Samsung Galaxy S8- All that you wish to know about Samsung’s

All set to release this month Samsung Galaxy S8, this powerful South Korean brand hopes to bring its image back as of Samsung’s 2017 rebound phone. Although Samsung’s profits are soaring on the strength of its chips as well as S7 and S7 Edge phone sales, it will still need to make up the $5 billion it lost on the Note 7 and to build the trust of buyers once again. Here is all that you wish to know of this new Samsung Galaxy S8.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Features

Though we have already discussed the Samsung Galaxy S8 features few months ago, here is what Samsung has planned for 2017 Galaxy S8 release. At the time of writing a report from Korea’s ETNews said that Samsung wants to ditch the Home button, integrated its functionality into the display instead – just like Apple’s rumoured iPhone 8. Samsung allegedly wants to do this to “fill all of the front of the Galaxy S8 with just screen”.

 

 

The Galaxy S8 may have significantly smaller bezels than the Galaxy S7. According to Park Won-sang the Principal Engineer for Samsung Display, the company was aiming to introduce an OLED display with a greater-than 90% screen-to-body ratio. Samsung hoped to create a handset with a 99% screen-to-body ratio in the next few years. For contrast, most phones currently have an average ratio of around 80%.

Also a Bloomberg report from November claimed that Samsung is planning to kit the Galaxy S8 out with an “all-screen front”. The “bezel-less” phone will “provide more viewing real estate”, with Samsung expected to ditch the physical Home button and bury its functionality in the lower section of the glass instead.

But the biggest boost to this rumour’s credibility came courtesy of Synaptics’ announcement that it had developed a new fingerprint scanner – the Natural ID FS9100 optical fingerprint sensor.

What’s important about the FS9100 is that it can scan your fingerprint through 1mm of “full cover glass”, which would enable Samsung to hide the scanner underneath the glass, rather than having to embed it in the Home button.

According to  Les Santiago, Research Director for analyst firm IDC, “By bringing optical sensing technology with the right form factor and power consumption envelope to smartphones and tablets, Synaptics is enabling the elimination of the Home button, which is a critical next step to full top-to-bottom, edge-to-edge smartphone and tablet displays,”

Importantly, Samsung has used Synaptics fingerprint sensors on previous flagship smartphones, including the Galaxy S8. So that makes it even more likely that this new sensor will make it to a future Samsung handset. The only possible roadblock would be that Synaptics says manufacturers can sample the sensor from Q1 this year, with manufacturing beginning in Q2 – that may be too late for inclusion in the Galaxy S8.

With those leaks in mind, a new concept render has been created by the appropriately named Concept Creator, which offers a quirky vision of Samsung’s next flagship smartphone.

 

Galaxy S8 and S8 Edge Screen

The Galaxy S8 will have two variants: 5.7-inches and 6.2-inches screen display. Also 2017 might be the year Samsung moves to a 4K display, following on from the Galaxy S6’s introduction of a QHD screen. One report from Weibo suggested that one variant of the Galaxy S8 will use a 4K-resolution screen.

The main argument for introducing a 4K display is the growing popularity of virtual reality. When you use a Gear VR headset today, you’re looking at a Galaxy smartphone’s QHD screen. But because the image display is in stereoscopic mode – split into two, basically – then you’re getting half resolution. Pair that with the fact that your eyes are very close to the screen, and pixel density suddenly becomes very important.

If Samsung moved to a 4K panel, you’d enjoy a significantly enhanced VR experience – visually, anyway. Also it is worth noting that the Snapdragon 820, which powers the Galaxy S7, already supports native 4K displays at 60fps.

There’s also a rumour that the Galaxy S8 will only be available with a curved-edge display, after a Samsung executive recently hinted that flat screens might be going away for good.

Galaxy S8 Specifications

Though the Galaxy S8 specs haven’t been announced yet (obviously), but they’re pretty easy to predict. The Galaxy S7 featured either a Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890, depending on where you bought your phone. The former is built by US chip maker Qualcomm, while the later is a custom-built Samsung chip. It is expected that the Galaxy S8 will be sold with Qualcomm and Samsung chips, depending on your market.

Samsung has already confirmed that it is working on producing the Snapdragon 835 with a highly efficient 10nm manufacturing process. This means the transistors are far smaller than those built on the 14nm and 16nm chips used in the Galaxy S7. As such, we’d expect a 10nm chip to be much less power-hungry, and potentially more powerful.

According to Samsung, the new transistor design will mean transistors can be placed on a chip with 30% greater area efficiency, resulting in 27% higher performance or 40% lower power consumption. Manufacturing has already started, with chips expected to land in smartphones in 2017. In fact, Samsung has already vowed to produce a second-gen version of its 10nm chips in the second half of 2017.

Samsung Galaxy S8 Price & Release Date in Australia https://t.co/YT4qomLi16 pic.twitter.com/RxldODW3XT

— Scott C Baxter (@Smartphone2017) October 24, 2016

Though not convinced that Samsung will be able to turn around a new mobile GPU with Nvidia tech inside in time for this year’s launch. Far more likely is the rumour that Samsung will use ARM’s new Mali G71 GPU in the Galaxy S8. That’s ARM’s new top-end mobile GPU built on the British firm’s new Bifrost architecture. It’s a 16nm chip clocked at 850MHz, and offers 40% improved performance and 20% better efficiency than the Mali-T880 – that’s the Galaxy S7’s GPU.

It’s also worth noting that the Mali-G71 was developed to meet the needs of Vulkan which is the powerful, cross-platform API built by Khronos. Samsung already added support for Vulkan in the Galaxy S7, so it’d be surprising if the same wasn’t true for the Galaxy S8.

Super-fast modem also probable is that the Snapdragon 830  and the Galaxy S8, by extension will come with a Snapdragon X16 built-in.

The Snapdragon X16 is Qualcomm’s latest modem built on a 14nm manufacturing process, and supports “fibre-like” LTE Cat. 16 download speeds. That’s significantly superior to the X12 modem built into the Snapdragon 820 chip – as used on the Galaxy S7 and LG G

The Snapdragon X12 modem supports 600Mbps download speeds. But the Snapdragon X16 can handle incredible downlink speeds of up to 1Gbps. That means a 4K movie – estimated at 100GB average file size – could be downloaded in just over 13 minutes. And a Blu-ray movie, which averages at around 20GB, could arrive in a quarter of that time.

Qualcomm has already revealed that manufacturers are currently sampling the Snapdragon X16, so it would be very surprising if the Galaxy S8 didn’t use the Snapdragon X16.

Galaxy S8 Camera

The recent reports seem to suggest that neither innovation will be ready for the Galaxy S8 launch, for that matter. Instead, it seems more likely that the Galaxy S8 will tout a very similar camera module to the Galaxy S7, at least until you hear otherwise.

In November 2016, a report from Korea’s ETNews claimed that Samsung will be adding autofocus on the S8’s front-facing camera. It’s less common to find auto focus on secondary cameras than primary ones, as front-facing cameras are typically only used for selfies or video calling. But there’s no real reason why Samsung couldn’t introduce such an upgrade for the Galaxy S8.

Galaxy S8 Battery Life

The matter of Galaxy S8 battery life is tricky, because how long a phone lasts on a single charge depends on so many factors. The first is the size of the actual cell. As the Edge variants tend to have slightly bigger batteries. But the screens tend on those phones are a little bigger – more so on the S7 Edge than the S6 Edge – which explains the added capacity. If there are two variants of the Galaxy S8, to cell size isn’t the only factor that affects battery life. Google’s Android N – the software expected to feature on the Galaxy S8 – offers battery life improvements. Then there’s the likely 10nm processor, which will be less power-hungry than the current 14nm processor on the Galaxy S7. However, if Samsung does finally move to a 4K display with the Galaxy S8, you can count on that putting a serious damper on battery life too.

Galaxy S8 Water Proof

One of the best features of the Samsung Galaxy S7 was its waterproof chassis. So you can hope the Galaxy S8 follows suit with an IP68-certified body

IP stands for ‘Ingress Protection’, and it’s a rating system put forward by the International Electrotechnical Commission to let consumers know how (1) waterproof, and (2) dustproof, a device is. If a handset is IP68-certified, it can be submerged in water at a depth of 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes. By contrast, an IP67-certified phone – like the Samsung Galaxy S5 – is only rated to depths of one metre.

Unfortunately, there haven’t been any rumours specifically regarding a waterproof Samsung Galaxy S8 just yet, so stay tuned.

Galaxy S8 Headphone Jack

Samsung could also follow Apple’s suit and ditch the headphone jack on the Galaxy S8 – à la the iPhone 7. The USB Implementers Forum recently published its Audio Device Class 3.0 specification, which details a standard for phone makers that allows audio to be transmitted via USB-C. The new standard is a clear bid to incentivise Android phone manufacturers to abandon the age-old 3.5mm audio jack for greener, USB-C shaped pastures.

Galaxy S8 Software

Samsung’s Galaxy S8 will see Android 7.0 Nougat on board. Nougat is Google’s flagship mobile OS for 2016, and is the debut software for the new Google Pixel smartphone. Probably the biggest improvement with the software is the addition of split-screen mode. However, Samsung already offers this feature with its own TouchWiz skin – the software Samsung overlays onto Google’s Android OS. But there are other new perks, like notification stacking, a flatter ‘material design’ aesthetic, and battery life improvements. Also given the support for Android Pay, it seems very likely that the Galaxy S8 will retain NFC for contactless payments.

Galaxy S8 price

It is expected to cost US $850 and Galaxy S8 Edge at US$900. In Australia the price range from AU$1166 and for the S8 Edge at AU$1236. For complete list of price world wide you can find here.

Till the launch and after stay tuned for more updates, tips, tricks and how to for Samsung Galaxy S8