Hands on with the Samsung S8+

SINGAPORE — It is beautiful. Samsung’s latest flagship Galaxy S8 series is quite the stunner, but underneath the beauty, enhancements to features and functionality are lackluster.

Introducing its Infinity Display to the S8 series, Samsung omitted the ubiquitous physical home button in favour of giving users more display real estate, pushing the screen width-wise to the edges such that the phone is almost bezel free. The new touchscreen Home button now sits neatly under the display screen. Aesthetically, I love how the front screen looks now: All curved glass, smooth and gleaming. And thanks to its Super AMOLED Dual Edge displays, the colours you get are vivid and bright, with a fair bit of contrast. Images just pop from your screen.

Samsung has added facial recognition, the newest biometric authentication feature to the S8 series. Though you can still unlock your device with your iris – a feature that was first introduced in the ill-fated Note 7 – I found facial recognition to be a lot more convenient and accurate. Lift the phone to the eye level and it instantly unlocks. That said, facial recognition may not work so well if you are in low-light conditions.

If, however, you still like unlocking your phone with fingerprints, you can still do so. The sensor is now located on the back, right beside the camera lens, which means it is easy to smudge your lens with a misplaced finger.

Then there’s Bixby the virtual assistant – Samsung’s version of Apple’s Siri. Bixby feels like a work-in-progress. For one, it lacks Siri’s voice command ability, though Samsung says that will change down the line at an unspecified date.

Bixby Vision, Samsung claims, can recognise and translate text. I tried it out with a couple of Chinese articles and had mixed results. There were a number of occasions when it picked up the text I was pointing the camera at as an image, even for larger characters. When it does work, it allows you to swipe across the line of text you want to have translated, much like Google translate.

One nifty inclusion is Smart Select; a tool which lets you selectively capture screenshots, or even video snippets to be sent out as GIFs. It also allows you to pin to the top of the screen any image you want, while carrying on with other tasks on the phone. I was only disappointed you couldn’t pin a video to the top. A feature carried on from its S7 predecessor is the edge panels. I appreciated how easily it allows you to open up a panel from the side of the screen with a swipe of the thumb to reveal a list of customizable shortcuts – great for people who love to use their phones single-handed.

BATTERY LIFE

While I didn’t spend the day watching videos or browsing Instagram, I did have Spotify on for a good four to five hours, a constantly vibrating phone from incoming messages and push emails notifications, making calls, occasionally browsing the Internet and navigating my way with Google Maps after work. I started out with the battery charged at 75 per cent at the start of the day at 6am. By 8.30pm when I got home, the battery was down to 10 per cent. Pretty average. All in, there was little to hate about the S8+, but it also did not have that ‘wow’ factor other than it being very pleasing to the eye. The main drawback for me would be the phone’s price.

The South Korean company released its latest flagship mobile device, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ on April 21 and officially launches in Singapore on April 29 with a respective retail tag of S$1,148 and S$1,298.

The main difference between the S8 and S8+ is the size — and price tag.

Both phones will come in three colour variations at launch: Midnight Black, Orchid Grey and Maple Gold. It’s unclear at the moment whether the two remaining colours, Artic Silver and Coral Blue, will eventually be made available in Singapore.