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Samsung Galaxy S8 hands-on: Samsung produces a stunning redesign

Super slim bezels and software buttons make this Samsung’s biggest redesign ever.

Jennifer Hahn

NEW YORK CITY—After tons of leaks and speculation, the Galaxy S8 is finally here. Samsung took the wraps off its newest flagship at the swanky Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and we spent a few minutes testing the device out.

I'm a bit spoiled by having seen recent slim bezel devices like the Xiaomi Mi Mix and the LG G6, but the Galaxy S8 is still a stunner in person. Samsung's and LG's slim-bezel entries have a lot in common, but Samsung's execution wins on all fronts. LG and Samsung have both attempted to round the corners of their displays, but the corners on the Galaxy S8 are actually round and look great (unlike the G6's awkward corner transitions). Samsung has beaten LG by a few millimeters in the slim bezel department, too, especially on the bottom bezel. The front is a great new look for Samsung, with no buttons or logos to clutter up the design.

The devices aren't as big as the screen sizes suggest. The 5.8-inch Galaxy S8 is pretty compact, and it isn't much wider than the Galaxy S7. The bigger 6.2-inch S8+ had a body only a hair bigger than my 5.5-inch Pixel XL. They are both totally normal phone sizes, one "small" and one "big." The taller aspect ratio inflates the screen size, but the body size isn't changing much.

This is probably the millionth Android phone with on-screen hardware buttons, but it's a rarity for Samsung. The change is definitely welcome. Samsung has stubbornly stuck to the hardware button order it came up with for the Galaxy S1, so while every other Android phone uses "Back/Home/Recent" from left to right, Samsung devices are typically backward ("Recent/Home/Back"). I immediately dug into the setting to try to swap the order and was happy to see that as an option here. Finally, Samsung made a flagship with the proper button order!

The sides of the device feel just like the Galaxy Note 7. That's probably a terrible example, given most us didn't experience that phone for long, but the Note 7 did mark a big change in how Samsung shapes the sides of the device. The company had been messing around with curved surfaces—on the S7 Edge, the front was curved and the back was flat, leading to a pointy edge on the side. On the regular Galaxy S7, the back was curved and the front was flat, so it had the same pointy edge problem. The Note 7 and Galaxy S8 round both sides of the device. And with a flush transition, there's nothing but a smooth, round side leading to another smooth side that's easy to wrap your fingers around. This all makes the S8 one of the nicest feeling devices Samsung has ever produced.

While the glass curves all the way to the side, the screen curve is reduced this year compared to the Galaxy S7 Edge. It's still enough to distort the sides of apps or the top and bottom of videos, but it's not as drastic as it has been in past years. It's another welcome change, as less distortion is better.

There are no software hitches whatsoever with the taller screens. The only letterboxes to be seen were around video apps like YouTube—and even then you can crop the video to fit if you want.

A big change this year is the location of the fingerprint sensor—it's now a rectangular section on the back of the device, right next to the camera lens. Leading up to the event there were lots of reasonable questions about the location of the fingerprint reader. This is a big device, so how easy is it to reach the fingerprint reader? Will having two rectangular-shaped sections right next to each other be a problem for feel? Will you just smudge up the camera lens accidentally trying to unlock the phone?

In brief usage, the fingerprint reader feels like an afterthought. I never accidentally hit the camera in my trials, but that's just because the camera and fingerprint reader are so far away. Compared to the LG G6 and Google Pixel XL, Samsung's fingerprint reader is much higher up on the body of the phone, making it a challenge to hit with your index finger.

The non-centered design leads to some problems, too. It's obvious when you think about it—by being on the right side of the camera, the fingerprint reader is biased toward holding the phone in your right hand, so your right index finger rests on the same side of the phone as the fingerprint reader. In your left hand, the fingerprint reader is on the opposite side of the phone compared to your index finger, making it really tough to hit. It's a bit of a problem on the S8, but on the S8+, there was no way for me to hit the fingerprint reader without having to readjust my grip. Maybe I'd get used to it with more usage, but it presented a challenge during today's demo.

Again, the back of the phone is glass. Although that's a bit of a disappointment for the price range, I get why Samsung chooses a glass back. It's easier to make the phone this way. Engineers don't have to worry about metal blocking the radio signals and don't have to come up with a complicated antenna to work around that. Glass shatters easily, though, so that's worse for Samsung's consumers. Give the same amount of money to Apple, and Apple does all that engineering work, resulting in a nicer feeling, more durable metal phone. Heck, OnePlus will sell you a metal phone for just $430. It feels like Samsung really needs to step up its game here and dump the breakable back.

Besides power and volume, there's an extra hardware button on the side to launch "Bixby," Samsung's new virtual assistant. It seems like Samsung is almost trying to build its own search engine.

It's hard to test any assistant app without first loading it with personal data. But even after acknowledging that, Bixby just doesn't seem ready. Supposedly you'll be able to long press on the Bixby button to get a voice prompt, but none of the voice command stuff works yet. All we could really see were demos of the Google Now style contextual cards. The good news is that the Google Assistant still pops up when you hold down the home button, so hopefully you can still choose to use Google's option if you want.

The other major software feature, Dex, worked great. Dex is an idea we've seen before—the S8 slides into a dock, which is connected to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. In the dock, the S8 powers on the monitor and displays a desktop Android interface, and all the usual keyboard and mouse tricks—drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, etc.—just work.

The dock is a little circular pod with a flip-up lid. The lid flips up to form a backrest for the phone, and a USB-C plug in the bottom of the pod connects to the device. On the back of the dock, you get two full-size USB Type A ports for the keyboard and mouse, Ethernet, an HDMI port for the monitor, and a USB Type C port for power.

Samsung covered all the usual desktop OS features here, turning Android into something that looks like a Windows clone. A task bar runs along the bottom, with a bottom-left "start menu" consisting​ of the app drawer. Next on the taskbar is a set of the normal navigation buttons, followed by running programs represented as icons. On the right side there are all the usual phone status icons, along with buttons for the notification and quick settings panels.

Samsung made a few "desktop specific" apps, like a file browser, Internet browser, and e-mail app. These are all dual-pane apps that work great with a keyboard and mouse. Samsung was also happy to demo Microsoft's excellent Android office suite. Beyond those, everything else seemed to be a phone app. Gmail, the settings, and other apps by default opened up in phone-sized windows, and even if you stretched them across the screen, they never clicked over to dual-pane tablet versions. As we discovered when we tried Remix OS, though, a bunch of phone apps in a windowed OS isn't too bad.

We'll have to spend a lot more time with the Galaxy S8 to issue a final verdict. At first glance, the design looks and feels great, but that fingerprint reader will take some getting used to. The Galaxy S8 launches April 21, and hopefully we'll be able to put these devices through our testing before then.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo

Channel Ars Technica