts to move the phone higher and farther away.
Complicating things, you can use your iris or fingerprint for Samsung Pay, but not your face.
I started out not using the fingerprint scanner, but after a few days, I was using it regularly. The change happened when I put the S8 in a Caseology Legion case, which has a slanted cutout for the fingerprint scanner and camera. The case cutout gave me the tactile cues I needed to hit the fingerprint scanner without smudging the camera.
Bye Bye Bixby
Samsung's flagship new service, Bixby, can't be tested yet. It won't be launched until May. The idea behind Bixby is that you push a dedicated button on the side of the phone and you're able to command it by voice, for instance, to send a photo you just took to someone in your contact list.
According to Samsung Mobile CTO Injong Rhee, Bixby will initially work with ten built-in apps, including camera, contacts, gallery, phone, reminders, and settings, but notably not the browser, calendar, or email. Rhee said those will come in the second batch of 10, and the company has 32 apps targeted.
"Right now, our focus is on the device interface and application controls," Rhee said. "As Bixby's ecosystem expands, clearly there's an overlap between what Bixby can pursue and what Google Assistant can pursue. We are working with Google...so we can actually benefit from both." For the record, "OK Google" works just fine on this phone.
Pressing the Bixby button right now takes you to "Hello Bixby," Samsung's answer to Google Now's stack of personalized cards. By default, it shows your most recently taken photos, reminders, weather, and a news feed, although with time it's supposed to prompt you with apps and information it thinks you might want—pushing Uber at you if you take an Uber at the same time each day, for instance.
Other much-heralded new software remains similarly elusive. Samsung Connect is supposed to bring together all of your (new) Samsung appliances and SmartThings Hub functionality. It doesn't work yet, so I can't judge it. Samsung's Dex, a system to turn your phone into a desktop PC, also isn't ready yet. See our in-depth look at DeX for more details.
Best Camera Ever
The Galaxy S8 has a 12-megapixel camera, just like the S7. But it's better. I took side-by-side images with the S7 and S8 in a variety of modes, and the S8's pictures are clearer and brighter, with more detail and less artifacting. While the S8 doesn't have dual main cameras, there's a software-based Selective Focus mode to create bokeh, and a pretty good Pro mode that includes Raw capture and manual shutter speed.
Low-light performance has taken a step up, too. Compared with the S7, shots taken in very low light show noticeably more detail on the S8. The S8 outpaces the Pixel in low light, too, with sharper detail, less artifacting, and slightly better colors. I'm comfortable saying that the S8 has the best phone camera I've seen, although I'm also going to turn the phone over to our camera analyst for a longer look.
The front-facing camera has improved from 5MP to 8MP, and it's gotten autofocus. In practice, that means sharper focus on faces, with backgrounds going slightly out of focus. That makes photos of yourself look great, but it means that if you're used to taking photos of yourself in front of things—famous buildings, for instance—you'll have to make sure to lock focus on the distant object to get the same fixed-focus look you're used to.
As light gets lower, the front-facing camera gets a bit soft, but it keeps skin tones warm. I prefer this approach to what the Pixel does, which makes my face look pale and dirty as it tries to dramatically brighten my features. Actual exposure isn't necessarily better than the S7, but you have more pixels, so things don't look quite as soft.
Both cameras record video as well, of course, to true 4K with the main camera, and 2,560-by-1,440 with the front camera, both at 30fps in all circumstances. There's also a 60fps 1080p (barely) slow-mo option. The main camera has OIS and the front camera doesn't, but in general, they're both excellent video cameras, much as the S7's was as well.
One new gimmick, Bixby Vision, isn't a great differentiator. It's a mode in the camera that can shop for products or translate text based on a picture you take. But it's no better than Google Translate or Microsoft Word Lens (in fact, the translator just uses Google Translate). It's not a minus, it's just not much of a plus.
Comparisons and Conclusions
Phones are connected devices. That's also what they do: connect us, to each other and to the internet. We create things, whether they're words or pictures, and we share them. The Galaxy S8 is the best phone available for creating things you want to share, sharing them, and experiencing things shared by others. It's the most connected device possible.
That said, the Google Pixel is less expensive than most S8 carrier models at $649. While the S8 is slightly better in many ways, the Pixel has a cleaner interface, more frequent Android updates, and longer standby battery life. For AT&T and Verizon users, meanwhile, the unlocked ZTE Axon 7 and OnePlus 3T deliver all of the power most people want for around $400.
The S8 securely kills the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in our eyes, though. While the iPhone SE$399.99 at Verizon Wireless is still an excellent value, platform lock-in is pretty much the only reason to get an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus over this device—the idea that you've spent so much time and money learning Apple's apps and using iMessage that it would be too much of a bear to leave.
But the phone is expensive enough that I would hesitate to upgrade from an S7, unless you think the better modem will help you connect where you couldn't before. The S8 is better than the S7 in every way except battery life, but it's a lot of money for incremental improvements.
I prefer the S8 to its larger sibling the S8+, though. This is purely a taste issue, as I love how the S8 is comfortable in one hand, even with a case on. The S8+ adds a bit more battery life and a bigger screen for $100 more, but doesn't add any other functionality, and I don't think the trade-off for usability is quite worth it. People with large hands, of course, may disagree.
The Galaxy S8 is the most luxurious, best performing phone on the market right now. It's on fire, and I don't mean that literally. Maybe it's more phone than most people need. But it's almost certainly better than the phone you have. And for that reason it's our Editors' Choice.
