Gadgetory

trying to figure out an intro for the Galaxy s8 in the galaxy si plus review has been tough this is actually about the fifteenth take I've done I wasn't quite sure what to say I went back and forth on saying they have the weight of the company on its shoulders since the note 7s Fiasco is it more than just a marketing hype of a floating whale but it boils down to this the Galaxy s8 at least on paper and in your hand looks to be an incredible phone but how was in a real world usage I didn't just test this phone in the office and take pictures of things I set up I took this phone out in the real world and use it the way I use a phone to the park with my kids to Home Depot to buy stuff I need it for my new home and throughout the courses review I'm gonna answer the question that hopefully you guys have on your minds is it worth your money should you buy it and did I end up picking one up I'm John written drew from TechnoBuffalo this is our review of the galaxy s 8 and the galaxy s 8 so let me get some of the details out of the way I use this phone for ten days and I use both the s8 and the s8 plus they go through the review I'm gonna just say s8 the only differences between these two phones aside for about a hundred bucks and price is little bigger screen size an extra 500 milliamps on the back all phones nowadays kind of look the same they're different variants of the rectangle so had a chance to first pick up a Galaxy s8 it struck me for its design and that's a hard thing to do nowadays the big story with the SI discrete that's what Samsung's touting the marketing machine came up the terminal finita display and if you can familiar with Samsung displays in the past you probably know it's gonna look really good and a holy crap is this display look incredible and if it seems like I am overly excited about it it's because I am legitimately overly excited about this play this is what I use all the time what you use all the time how you interact with your phone it's gotta be good and man does it look really good even mundane things like checking emails and sending SMS look awesome and are kind of fun to do because things look so crisp that's even with the resolution scaled down to a little bit better than 1080 versus a qHD that's capable of just for comparison purposes it's got 36% more screen real estate than we saw on the galaxy s7 and the galaxy s 8 plus 6 point 3 inch screen size almost the exact same footprint as the iPhone 7 plus so you are getting a ton of screen real estate you're also getting some new design cues you've got rounded corners you've got now the edge display that's on the standard models but it's a much less subtle I just what we've got on the galaxy s7 the mbola tech Samsung's had in the past is here they've added mobile HDR which looks nice I didn't test that much mobile HTR I did watch them netflix content looks marginally better but the story for me and how the screen is better than previous generations is in direct sunlight that has been the Achilles heel of almost every smartphone and I'm a dad I take my phone out take pictures of my kids at the parks and I want to be able to see what the screens gonna look like so I can get that perfect shot if you take the brightness and push it all up 200% you're gonna get all 1000 nits of brightness coming out of this thing now if you can feel the phone getting super warm when you're pushing that much brightness you can actually see the display in direct sunlight which is really rare and also really refreshing to see the other stuff you'd expect from the screens looked good certainly do games and video look absolutely beautiful they do have the curved display here so holding it kind of be tricky often times I was launching the edge panel so they're trying to hold the sides and for playing games your right hand is certainly gonna cover the single downwards facing speakers so you got to figure out how to hold your hand properly to get real audio to come out when playing game is your even watching video and while the screen is beautiful perhaps the most surprising thing about the Galaxy s8 is Samsung finally laid the smackdown on carriers and there's not a tramp stamp to be found on any of these I'm looking at you Verizon in your check mark you like to put over home buttons and speaking of home buttons you are not gonna find a physical one here on the galaxy s 8 because of all that screen real estate Samsung made the home button in the screen itself it's kind of like a force touch 3d touch type thing it's a touch panel all the way across the bottom you can push it all the way and get a bit of haptic feedback and you can go home it also means for playing a full screen game or watching a full screen video you can sort of push hard on that screen you'll be able to go home instead of just tapping on screen buttons come up and then hit the home button again perhaps the biggest downside of the phone is removing that physical home button meant and I meant moving the fingerprint reader to the back of the phone and oh what a horrible choice for an otherwise really awesome phone they put it oddly directly next to the camera sensor and because you don't have any humps anymore on this camera sensor when you're using the phone looking at the screen your finger doesn't really know where to go to hit that your print reader which means your camera sensor is going to fingerprints all over it I wish you would have put that somewhere else and I kind of think Samsung knew then they give you a ton of other ways to unlock your phone things like iris scanner for the note 7 are here and it works well especially works well in dark environments it works through sunglasses but if you in direct sunlight it's not gonna work so well for you Samsung brought back something that used to be on old Android devices and tried to improve it with facial recognition it works a little bit slow for my tastes and it can be fooled with some pictures so it's not the most secure buy found another way to unlock your phone it's there so in typical reviews after I talk about the screen I'll jump into build and it's kind of hard to do that the SI it because the screen pretty much is the build and I will say this the phone feels really nice in the hand despite it being so thin I don't feel like I'm going to drop it and also for someone who's been using an iPhone 7 plus in the past I really appreciate how thin the phone is in my pants I don't have bone bulge in my jeans I didn't do any drop tests on it but it is coated front and back with Gorilla Glass 5 so presumably be able to survive those drops and everybody will come in my 10 days of testing haven't noticed any scratches but man is it a smudge machine I've got the black version and my fingerprints are everywhere it's not like I just ate like McDonald's fries and picked up the phone I washed my hands like a normal Clemen being and it still looks kind of gross in the back the aspect ratio is also changed with the screen getting bigger in fact the galaxy si+ fits into almost exactly the same footprint as an iPhone 7 plus so that means your experience at the phone is a little bit different it's tall and thin it's more Giselle and less like Jack Black you're gonna be able to see a lot more content on the screen but it also means you're gonna have to really stretch your thumb to get to the top to put the notification tray the Samsung lets you do things like you use a fingerprint reader to swipe down to bring that down but again it's hard to reach the fingerprint reader with the Galaxy S a plus and it's hard to find it on either phones the virtual assistant world is pretty saturated right now but Samsung thought there was room for one more so enter Bixby the only Ricky interaction you're gonna have a Bixby probably at launch you can accidentally press the dedicated Bigsby button when you're trying to push volume down and if you do push that you're gonna get hello Bixby which is gonna look very similar to Google now of information at rating birds victory visions also here kind of gives you an augmented reality information on books wine or products I tried to test it out at Home Depot excited by a showerhead and it did not work or very well for me but the big selling point of Bixby is that you can control anything you can with your finger with your voice that also is not working as of launch date so Bixby's kind of half-baked right now so Samsung software's a tough one to talk about I've been let's just say less than kind in the past about samsung GUI and I think a lot of you guys have been less than kind and as soon as you bought a Galaxy S whatever the first thing he did was down a little launcher ever since I think the galaxy s6 Samsung has been getting way better in fact I'm gonna go on record of saying this I love what Samsung did with their Android software you can quote me on it and take it to the bank use it for five or six days and I think you're gonna agree with me it took a lot of really nice things from stock Android and added a ton of other features on top of it that get out of their way they're not layer on layer on layer stuff you have to relearn how to use your operating system they're nice improvements you get the things you like from the pixel on check to swipe up to get your app drawer you also get a lot of other improvements as well you can swipe down for example to also get your app drawer you've got an improved notification tray we've got a tweaked and redefined setting I really like being able to swipe my hand over the screen to take screenshots you've got edge panels if it's ton of information to swipe away what Samsung's done in the software is surprisingly make it more elegant without making it more cumbersome and as critical as I've been in years past I think I gotta give credit where credit is due in a preview like me you're not sold on VIX Piett Google assistant also is shipping with the Galaxy S II and perhaps the best software feature and for me I think a reason to consider the Galaxy s8 a really most modern Samsung phones is Samsung pay so it works like Apple pay or Android pay can use NFC payments but also will put out a magnetic field for anywhere you would swipe a card you can hold your phone right next to it and it works really well then you could pretty much do Samsung pay anywhere credit card is when the essay was announced it said it was gonna be the same camera sensor as a note 7 in the a7 I was a little bit disappointed to the new phone and I wanted something new just because new turns out that was a bit unfounded because the camera in the s8 is still really good the 12 megapixel sensor with some software improvements over last gen and the shots look awesome things do look a little bit overexposed so they can be tweaking settings but I still like the brightness of it and I wanted to test the camera like I legitimately use a phone every day so took my kid out to the park I was able to get pictures of him running which is really hard to do for fast motion and normal noontime sunlight pictures with absolute incredible low-light also looks really good the video quality also looks awesome you can set all the way up to take 4k video you get if you don't have a micro SD card a 10-minute cap on 4k but here you go here's a video of my son going down a slide in 4k just as a fun sized story he was terrified to go down that slide like four days ago and he just got super brave and and went down so while the rear camera didn't get much the way of improvements the front-facing cameras did it's 8 megapixel and it now has autofocus which is something I guess we moved down a further facing camera so we want to take your selfies it works really well and also new the cameras I guess everybody is taking cues from snapchat you've got filters built right in the camera boils down to this Samsung's throwing around a ton of marketing talk about the cameras things like multi frame image processing pictures look really good look great in almost any situation in fact when compared to things like the pixel or the iPhone 7 plus this stands on its own if it's not the best phone camera out there it's certainly in the running and deserves to be in that conversation the estate's got a 3,000 million power battery si plus has a 3500 and in my battery test I was mostly using the S Plus and I was able to get through a full day of testing and my usage might vary from yours but I wirelessly charge it overnight 100% when I wake up around 7:30 in the morning I am taking a lot of pictures like ultimate dad it didn't land number of pictures I'm watching a ton of YouTube videos thinking about hour and a half two hours of phone calls playing some games when I probably should be working and by end of the day without changing any set my brightness set to about 75% usually I'm about 10 to 15% battery life left but those figures are only if you don't have any power saving modes on Samsung offers two different ones there's a midden to max and turning on the make and turn about 20% of battery life until like 8 to 10 hours so you can really get through 2 or 3 days if you need just beware those settings are there usually my phone reviews have a performance category but that's almost a moot point now with modern phone so fast that's performance but I've got some intangibles I had the most fun putting together notes for this part of the review because there's a lot here let's start with the big one IP 68 same waterproof ich miss we saw on the s7 the note 7 you could take it in the shower with you if you're inclined to do so for reasons I'm not gonna talk about headphone jack it's here and it's gonna be shipping with $99 equivalent AKG headphones which I guess to my untrained ear sound like any other hear buds that come bundled with phones but it's there you can plug your headphones with it and have to just use bluetooth if you couldn't tell I really liked the galaxy s 8 and I asked the questions the beginning what did i do did I buy one and I did I caved I really like the Galaxy S a I ordered a galaxy s 8 plus in black in fact maybe the only knock I have on the phone as I have from price and a really poor place from the fingerprint reader is the colors I wish the u.s. got the gold and the blue like we had with the last gen phones but alas they ain't here I wasn't a fan of the silver of the grey so I went fingerprint smudgy black the phone looks really sleek I've had it into my own phone now for about three days I don't think I'm looking back I like the way the phone performs I like the way it feels and the best endorsement that I can give for a phone is to actually buy one myself my own money behind it use it as my daily driver and the galaxy s 8 plus it's gonna be the phones in my pocket for the foreseeable future but that's just my opinion what do you guys think about the Galaxy s8 in the si+ is it the phone you've been waiting for you disappointed let me know your reasons down below in the comments looks legitimate have a discussion about the technology that's in is the latest from Samsung I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you like the cinematography credit goes to Nate Andrew takes no credit for this one please give the video a thumbs up we certainly appreciate it until next time I'm John render from techno bow you