Samsung Galaxy S8 Specification, Release Date, Price Revealed

Venture Beat, thanks to the ever-brilliant Evan Blass, has secured an image of the Samsung Galaxy S8 in all of its glory, it would appear. There are some things to rejoice about and some things that aren’t so good. Many of these things aren’t a huge surprise, given the leak that came via The Guardian earlier this week.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Specification, Release Date, Price Revealed

First up is that rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, we knew from the leaks that the new phone would have a tiny top and bottom bezel and a curved edge. This means that there’s no room for a fingerprint scanner on the underside side of the front face. Take a look at the section below, and I’ll explain why I think this is a disappointment, given the technology available.

My real concern is about the proximity of that fingerprint scanner to the camera. It may sound like a stupid thing, but it’s going to result in people smearing finger grease all over the camera lens. This isn’t the end of the world, but I often find with my iPhone that finger grease can mount up and ruin images. When you’re snapping things quickly, there often isn’t time to wipe the lens first.

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You’ll also note that claims of the headphone jack being removed are widely disproven by this leak. That’s interesting given that Apple hasn’t suffered too much for the dropping of the now-ancient port. Bluetooth headphones and dongles are familiar enough not to cause many problems, and HTC is rapidly moving away from including headphone jacks and using USB-C instead. The bonus of this, on HTC phones, is that they can measure your ears to give better audio quality, and also include noise canceling.

Two models, there’s no “flat” phone this year

The leaks currently suggest two devices, one of the 5.8-inches and one of 6.2. Now I know every one of you reads all of my posts like a gripping novel, so there’s no need to remind you that I wrote about this sizing plan before. But prior information suggested a 0.1-inch smaller screen, at 7.7-inches, which the new report rules out.

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Concept Samsung Galaxy S8

As predicted, the flat S7 has been replaced with a curved model of a different size. I’m all for this; I think it’s a sensible idea although I would like to have seen the smaller handset be 5.5-inches or even lower. I say this because I maintain that the S6 Edge is Samsung’s best phone.

Same same, but different

Although the processors are moving to a 10mm process – which is critical – the phones aren’t changing all that much internally. These are still quad-HD screens that have 4GB of RAM. There’s a boost to the baseline internal storage, which is now 64GB and the microSD slot that Samsung brought back to thunderous applause can give you a 256GB increase if you fancy splashing the cash on a high-capacity card.

Other than those small tweaks, these phones are technically very similar to the S7. It’s, therefore, the design which is going to sell these devices. And I suspect that their new screen ratio – Venture Beat says it’s 18.5:9 instead of 16:9, the standard widescreen ratio – will be the thing that sells this phone as most impressive to general consumers.

USB-C is, apparently included. The image makes it look a bit like those are microUSB ports, but that would be insanity – Samsung already introduced USB-C on the ill-fated Galaxy Note 7, and it wasn’t responsible for the phones problems.

Batteries drop very slightly in capacity, but with a gain from the move to 10nm processors it’s quite unlikely that the real-world battery life will be reduced over last year’s models. And you’ll get a more powerful phone with a much-improved graphics system.

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