The Galaxy S8 Plus Three Months Later

Taken with the Galaxy S8 Plus

On April 21st, 2017 Samsung released their latest flagship devices, the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, hoping to get the trust from customers back after the Note 7 recall from the year before. The Korean Tech giant added features that were adopted from the Note 7 and new features like a new display that takes up the front of the phone and a pressure sensitive home button. Were they successful with the launch of the two new devices? Samsung sold more than five million device within the first few weeks of being available, me being one of those people.

It’s July 21st, three months later, how’s the Galaxy S8? I bought the S8 Plus and it’s holding up pretty well. I got the Plus variant of the S8 and the battery life is amazing, I start of my day with 100% and I don’t normally have to charge it until 8PM when I get the 15% warning.

The display is okay, for using social media and reading I love the display, the new 18:9 aspect ratio makes it perfect to read, since more text is on the screen, but not for video. When you go to YouTube or Hulu, since shooting in a 18:9 aspect ratio is not a normal thing, you would have black bars on the sides of the video. You can press a button to zoom in on the video but it sometimes it cuts off or leaves out text that’s closer to the edges of the video. Netflix is the only video app that most of it’s content are automatically formatted for the S8’s display.

The phone is also still responsive. Samsung device are notorious for slowing down over a period of time, on my S6, I found the the battery wasn’t lasting long and it was slow. I’m having no problems with speed, multitasking is wonderful and it managed open apps running in the back around well.

When the device was announced, Samsung also announced it's AI interface Bixby and it came out two days before I wrote this in the US. In the short time playing with it, I still chose to use Google's Assistant. It doesn't understand what I'm saying half of the time and it sometimes just doesn't want to work.

Even after three months, I still recommend this device to people for a new phone and an iPhone replacement. Click here if you want to purchase the device unlocked.