It's here.
Y'all know the salient facts. Amazing display, misplaced fingerprint sensor, the frisson of danger that comes from wondering whether it'll explode, Bixby thinger, weird split of SnapDragon 835 for the US, Exynos something-or-other for the RoW.
Well, it's certainly exceeded my expectations. My current work phone is a Samsung Galaxy A3, running Android 6. It's ooooookay. To be fair, it does wifi calling and HD voice and runs Outlook, and that's 90% of my use case, right there. It's small and a bit clunky but it's a cheeky chappie that mostly gets the job done. It's the Norman Wisdom of the work phone world.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is not like this. The S8+ is tall and elegant and impeccably turned out.
The QHD+ screen is just glorious. I get a 6.2" display in a footprint that's narrower and only a shade taller than the iPhone 6S+. It's crisp and bright and vivid and the blacks are just so damn black (none more blacker!). DisplayMate have rated this as the best mobile display they've ever tested, and you can see why.
The build quality is (whisper it) as good as Apple's. Only with a notification LED and a front-facing IR camera that can scan your irises, and a heart-rate monitor, and no bezels to speak of, and Bluetooth 5, and a faster camera, and fast charging, and all the other things that are probably coming to the iPhone 8. The industrial design is clearly better than the iPhone 6 family; all the symmetry in the world on the bottom edge can't make up for the fact that OH EM GEE DEM BEZELS IZ YUGE. Anyhoo.
It's fast and easy and you can twiddle everything, and Samsung's apps (Health, Calendar in particular) are actually pretty good. Touchwiz looks pretty nice these days, especially compared to Norman.
Samsung provide a thing called Smart Switch, which lets your Galaxy plug into your iPhone and suck its brains out. It seamlessly transferred all my call history, message logs, pictures, music, files and so on. Easy as pie.
One thing that is interesting - the gulf in functionality between the iOS version of the Samsung Gear app and the Android version. Wow. How much of that is for technical reasons and how much is for political/marketing, I dunno. But iOS Gear can't do shit compared to Android Gear.
Android still puts a boatload of shit into the status bar (location, BT, wifi, 4G, alarm, battery, clock, uncle Tom Cobbely and all) and I'm pretty sure the notifications are made of witchcraft. Also (and in common with Apple), every single ringtone and alarm sound that comes with the phone is 100% twee bullshit.
Overall it seems like a pretty awesome phone. I got the orchid grey one, but that's kind of academic. I've only used it in the nude (the handset, not me) for long enough to go "woah, this is going in a case" and it's now in an orange UAG case. And all the S8 colours have a black front, presumably to help conceal the fleet of sensors and cameras.
Any questions?
Well, it's certainly exceeded my expectations. My current work phone is a Samsung Galaxy A3, running Android 6. It's ooooookay. To be fair, it does wifi calling and HD voice and runs Outlook, and that's 90% of my use case, right there. It's small and a bit clunky but it's a cheeky chappie that mostly gets the job done. It's the Norman Wisdom of the work phone world.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is not like this. The S8+ is tall and elegant and impeccably turned out.
The QHD+ screen is just glorious. I get a 6.2" display in a footprint that's narrower and only a shade taller than the iPhone 6S+. It's crisp and bright and vivid and the blacks are just so damn black (none more blacker!). DisplayMate have rated this as the best mobile display they've ever tested, and you can see why.
The build quality is (whisper it) as good as Apple's. Only with a notification LED and a front-facing IR camera that can scan your irises, and a heart-rate monitor, and no bezels to speak of, and Bluetooth 5, and a faster camera, and fast charging, and all the other things that are probably coming to the iPhone 8. The industrial design is clearly better than the iPhone 6 family; all the symmetry in the world on the bottom edge can't make up for the fact that OH EM GEE DEM BEZELS IZ YUGE. Anyhoo.
It's fast and easy and you can twiddle everything, and Samsung's apps (Health, Calendar in particular) are actually pretty good. Touchwiz looks pretty nice these days, especially compared to Norman.
Samsung provide a thing called Smart Switch, which lets your Galaxy plug into your iPhone and suck its brains out. It seamlessly transferred all my call history, message logs, pictures, music, files and so on. Easy as pie.
One thing that is interesting - the gulf in functionality between the iOS version of the Samsung Gear app and the Android version. Wow. How much of that is for technical reasons and how much is for political/marketing, I dunno. But iOS Gear can't do shit compared to Android Gear.
Android still puts a boatload of shit into the status bar (location, BT, wifi, 4G, alarm, battery, clock, uncle Tom Cobbely and all) and I'm pretty sure the notifications are made of witchcraft. Also (and in common with Apple), every single ringtone and alarm sound that comes with the phone is 100% twee bullshit.
Overall it seems like a pretty awesome phone. I got the orchid grey one, but that's kind of academic. I've only used it in the nude (the handset, not me) for long enough to go "woah, this is going in a case" and it's now in an orange UAG case. And all the S8 colours have a black front, presumably to help conceal the fleet of sensors and cameras.
Any questions?
