So long as you aren't hanging all your hopes on work-in-progress Bixby (Google Assistant is an easy alternative to invoke) and have the patience of a saint when unlocking the phone, the Galaxy S8 is a sound buy that will make your friends jealous of its tall, curved, crazy-elegant screen. If you're serious about buying, I'd make a special trip to test out the fingerprint reader before taking the plunge. And if your current phone isn't yet on its last legs, it doesn't hurt to wait and see how the S8's battery continues to fare in the wild. So far, though, it appears to be incident-free.
Don't want this to happen? Get a case, I was extremely nervous I'd drop it, It almost seems more like a museum piece than a tool I'm going to use every day, I've had a couple close calls so far, but it hasn't smashed to the ground yet, When it inevitably does, because butterfingers, I have a feeling those rounded edges will be easier to crack than a device with straight sides, I can't say for sure, but the bigger problem may be the glass back, Last year's GS7 shattered when I dropped it (oops), and my colleague Luke Lancaster in Sydney said his S8 slipped and slid out from under him, resulting in a bash, With the Galaxy sunflower field iphone case S8's newer Gorilla Glass 5 topper, time will tell just how often this happens for others, too..
See what happened when we purposely tried to smash it up. There's no more physical home button, and honestly? I didn't miss it at all. The onscreen control you see on pretty much every other Android phone felt completely natural. In fact, going Home on the S8 was faster than going Home on a lightly used S7. By the way, you can swap the placement of the Back and Recents buttons if you want to. The S8 is the first standard Galaxy S phone (as in, not an Edge or Edge Plus) to have curved sides and the Edge display. You can use it as a kind of speed dial for your frequent apps and contacts, news headlines and so on, which you can call up from any screen (and tweak the tab location so it's easy for you to grab). You can add a lot of panes in the settings, but I like it best when kept to two -- otherwise you waste time trying to find what you're looking for.
Oh, one more thing about the screen, It's a very high-resolution, 2,960x1,440-pixel display, and that makes text, images and video absolutely pop, even in direct sunlight, You should know, though, that the off-standard dimension means you'll have to either be cool with black bars on the sides of videos you play (called pillarboxing), or you'll need to tap a screen control sunflower field iphone case to crop-to-fit, In some videos, doing so reduced image quality, At other times, it looked just as good, That fingerprint reader is mighty close to the camera..
My biggest problem with the phone design is the fingerprint reader, which moved from the home button on the S7's front face to a narrow strip on its backing that looks a lot like a Tic Tac, just left of the camera mount. I have no idea what Samsung was thinking putting it here. Other rear-mounted fingerprint sensors, such as the LG G6 and Google Pixel, are closer to the middle center of the phone's body, well clear of the camera and flash. They're round and easier to completely cover with your fingertip.