Gadgetory

hey what is up guys MTV HD here and a couple years ago in 2014 Samsung made a surprise product announcement called the Galaxy Note edge with this crazy display hanging off one side and for a random unexpected phone it got a lot of attention since then that product has evolved again and again into Samsung's entire flagship lineup which brings us to the galaxy s 8 so this new phone looks awesome and that's a hallmark headlining feature is how good it looks and how well it's designed and then of course being a flagship it has all the bleeding-edge specs inside and the hardware you'd expect from a premium Android phone so is this the complete package like the ultimate smartphone almost it's almost it's almost there so let me start by saying I love this phone's build like pretty much everything about the outside of this phone is premium and well built and awesome the display up front sort of melts over both sides and it does so smoothly into the back frame while last year's phone did it more sharply and if you want to talk about modern or about the future of smart phone design this year has been a shift to these really tall displays making these slightly taller candy bar shaped phones now the best part of these super thin bezels on all sides is that the footprint of the phone shrinks a lot so the five point eight inch and 6.2 inch displays respectively on the s8 and si plus don't feel like huge phones even though they have huge screen in fact the SI I think is a great size because it's so narrow I might have big hands but I think even anyone with regular hands can reach across to the other side of this display just maybe not all the way up to the top I think the best indicator for this is the fingerprint sensor obviously there's no more room to put it up at the front of the phones so they moved it around to the back but instead of putting it somewhere in the middle of the back they put it right up there next to the camera now with most backs fingerprint sensors they're a little lower on the phone for reach ability just the way you hold the phone makes it easier now I think the top fingerprint sensor might look a little bit better in some cases but it is definitely harder to reach even with my larger hand i legit dislike this location i hold the phone with my right hand so i'm reaching the max them distance up and over across the phone over across the camera with my finger and often I don't quite make it or I touch the camera glass instead or I only partially cover the fingerprint sensor and the reader doesn't unlock it doesn't work so this is through a week of using the phone I'm sure I could get used to it eventually but for most people this just makes it a two-handed phone and then you can end up just using the phone with two hands all the time now to be fair the glass over the camera actually does a good job deflecting smudges that come from Aaron fingerprint unlocks but honestly a clever way to get past this is with a case or better yet a skin actually so this is the skin from dbrand and not only is it better for gripping this all glass zone but the tiny depth difference actually lets you better distinguish the singer print sensor from the camera on the back so fun fact highly recommended either way Samsung's word on this is now they provide you with a bunch of other ways to unlock your phone biometrically that don't use a fingerprint sensor mainly being the iris scanner and the face unlock now I didn't expect to like this answer mainly because the face unlock can literally be tricked with a picture of you so that's no good and the iris scanner usually requires you holding it up at a weird angle that you don't normally hold your phone which is a little awkward but this iris scanner I think it might have a wider angle lens or the sensor has improved something about it is better because I don't quite have to hold it up that awkward angle anymore and it does a pretty good job of unlocking my phone when I'm not like trying to I set it up I didn't expect to use it but a lot of times I just hold the phone up and start using it and it would unlock for me so that actually turned out to be a pleasant surprise either way aside from the awkward tallness of the phone and a fingerprint sensor the galaxy estate is the best industrial design of any smartphone and a long time in my opinion even though there are other phones out now and coming soon that do the tall display thin bezels thing you still got to add on all metal and glass still has expandable storage through a micro SD card slot still fully water and dust resistant ip68 certified so you can spill water on it and it's cool it still has USB type-c with quick charge still has wireless charging still keeps the headphone jack and the speaker is below average and downward facing it might be the worst part of the phones build but that comes with the territory when there's no room on the front and you kind of want to water sale your phone so back to the screen it's incredible it is I would say the best display on any small phone again it gets extremely bright so it's visible outdoors or whenever and it's an OLED so of course it has fantastic color and contrast ratios and dynamic range and it's super high resolution too we're talking 29 60 by 1440 on both phones actually so all that makes for an awesome media experience a great web browsing experience and great scrolling through Twitter and Instagram and seeing a lot of stuff at once experience and all of Samsung's software obviously supports it perfectly now not every app in the App Store fills the display right now right out the box like a lot of games especially will have to be updated or may just never fully support that so you'll either have the black bars on either side or you can punch in and of course most videos also are an in this aspect ratio' either so when watching a video you'll get the black bars as well unless you hit the button in the software to punch in a little bit but then you lose some of the frame so it's kind of your call it's give a little take a little for the slightly taller display but overall I'll take it I think the screen is awesome and with its curved edges and curved corners I'm a fan and then there is the inside of the phone and since this is a flagship Samsung is again pushing things to the highest end of what's available except for one particular area but there's some pretty high-end specs in here Snapdragon 835 a dream of 540 GPU 4 gigabytes of RAM at least 64 gigs of storage which like we said is expandable and this is the first phone to ship with Bluetooth 5.0 which I made an entire separate video about that just dropped highly recommend that so the performance aspect is pretty much taken care of the same way it always is great specs great speed and animations out the box but nobody has used this phone for a year or two yet so we'll have to see how the Samsung software ages and that's just what it is it's Samsung software on top of Android 7.0 and it has its pros and cons actually like that it's adapted to be more like nougat with the swiping app drawer and the cleaner overall look especially of the Settings app but it's really obviously still Samsung eyes with all the colors and some interesting quirks here and there with the paginate adapt drawer and a couple extra animations nothing too crazy or extra but it's not necessarily better than not having it the edge screen has gotten better there's now a couple features like from the note with smart select and the jiff maker where you can select part of your screen to make an animation or even take round screenshots all kinds of stuff that we didn't have before so you know those interesting stuff you can put in there I really like the extended screenshot feature where you can take a screenshot but then it gives you the option to scroll down and extend that as much as you want so I'm really glad that made its way back into this zone but yeah overall it's familiar to anyone who's used a samsung phone in the last two or three years both aesthetically and functionally now one of the biggest new features in the software Department of the Galaxy s8 is called Bixby you may have heard of it it's the virtual assistant that's built for this phone that just does a lot of what Google assistant does now the circumstances surrounding it are interesting because Samsung put a dedicated button on the side of the phone just for launching it a big speed button now a lot of people didn't like this for fair reason whether they didn't like Bixby or didn't want it so they found a way to use an app to remap the Dixie button to do whatever they want robably should have been in the Samsung settings in the first place you can make it the default for the button sure but in in regions where people don't use Bixby or Bixby's not supported or language supports not there yet or it's incomplete let them go on the settings and remap it to whatever they want it could be a legitimate useful separate feature well yesterday Samsung actually patched that up and blocked any remapping of that button at all on the Galaxy S 8 so it's definitely now just a bixby button so understandably again people got kind of angry about that nobody wants accidental triggers of the app they want to never use but a couple of people were asking well hey what if what if Bixby is actually really great what if Vic's T is amazing what if it's better than Google so I gave it that chance I didn't remap my Bixi button and I was using Bixby alongside this phone for the past week and I'll give you that so first of all the voice feature is not activated yet and it won't get added till later this year so that's a pretty rough start but aside from that it does show you some cards your gallery your upcoming calendar events maybe some weather some frequent contacts but then that pretty quickly devolved into a bunch of samsung apps like themes and wallpapers and Flipboard and a bunch of stuff I don't use so really it's working in catch-up mode to be able to do all that Google does with Gmail and navigation cards and flight status and all that now the one place that did you some interesting stuff is in the camera app in the viewfinder there's a big C button that if you press it it can recognize images in the viewfinder and search for them whether it's images or if it's a product it will get you Amazon search to maybe buy it I think Google Goggles try this a couple years ago and with Bixby it was about the same pretty hit or miss sometimes they would get it and will be pretty useful especially when there's a lot of text to it that it can recognize it just searches that text so it makes sense that it would work there other times when I thought it might get it nothing came up or it got it wrong with this Bluetooth speaker for example sometimes I got nothing sometimes it thought it was a baseball hat I don't know not sure how to get it to work better but no dice so aside from this biggest new software feature being kind of a swing and a Miss on this phone I'm totally fine with the software on the s8 it's cleaner it's much more fine it's out of the way I like it now the camera on the back is has also been a bit of a source of discussion at first it wasn't really talked about and we kind of assumed it was literally the exact same camera as last year I has the same specs no dual cameras like some of its rivals it's a 12 megapixel F 1.7 aperture dual pixel autofocus optical image stabilization top-notch stuff again but yes same as we've already seen but turns out this is a slightly updated sensor with newer optics so the images will look slightly different from the galaxy s7 honestly most of the difference will come from better image processing but the photos and 4k videos from galaxy s 8 look fantastic as you would expect maybe leave a comment if you want a direct comparison to its predecessor but you can imagine you can see the samples great detail great contrast color and sharpness are excellent and pretty aggressive auto HDR modes so dynamic range is also pretty wide rarely blows out the highlights like a lot of other phones would so of course it's a pleasure to take photos and videos with such a nice screen as a viewfinder we often say the best camera is the one you have with you I think this is no exception with this phone it'll be one of the best cameras you can put in your pocket again this year now battery life is one area where I would have wanted just a little bit more now this is Samsung we're talking about here and they just had one of their phones last year literally start exploding when they tried to push the battery to the limit so I almost can't blame them for playing it safe this year but yeah the 3000 milliamp hour battery on the Galaxy s8 I was testing pretty much barely got me through the end of the day maybe 10% left when I'm done and to be fair I'm pretty heavy on it I use it a lot bright screen lots of video watching taking pictures etc for the review but there are phones with definitely better battery life as I suspected the upside though is that it charges ridiculous we fast I had a night where I went to sleep with 22% and I woke up in the morning with 8% so that's pretty terrible standby time I was going to start the day with the battery dead but I threw it on the charger for about an hour left with a hundred percent battery no problem so you kind of pick your battles there Samsung just played it safe with the battery so at the end of the day the Galaxy s8 is awesome and it's so Samsung that this this project was born from the crazy like backburner pet project that was the Galaxy Note edge and now every phone like this has this crazy edge display and I'm glad they keep doing that though and you got to give Samsung credit for making a phone that can stand out for how good it looks in an era well this little mini era where so many phones are accused of all looking the same this one actually does stand out in a pretty awesome way and I like that a lot of that there may be little things you don't like about it little unmapped abou buttons little software quirks here and there maybe the speaker is not the best but as a complete package this is an awesome phone I recommend it I've said the word awesome so many times you probably can understand that I like this already and I recommend it I've links below for other stuff you want to check out but that's pretty much it thank you for watching talk to guys the next one peace