Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unbox yes it's time to talk about the Samsung Galaxy s8 plus so this is the company's new flagship Android smartphone for 2017 there's a ton of interesting new features to talk about so this could be a long one so stay tuned but before I get into any of the features or anything like that I do want to mention that because I live in Australia of course I've been sent an extra nice model of the si+ if you're in North America you will be given a variant with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SOC inside but for us in the rest of the world including Europe and Australia it's the Exynos 88-90 5s SSO a bit different from some of those United States reviews that you might be seeing out there we'll be talking all about the performance of the external world exclusively in this review simply because I haven't had any hand side of time at the other variant so just before we get any further keep in mind that all the benchmarks that we'll be showing you guys a little later are also available to view in text spots written review over on tech spot comm including some benchmarks that we don't put in this video so head over there after you checked out the whole video here for more content available on the Galaxy S A+ anyway onto the show because we need to talk about the design of this handset and there's a lot of things to like about it and obviously one big downside as well to talk about so the main thing to notice with the Galaxy S a plus of course is the screen to body ratio Samsung has gone basically removed the bezels on the smartphone entirely to slot in that 6.2 inch AMOLED display that occupies almost the entire front panel they've removed the navigation buttons along the bottom edge instead going with on-screen navigation buttons and they've significantly shrunk the bezel at the top of the screen even though it still includes things like the center notification LED speaker and front facing camera you still get all those features but this screen simply takes up so much of the front of this handset that it looks extremely futuristic you really don't notice how dated and ugly other smartphones look with their massive bezels until you get your hands on the galaxy s 8 plus this is a futuristic design trend that other companies will need to imitate to keep up with the pack I don't want to see big vessels on phones anymore now that I've used the galaxy si plus of course you also see those curved display edges I'm not a huge fan of those person I think they add a bit of distortion to the display experience but it certainly looks awesome when you sort of take it out of the box and go wow you know that's the phone's curves got glass on either side looks fantastic and that translates into the rest of the build of this handset I mean it's metal around the edges it looks and feels great in your hands glass fully on the back again gives you that premium look while still allowing wireless charging to be a thing in this handset and the build quality it's seamless it's fantastic and it's such a big step up from what we used to see from Samsung and phones like the galaxy s5 they revolutionize their design language with the galaxy s6 and they've refined it incredibly in the galaxy s 8 plus to make this the best looking phone you can get on the market at the moment the one downside though that comes with making a phone with these materials and its build is that as Steve mentioned in his video where he ranted about his own galaxy si plus this is an incredibly fragile phone we've seen reports all over the internet that discuss how you know phone repair shops going crazy because they're making tons of money on people who are buying s8 pluses or s apes dropping them within the first week and the screen shattering one of the reasons for this is due to that curved edge it doesn't add a lot of rigidity to the design if you drop it on your desk on the edge there's a chance that the weak glass in that area will shatter and also glass on the back that's another weak point of the phone drop it on the back and that glass will shatter as well on top of that it's extremely slippery because you've got the oleophobic coating on both sides to attempt to prevent fingerprints at school a fingerprint magnet it slips out of your hand like nothing else it slides along desks there's not much of a rim around the edges you do get that metal there that gives you a bit of grip but it's just not slim it's just not large enough on those edges to make it easy to hold the device I if it slips out of your hand you're pretty much ruined so that is one thing to know it's a bit disappointing because Samsung has clearly made the most attractive smartphone body on the market at the same time you're spending you know 800 bucks on the phone and you'll want to keep it secure the entire time that you're using it and with the si+ that means you pretty much need to get a case so you've got that awesome design but at the other hand you need a case that makes it look ugly and pretty crap to prevent it from breaking it's a bit of a downside as far as the SI plus is concerned and kind of hinders my recommendation of it a little bit if you're willing to put up with the case you get some great features but at the end of the day I'd really want to see that design and all of its glory without it being so fragile there's another issue with the galaxy a-pluses design and that is the position of the fingerprint sensor which is simply pretty dumb I mean what with Samsung's engineers thinking putting the fingerprint sensor right next to the camera lens whenever you go to activate the fingerprint sensor you'll be putting grimy fingerprints all over the camera lens and that can impact the camera quality quite significantly after a couple of attempts of hitting that sensor so I would have made a lot more sense to put the fingerprint sensor below the camera so that you're not constantly grimy up the camera and having to clean it all the time yeah it's just a pretty dumb move as far as that's concerned you do get a bunch of great features throughout the si+ as design though USBC is included on the bottom for the first time exam some gear VR headset is held back the s7 edge from coming with the USB C port when you get that on the SI parts of the first time you still get the 3.5 mm audio jack phones that don't have that as simply stupid it's fully water resistant ip68 so you can use it underwater in a fresh water don't use it in salt water it will corrode the phone but aside from that you know splash resistant and all of that you a tray on the top of your nano SIM and also a micro SD card so you still get expandable storage in this handset the notification LED I still love that feature about phones Union led notification LED in all Android handsets to be honest and yeah the speaker that's included on the bottom are not too great in terms of its quality but it does go pretty loud a super fern you know dual front-facing speakers on your phone but when you're sacrificing the bezels you know you probably can't fit too much of a speaker setup in there so I forgive samsung a little bit for that one this player is obviously one of the key areas that Samsung has upgraded from the s7 edge we're now seeing a 6.2 inch Super AMOLED with a resolution of 20 60 by 1440 so an 18 point 5 to 9 aspect ratio making this display much taller than you'd normally see on a traditional smartphone compared to the s7 edge it's 17% larger the main thing that's changed here is the height of the display obviously you get 400 extra pixels of vertical height the width of the two displays 5.5 inches on the s7 edge 1 which is 6 point 2 inches here it's pretty similar in terms of its width but again it just Samsung has expanded the display vertically to occupy more of the front of the handset and I think that that is an excellent choice because screen to body ratio is all the rage these days in terms of usability even though this display is taller and larger than last year's model I still found it easy to hold and operate this phone I think the width is usually the limiting factor here for display usability so the extra height doesn't make a significant difference here most Android applications support the expanded aspect ratio perfectly fine by default for those that are locked to 16:9 Samsung has a handy toggle that lets you expand the app to use the full display and this works pretty much perfectly in all the time so I had to use it the main benefit is having the taller display despite it using more of the handset profile it does make it easy to use of split screen mode that's included Android 7.0 you can see a bit more of each application on the screen and any one time although one of the downsides I guess is that if you're watching a video that's shot in 16:9 like most videos on YouTube or whatever you will see black bars on either side of the display you can zoom in the video so that it occupies the full 18 point five to nine I display aspect ratio but that cropped the top and bottom of the video not too keen on that so I tended to just put up with the black bars on either side but I can't see most people making content 18 point 5 to 9 aspect ratio so this is an issue that will plague all phones that decide to use that expanded you know display aspect ratio though I still would put up with that considering just how awesome the display looks on this handset when looking at display performance and some is still a leader in terms of their Super AMOLED technology we're getting the traditional benefits of AMOLED tech deeper black levels that lead to an infinite contrast ratio which really make colors pop on this display viewing angles are fantastic case with all amyloids viewing this displayed off angles you get almost no color shift and the main benefits something that Samsung has managed to engineer really well in the MLS is a high peak brightness over 570 nets in the s8 plus makes this display very easy to view outside traditional amyloids tend to sit in more of the 300 to 400 nits peak brightness range but I guess Samsung doesn't worry about power consumption just pushes it straight to the max in the SI plus it's almost LCD territory in terms of that particular aspect in terms of color accuracy this is an area that sounds sometimes to calibrate out-of-the-box they go for again with it's outside of srgb which leads to an oversaturated display in general of course that leads to poor color accuracy because Android has no color management to speak of if the government is outside srgb you will be seeing oversaturated and too vibrant imagery but I think that tends to look really awesome on a smartphone and something that most people look for when they're working in this way you know they pick up a phone in the store whatever to test out they go wow you know that that just works awesome it's a vibrant it's beautiful and now that's pretty much what most people want so I guess you can kind of forgive the poor accuracy and in terms of you know our saturation and color checker results there however for those that do need their phone to have a color accurate display whether that's creative professionals developing apps or something like that Samsung does have a basic display mode that you can switch to that improves the color accuracy significantly it tends to make the operating system look pretty crap because Samsung designs their operating system for the vibrant display but it pulls back in the saturation color check a gross scale performance significantly it's not super accurate I prefer to see a delta a value under two in most of these tests like on the Galaxy s7 edge but it still is a big change from the default color performance mode it's also we're talking about a feature I haven't seen as phone's performer is the resolution toggle out of the box this phone is set to the FHD plus mode so that's a 1080p equivalent display resolution here you will want to push that up to the full 20 960 by 1440 resolution as soon as you get it because it does give you that extra sharpness and Clara when fewer things like photos and text moving on to the performance now and as I mentioned earlier there are two variants of the s8 parts available one with the Snapdragon 835 that I won't be talking about and also go to another video or something if you're interested in performance of that variant what I do have with me is the very with the Exynos 88-90 v SOC inside so the main upgrade here in terms of last year's model the galaxy s7 edge that use the Exynos 88-90 is a shift from a 14 nanometer to a 10 animated manufacturing no to increased efficiency and slightly better performance there we're still seeing an optical design split into two quad-core clusters the high-performance cluster uses externals and one CPU cores clocked it up to 2.3 gigahertz in the s8 plus and the energy efficient cost of this use for low performance tasks is arm cortex a53 CPU cores clocks it up to 1.7 gigahertz here in terms of GPU we're looking at a Mallee g71 MP 20 with a clock of 546 megahertz so a big upgrade on the Exynos 88-90 also seeing an lpddr4 X memory controller is attached to 4 gigabytes of RAM in the galaxy s 8 plus and we're also seeing 64 gigabytes of NAND we're seeing LTE categories 16 for the first time in an external chip so that means you get gigabit LTE downstream category 13 upstream also seen bluetooth 5 in a smart phone from the first time Wi-Fi 802.11 AC NFC all the stuff that you're after in a high-end phone you're getting in this particular device as we move to benchmarks because that's of course what you guys are interested in and taking a look at how the X on off eight eight nine five performs across a range of CPU limited workloads it's around 22% faster than the s7 edge with its 890 in their CPU limited system benchmarks despite having a lower clock speed on the high-performance cause it sounds like they'll say that we should be seeing a 27% performance improvements a little bit lower than that across the board but it still leads to a very snappy experience in everyday tasks although Tory won't notice a big difference if you're moving just from the s7 edge compared to a device with the Snapdragon 820 one like the pixel EXO 2 and 20% faster on average how of our the whywe meet nine which includes a cure in 960 SOC the si+ fall short by around 6% the cortex 873 cpu cores used in the q9 6g tend to be a bit more power from the m2 s that we're seeing in the 88 and 95 both of these phones you know are very strong contenders here if you're upgrading from a two-year-old external powered galaxy s6 to Android 37 percent better CPU performance so decent results there we're looking at GPU workloads again the mallard g71 MP 20 is a big upgrade on last year's model we're seeing a 60% faster GPU compared to the galaxy s7 edge with the Exynos chip inside pretty massive performance difference here and when you're limiting to just on screen benchmarks si+ still holds a 54% performance advantage over the s7 edge despite its increased resolution compared to phones with the Snapdragon 820 one inside games are a bit small and around the 39 percent performance improvement still pretty impressive compared to Qualcomm of last generation silicon and compared to the mate no 0 960 which also uses a mallard g71 but only the MP 8 variant the SI plus pulls way of around 32% on average in it in general VRS 8 plus here with the g71 MP 20 tends to perform around the same mark as the iPhone 7 plus and we know how powerful Apple's GPU is in there a 10 SOC unfortunately I don't have enough data to compare the eight at 9 5 to a Snapdragon 835 SOC at the moment so that's a check back on hardware box soon because I do have an 835 device to take a look at shortly what are the main issues with Samsung's Exynos sots has always been throttling and that is no exception unfortunately with the s8 plus we're still seeing after about 25 minutes of an intensive gaming workload that the GPU inside the Exynos 88-90 5 throws by over 40% which reduces the performance pretty significantly it still does outperform chips like the Snapdragon 820 one after it you know throttling for each tube is factored in but I really prefer to see this throttling for within the range of Qualcomm chips which tend to be more in the 20 to 30% range 40% is a lot and I think so need to work on that a little bit in their various that they are shipping to most international customers in terms of man performance are they have improved these sequential performance a bit compared to the s7 edge getting very soil sequential results here however random results still still fall sort of middle of the pack I'd like to see better random performance that would improve some of the you know uploading app writing to storage sort of works workloads that we see in smartphones but disappointing the router performance here but you know generally using the si+ it's a very snappy device and applications very extremely quickly it's the top-end phone to go expect good performance that's what we're seeing across the board here samsung has paired great performance with great battery life in the SI plus hopefully we're not going to see any explosions this time around but we are seeing a 3500 milliamp hour battery here slightly smaller than the 3600 milliamp hour so that we saw the s7 edge but thanks to the increased efficiency of the 10 nanometer SOC battery life tends to be around the same mark as the s7 edge in some of our benchmarks like our web browsing task Falls a little bit behind and other tests it can pull a little bit ahead so it just depends on the metric that you're looking at but generally very good performance across the board compared to one of my favorite phones on the market the Google picks or Excel the si+ lasts around 10% longer on average that's a very strong result here it's great to see good battery life in a high-end phone we don't want to see they're not going for something that's too slim and negating battery life entirely the SA pass will last you all day no rows one thing to note though this is important the s8 plus uses an always-on display this is pretty handy you get to see things like your time and notifications all the time but leaving this feature on does impact your standby battery life which is not reflected in these charts I like having the feature enabled it's great it gives me information at my fingertips whenever I pull my phone out of my pocket or whatever but it will reduce of standby battery life so if you do want to get your phone to last as long as possible you will have to disable that feature out of the box I feel like I've been sitting here talking for ages on the si plus but it's definitely still more to get through and most notably the camera Samsung has done something unusual here and that they haven't upgraded the camera sensor from the s7 edge we're still seeing the same 12 megapixel sensor with 1.4 micron pixels with optical image state and an F 1.7 lens so we're still getting the same dual pixel technology and what that means is that along with the light detecting pixel in the sensor every single pixel is also paired with the phase detection unit meaning that focusing speeds are pretty much unparalleled you put your phone up to a subject and it's focused almost immediately on the si+ that's one of the great features about this camera one of the things Samsung has improved is the processing they've tweaked it slightly and I think the main thing that is upgraded here is its dynamic range you get photos with a bit more depth in them and improve performance in sort of your indoor artificial lighting settings and at low light but have improved in the in terms of its dynamic range you still get fantastic results across the board photos taken with the s8 plus look great if they're outdoors they look pretty good when it's indoors cameras tend to suffer a little bit here but the SI plus one of the best performers indoors detail not too fantastic Samsung does play apply aggressive post-processing noise reduction filter so if you zoom in you will see some of the oil painting effect here which is a bit disappointing but in terms of its you know color performers photos are vibrant they look great they tend to be well meted unless you're in a cloudy situation or you're in tricky indoor lighting situations some of my photos were tinted a bit red in indoor situations and looked a bit cold if it's cloudy but aside from those sort of minor deficiencies you be getting great photos from the si plus it's a very dependable camera your point of shoot you get great results and that's what I've seen from Samsung phones in the past one thing to mention is that I didn't think the photos from this camera were quite as good as I found in the Google pixel Excel the pixel excel has an incredible automatic HDR mode that just produces fantastic photos across the board the s8 plus isn't close good the indoor situations that the pixel excel exceeds in but still very strong performance when the SI plus and I think it's probably the second best camera on the market at the moment you also get a great range of other camera features like your traditional slow-motion modes there's a hyper lapse mode I was really impressed with the manual mode you get to control our whole range of features almost pro DSL our level here looking at your ISO your shutter speed your white balance but all things like your metering mode and also your focus mode which we don't normally see on smartphones I love having those controls in this particular device 4k video recording on the rear camera you can also get 1080p 60 frames per second recording if you want that on the front is limited to just 1440p recording but I was pretty impressed with the front-facing camera this has been upgraded from the s7 edge to an 8 megapixel sensor with autofocus and F 1.7 lens yet some pretty decent background blur in your selfies from this camera and improve low-light performance i love the companies focus on the selfie performance in low light and the si+ succeeds pretty well in this regard software is always a contentious issue when it comes to samsung devices because i know a lot of people out there don't like their TouchWiz interface atop android 7.0 but i think they've made some pretty decent strides in improving the visual styles their interface in what they're now calling the samsung experience apparently it's no longer TouchWiz it is the Samsung experience some of the things they've done across the board is make it look more professional make it look more neat make it flatter reduce some of the childish and cartoonish elements that they used in their previous things is much more clean there's clean lines nice rounded elements I really like some of the design tweaks that they've made here it fits in reasonably well with stock Android they use some elements from Google stock Android design here though it's not necessarily the same and still allows the si+ of software to standout from stock Android Samsung has made a number of changes to elements around the Android interface you'll see the notification pane is a vastly different visual style but you still get pretty similar features like your highly informative notifications you still get your quick setting toggle split into two settings along with the brightness slider Samsung has cut down the unnecessary crap here in favor of just the elements you need which is pretty decent the settings screen has also been changed significantly with the simplified design making it far easier to navigate than any previous Samsung hands that love the condensed sub menus here and they even give you a few tips to try and make it easier to navigate through the sections if you happen to stumble into the wrong area there also a lot of features throughout the software I'm not going to discuss everything because some of the stuff we've seen in previous galaxy s7 devices and so for things like your app notification blocker full theming support there's a one-handed moon just your support and even a game launch of things like improving performance and you know capturing some in-game footage on the handset itself does even a new maintenance tool makes it easy to do things like management Bachelor life and Storage turn on performance mode secure your handset and so forth I like seeing tools like that included it's a nice way to condense all that information into the one easy-to-use utility blood wear isn't as much of an issue on the s8 plus because during the setup utility you can choose to not install a bunch of unnecessary crap like there Jupiter internet browsers like FS health and so forth I really like that feature actually I wish more companies would choose to rid yourself of the bloatware and their setup utility however there are still a number of bloatware and unnecessary apps in my opinion included on this phone there is a duplicating gallery app and most notably Galaxy apps I don't know why samsung feels the need to include that own app store on the s8 plus Google Play is a perfectly fine utility Samsung just update your apps through the Google Play School please I don't need to see it galaxy apps on this phone so if you other bits of bloatware here and there as well not the cleanest android experience going around but Samsung are making some improvements in that regard the edge screen is still a feature included on the si+ apparently sent some things you need a curved display for the edge screen but really could be implemented easily on a flat screen anyway are you simply swipe in from the right of the display to bring up the edge screen it's got apps shortcuts to apps that you use frequently there's some contacts that you might want to know speed dial in then perhaps the most useful features some of its screenshotting utility but to go the edge screen got in the way more than it helped me out throughout my time is near safe pass and I pretty much just disabled it from the get-go it's not too useful another feature I didn't find too useful was Bixby which is the main new software inclusion on the SI + / to be honest it's a pretty straightforward clone of both google now an assistant it doesn't add a whole lot of new functionality that couldn't have been achieved through implementing either of those features you do get Google Assistant on its handset it is a far better option for voice searching from what I've heard although I can't actually use big speed voice in Australia - not included here just yet Bixby home is included on the leftmost and of the homescreen includes things like your calendar reminders whether some news information reminders so forth in there these are all things we've seen before in Google now it doesn't really add a whole lot to the experience they're a big speed vision the easiest way to categorize this is it's similar to Google Goggles back in the day though you point your camera at something it tries to identify it tries to show you information a bit more of a gimmick than useful I wouldn't go around you know using bixby vision on things every single day so yeah bit of a gimmick there not to a person with big spit overall but Lee sounds like you know they're trying something new they're trying to compete with Google assistants but pretty much just use Google assistant if you needed that functionality unfortunately Samsung thought the big screen would be so useful that they include a dedicated button for it on the left hand side of the phone the amount of times I've used this button is probably once just to test that it actually worked because unfortunately you can't win that but does something useful I really love it if you could remap the big sweet button to your favorite app or even something more useful like Google assistant but you can't on the SI parts without a third party utility and that's pretty disappointing if you're including a dedicated button that could be remapped to something Samsung you should allow us to remap but that's good user practice but before you can't do it on the si+ are much to my disappointment so if you've made it all the way through my galaxy A+ review to the M here let's recap what I think is awesome in this handset so the design it looks fantastic it looks futuristic with that display occupying almost all of the front panel the build quality is immaculate and you know other manufacturers will really need to step up their game and produce more zero bezel handsets because this is where the design trend is heading and this futuristic design makes all other phones are pretty crap in my opinion the display itself Super AMOLED looks awesome great viewing angles great brightness great resolution looks vibrant and over saturating gem which I know a lot of people like fantastic performance in the Exynos 88-90 5 even though it's throttles at some situations great back to life once again the camera is fantastic produces excellent photos almost across the board thanks to some minor tweaks and focusing speeds are still very fast doesn't quite come to the same level the pixel Excel becoming in second message to a fantastic feed as far as cameras are concerned we're still seeing some great tweaks to the software it's improving TouchWiz every year even though bloatware is still an issue big speed doesn't add a whole lot to the experience and we're still getting pretty useless edge screen but there's a lot of features packed into the galaxy s 8 plus that some people will find it useful the main downsides to this phone are the horrible position of the fingerprint sensor on the back and the fact that it's pretty much the most fragile phone ever made you're going to need to put on a case on this phone so that doesn't shatter when you drop it for the first time that's a disappointing aspect really because they've made one of the most beautiful designs ever as far as smartphones are concerned but they haven't made it sturdy enough for everyday use if you're one of the people that loves could be cases on your phones anyway by all means go out and buy the s8 plus and enjoy the excellent functionality and features that it provides but if you rather use your phones without a case you want to see the beauty of the handset you don't want the extra bulk and unattractiveness that is provided by a case then perhaps the si+ isn't for you and if you look on the market for some of the other options like the LG G 6 and other phones that are coming up in the coming months that's what I main take away here by the SI plus if you like using the case don't buy it if you think it's too fragile and yeah check out the full review on Tech's bottle con with all the benchmarks in there we're finally at the end of the video thanks everyone for watching the whole way through if you like this video definitely consider supporting us through our patreon and we'll catch you in the next one