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The first phones from Samsung since the exploding Note 7 launched today. Here are three things to consider before buying the Galaxy S8 or S8+.
The latest from Samsung is, by all accounts, big and beautiful. The screen – 6.2 inches and HD – is almost the full size of the phone. The sides are curved and the corners rounded. There’s no traditional home button, instead, the fingerprint sensor is on the back of the phone and there is a pressure sensitive area at the bottom of the screen. The battery lasts for two straight days, it comes bundled with high-quality headphones with a normal headphone jack and, of course, the phone is water resistant too.
It’s not all perfect. The pressure-sensitive part of the screen is easily triggered. The revolutionary iris-scanner and facial detection doesn’t always work right. But most importantly, it hasn’t blown up yet.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ offer a lot to be desired. Still, there are three key things to consider before buying.
1. How important is camera quality?
At first glance, the camera on the S8 and S8+ looks to be a lot of fun. It has Snapchat-inspired filters, including live filters that recognize your face and let you play with virtual props. According to Quartz, there’s also a veritable plethora of camera modes to choose from:
There’s a “selective focus” mode that can take some pretty extreme selfies (that you can later refocus to the background if you’d prefer), a selfie mode that can slim down your face, a “food” mode for taking the prefect photo of your brunch, the ability to take wide-angle selfies, slow motion video, panoramas, manual-focus shots, and everything else you’d expect from the company that made one of the best smartphone cameras last year.
But while that’s all well and good, the camera itself is not quite up to the standard on the market today. There’s just one rear camera and no manual focus, which means the photos don’t look quite as sharp as ones on iPhones.
2. Do you desire voice-activated assistance?
You know Alexa, you know Siri. Samsung wants you to use Bixby. In the future, Bixby voice assistance will connect all your Samsung appliances and devices. For example, connecting your phone to your washing machine to your fridge. But the technology in the Galaxy S8 and S8+ is not there yet.
On launch day, the S8 and S8+ do not have voice assistance. Instead, they offer a “Hello Bixby” screen that provides an assortment of information like the weather and calendar reminders. The phones also have “Bixby Vision,” a function that allegedly can identify objects in photos and provide more information. At this time, though, the accuracy and efficacy of Bixby Vision is still hit or miss. Again, from the Quartz review:
Bixby could tell me that the bottle of wine I had on my counter paired well with beef and lamb, and that 2015 was a decent vintage (because it partnered with Vivino, a wine-comparison company). But the phone was equally sure that a can of Coke was either Coke, or a jar of Trader Joe’s red peppers, because this information was being fed through data from Pinterest, and seemed to be based entirely off of what colors and patterns were in the image.
If it’s any consolation to Samsung, Apple’s own efforts at image-identifying technology are not going particularly well either.
3. Are you ready to pay up?
The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ are expensive. The S8 is listed at $750 and the S8+ costs $850. For now, those are both more expensive (about $100 more) than the iPhone 7 and Google Pixel. But, the new Galaxy phones do start with nearly twice as much storage (64 GB vs. 32 GB). And, if the you wanted to wait for the same features on the iPhone 8, that’s expected to cost you $1,000.
