Samsung Galaxy S8+ Review: Infinity Display for Everyone
14 min read
Samsung Galaxy S8+
RM 3699
Pros
- Excellent build quality
- Excellent accessories package (Micro USB adapter, USB OTG adapter, AKG earphones)
- Excellent 6.2-inch display quality
- Excellent rear camera quality & user experience
- Lightning fast Dual Pixel AF
- Great front camera quality
- Excellent performance
- Great battery life
- Fast charging
Cons
- Awkward fingerprint scanner position
- Half baked Bixby virtual assistant
- Expensive
Software, Performance & Battery Life
Software & Features
Samsung has given their TouchWiz Android skin a complete overhaul, of course, the name has been rebranded to Samsung Experience. I have to give them the credit for this because they actually made a difference with the new improved skin.
The overall look and feel are now much more polished with flat and simple icons. While there are still some features that Samsung carried over from TouchWiz, but at least they are disabled by default as no many people are actually using them.
Bixby
Launched alongside the Samsung Galaxy S8 family is the Samsung’s own digital personal assistant, Bixby. That puts Bixby in the same league as the Google Assistant and Apple Siri. If I were to compare them, I’d say the functions are pretty much similar with Google Now and Assistant combined.
Swiping from the left at the home screen will bring you directly to the Bixby page where you get weather, calendar and news update here. Does that ring any bell? It is just as similar as Google Launcher.
Then one of the key features of Bixby is the Bixby Vision, an AI image recognition where you can actually use it to identify or search for similar items on the web. This feature also supports on the fly translation just by pointing your camera at the text you wanted to translate.
However, Malaysia’s Bixby release is missing out the voice recognition as the feature itself is not 100% ready for worldwide release. It is only available in South Korea at the time of this review is published. This clearly shows that the software is not fully baked and they decided to release it prematurely.
While I do appreciate all the efforts in the AI industry, but since the phone is based on Google Android and Google had a much powerful Google Now and Google Assistant, I don’t see any reason for my to use Bixby at all. Even the Bixby Vision has been done by Google Goggles app many years ago, even though the Goggles is pretty much dead right now. On-the-fly translation with the camera? Google Translate can do that too.
Edge function is still around for quick access to your favourite actions and tasks.
For instance, you can have calculator app right from a simple swipe from the edge.
The most interesting part of the S8 is that we finally get the soft navigation keys. Gone is the old physical and capacitive buttons. That also means that we can change the orientation of the Back and Multitask buttons to the correct location.
By the way, Samsung Pay works and it is so convenient to use. Paid for my meals over at McDonald’s and groceries at Tesco.
Performance
Benchmark
The new Exynos 8895 SoC absolutely destroys its predecessor, especially in the graphics department. The upgrade from Mali T880 MP12 to the latest Mali G71 MP20 is showing its results.
GeekBench 4 shows about 15% and 21% increment in the single core and multi-core performance respectively over the S7 edge. Too bad that the Compute test couldn’t be run on the S7 edge and Huawei P10 Plus as the app would just crash halfway through the benchmark.
Side by side comparison with the Huawei P10 Plus, we are getting a really interesting result here. While the P10 Plus has been losing out to the S8+ in the previous benchmarks, the P10 Plus makes a come back in the PCMark Work 2.0 test.
3DMark’s result is pretty straight forward as the S8+ has a way powerful Mali G71-MP20 than the P10 Plus’s Mali G71-MP8.
While there are claims that the S8 and S8+ also suffer the inconsistency of UFS2.0 and UFS2.1 storage, the sample unit we got here is running on UFS2.1.
Real Life Performance
Numbers aside, using the phone in real life is a joy. It handles everything I throw at it without any hiccups. Games run extremely smooth on it despite the higher resolution display. Multitask on the phone is much more comfortable now thanks to the extended screen real estate. Overall, I have no qualms over the phone usage and frankly speaking, this is probably the best Samsung experience I ever had for a long time.
Battery Life
Many have raised an issue when Samsung announced that the S8+ only will come with a 3500 mAh battery. That includes us in the spec comparison article we published a few months ago. A phone with high-resolution 6.2-inch display paired with 3500 mAh battery could spell poor battery life.
After a week in Taiwan during the Taipei Computex, my am really impressed with how Samsung manages to optimise the battery use where I still could get jobs done without having to plug into my power banks. It was a hectic week where I need to use the phone for constant social updates and communications. Still, the phone manages to keep up with everything for the whole day.
While the screen-on-time might not be that impressive with about 3.5 hours, standby time is really good and that’s the exact reason how it manages to last me a day without trouble.
Charging is quick thanks to the Samsung Adaptive Fast Charge where it only takes around 90 minutes to charge from 10% to 100%.
The Adaptive Fast Charge wall adapter is rated at:
- 9V / 1.67A
- 5V / 2A
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