Computer Shopper - July 2017

FLAGSHIP ANDROID SMARTPHONE
SAMSUNG Galaxy S8
★★★★★
£689 • From www.amazon.co.uk
VERDICT
Pairing speed and power with a sophisticated and attractive
design, the Galaxy S8 runs rings around the competition
THE SAMSUNG GALAXY S8 is one of the
most anticipated phones of all time. Not only
is it the follow-up to one of 2016’s best devices,
the Galaxy S7, it also has the unenviable task
of winning back anyone who got burned –
fi guratively or literally – by the ill-fated Note 7.
The standout feature is its screen. The
bezels of the display have been almost entirely
shorn off, leaving a screen that extends to
almost every edge of the device, save for thin
slivers of black glass at the top and bottom.
It thus fi lls virtually all of the S8’s front
panel, with just a few millimetres of bezel
banding the top and bottom edge. Curved
edges now come as standard, too; there’s still
a larger, pricier Galaxy S8+ model, but
Samsung has dropped the fl at-screened
variant and the Edge moniker with it.
FULL SCREEN MODE
The device is immediately arresting and the
Galaxy S8 looks unlike anything else on the
market. It’s essentially a fl at slab of glass, but
there’s no way you’ll mistake it for any other
phone. It’s an absolutely gorgeous device –
instantly striking and breathtakingly beautiful.
It is, without a doubt, the best example of
smartphone design produced to date.
As part of the great bezelpocalypse, the
home button and navigation buttons below
the screen have been replaced, leaving a
soft ware-based navigation bar. However,
Samsung has also included an ‘embedded’
home button, which emulates the
feel of a physical button using
technology that feels similar to
Apple’s Force Touch. It’s very
polished, to the extent that we
almost prefer this style of button
to Samsung’s previous approach.
As you’d expect from a
Samsung phone, the display is
pretty much fl awless. sRGB colour
gamut coverage hits 99.9% and
contrast is, unsurprisingly for a
Super AMOLED panel, perfect.
The QHD+ resolution is pin-sharp
and the brightness, which we
measured peaking at 569cd/m 2 , is
absolutely blazing – the maximum
setting actually carries a health
warning. This is also the only
smartphone screen to be certified
by the UHD Alliance to the Mobile
HDR Premium standard.
The use of an unusual 18.5:9
aspect ratio means the Galaxy S8
is taller and thinner than you’d
expect, which makes it much more
comfortable to hold and use
one-handed. It also feels a lot
smaller than it actually is, in a
good way. It may be a 5.8in phablet, but it
actually feels more like a 5in device, easily
fi tt ing into your pocket. It also feels a lot
slimmer than you’d expect, given it’s 8mm
thick, thanks largely to its tapered
edges.
One slight issue is that because the
vast majority of video content is
formatted to fi t the more common 16:9
aspect ratio, you’ll often end up with
black bars surrounding whatever you’re
watching, which somewhat defeats the
purpose of an edge-to-edge display.
There are several viewing options, such
as cropping the content to fi t your
screen, but you’ll likely lose the edges
of the picture in the process.
THE POWER OF EIGHT
Performance is spectacular. Samsung
has been all but topping the charts
for speed for recent generations of
its smartphone range, so it’s no
shock to fi nd it’s still doing the same
here with the S8.
⬅ The Galaxy S8’s stunning screen extends
to almost every edge of the device
Packing Samsung’s 10nm Exynos 8895
CPU and 4GB of RAM, the Galaxy S8 scored
1,994 in Geekbench’s single-core test and
6,629 in the multicore test. The latter is
the highest score we’ve seen on any
smartphone, and the single-core result is
also the highest on Android; only the
iPhone 7 scored higher, with 3,489.
It’s just as powerful in games, achieving a
spectacular 64fps average in the GFXBench
Manhattan offscreen test. By pipping the
iPhone 7’s 63fps, that’s another new record
for the books.
Networking is similarly speedy, with
Gigabit Wi-Fi and LTE support out of the box.
While Gigabit routers and mobile networks
are still far from widespread, they’re defi nitely
on the rise, so it’s nice to know that the S8 is
in a position to take advantage of all these
emerging technologies.
BURNING SENSATION
Batt ery life is the only mild disappointment.
The S8 clocked up a score of 16h 45m in our
benchmark tests, and while that’s still an
incredibly high score, it’s about an hour less
than the S7 and about two hours less than
the S7 Edge. On the other hand, this still
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JULY 2017 | COMPUTER SHOPPER | ISSUE 353