Friends+Design
- Incredible overall fit and finish
- Water-resistant (IP 68 certification), and with Gorilla Glass 5 protection on both front and rear
- Apart from fingerprint recognition, you also have iris or facial recognition options for unlocking the device - iris is blazing fast, but requires some careful alignment - facial recognition works pretty well, but does require good lighting
- The new on-screen navigation works well and buttons can finally be re-mapped - the home button has nice haptic feedback
- The new fingerprint reader position at the back will certainly raise more than a few eyebrows - it's too high up and right next to the camera - which is not the most convenient placement
- The all-glass body is quite slippery, if you don't use a case
Display
- With its bold, exquisite, elongated shape, and borderless "infinity" display, the Galaxy S8 is one gorgeous piece of technology - arguably the best designed Android phone to date
- The exceptionally bright Infinity display is gorgeous, and a chart-topper in terms of sunlight visibility - and colors are even punchier than before
Software
- Samsung's TouchWiz software is now more polished than ever, and gives a thoughtfully conceived software experience
- You can also use the phone as a mobile workstation with the DeX desktop dock - creating an Android "desktop" experience - which could be pretty handy
- The S8+ is also generally quite tall for one handed use - reaching the notification area, for instance, can be tricky - similarly, the on-screen navigation buttons are placed pretty low relative to the overall height of the S8+ and can also be hard to reach
Performance
- The new 18.5:9 aspect ratio for the display works great for portrait gaming, browsing and multi-tasking
- The Exynos chipset powering the phone delivers a chart-topping performance in both CPU and GPU benchmarks - the Mali-G71 MP20 GPU is impressive too - overall, the performance is class leading, and brimming with horsepower
Camera
- The camera is state-of-the-art and pretty much the same as the already great camera on the S7, with one notable improvement - low light photography - the new Multi-Frame Image Processing delivers noticeably cleaner and sharper low light photos - overall now, this camera is right up there with the best in the business - the iPhone 7 and the Google Pixel
- The front camera is very good too, and a major upgrade from the S7 in terms of image quality - Samsung has also included a big collection of filters, stickers and dynamic facial effects to raise your selfie game
Audio
- Good audio quality
Battery
- Very good battery life, a little better than the already good battery life of the Galaxy S7
More
- Samsung's AI Engine Bixby is a decent add-on too, although a lot of the functionality, including voice activation will come in later
- The S8+ is is really versatile when it comes to connectivity too with things like Gigabit LTE support, bluetooth audio streaming to two devices simultaneously, and presence of DisplayPort video output over Type-C
- While the 18.5:9 aspect ratio is futuristic, and certainly comes in handy while browsing, and gaming, but most video/image content is still not made for such a wide screen, so will usually be wasteful of the extra space
