Awaiting Samsung Galaxy S8: Know what could be in store

Trying to recover from the nightmare of Galaxy S7 debacle, Samsung is finally ready to reveal the Galaxy S8 next week at the company’s annual Unpacked launch event.

Breaking the traditional way of launching the new product at MWC, Samsung will launch the next iteration of its Galaxy series in New York and London simultaneously on March 29 which will be live streamed on its Galaxy web page starting at 9:30 pm IST.

Though Samsung is yet to confirm the details, the pre-orders are expected to begin on April 10, and the handset may go on sale by April 28, in black, grey and silver colour.

As per the rumour mill, Samsung Galaxy S8 will ditch the Home Button and navigation buttons in the front, and sport a 2960 x 1440 resolution, a notable bump over the S7’s 2560 x 1440. With almost no bezels, the fingerprint sensor is housed at the back right next to the camera sensor, and the logo will be composed on the back centre. Bixby is also expected to work exclusively with native apps like Camera and Messages with a dedicated Bixby button underneath the volume buttons on the left edge, which will be the first inbuilt AI assistant from Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ could sport 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch Super AMOLED pressure sensitive displays respectively. The two smartphones will be powered by the latest Snapdragon 835 SoC, but some markets will get the home-grown Exynos 8895 chip as well. They will be paired with 4GB of RAM, though China and South Korea are said to get 6GB of RAM variants. The devices will run on Android 7.0 Nougat and support dual-SIM slots.

On the camera front, there is expected to be a 12-megapixel dual pixel rear camera with 8-megapixel front camera. The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones will be IP68-rated for dust and water resistance, and could support an iris scanner, some facial recognition technology, and 3000mAh and 3500mAh batteries respectively.

Though Samsung is expected to hold onto headphone jack, unlike Apple, the company might launch new earphones replacing the white rubber ones bundled in predecessors.

We will give you more clarity on the specifications once the phone is launched.