Samsung Galaxy S8 Review

The S8 arrived six months before the iPhone X and had already decided what phones would look like. The 5.8-inch, 18.5:9 Super AMOLED ran nearly edge to edge, the home button became a pressure sensitive patch under the glass, and it was the first phone screen certified Mobile HDR Premium. The LG G6 had gone tall a month earlier and the Xiaomi Mi Mix had gone borderless the autumn before, but it was the S8 the whole industry copied.

Samsung paired it with the Snapdragon 835 in the US and its own Exynos 8895 elsewhere, the first 10 nanometre chips in any phone, and both were fast and cool. The 12 megapixel Dual Pixel camera was the S7's sensor with multi frame processing added, still among the best of 2017. Then the misjudgements. The fingerprint sensor sat beside the camera lens, too high and too small, so people smudged the glass hunting for it; the iris scanner and face unlock were the workarounds and neither was as good.

Bixby got a hardware button that could not be switched off until months of complaints. Early units shipped with a reddish tint that a firmware update corrected. The 3000 mAh battery, conservative after the Note 7 fires, gave a day and no more. Sold unlocked at $724.99, it ran Android 7.0 with the Samsung Experience skin and was updated through Android 9 Pie with One UI, which is where support stopped. In 2017 it was, with the Pixel 2, the phone to buy.