With Galaxy S8, Samsung Tries to Break the Spec Sheet

Every time a major new telephone comes out, we at PCMag do this thing called a "spec comparison." These are search-driven articles designed for people who are desperate to find out, for instance, if the Samsung Galaxy S7 is "amend" than the iPhone 6s before anyone has spent any decent amount of time with them. Similar examples are all over the internet, with tech fans using specs as a proxy for how well something works.

Samsung's Galaxy S8, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, aims to break that model. Only Samsung and Apple, with their massive marketing budgets and powerful brands, could do this and get away with it. It'due south a risky play, and Samsung has to deliver on its promises. But if the Galaxy S8 performs as well as information technology promises, it could upend many of the ways tech-savvy shoppers currently wait at phones.

Killing Benchmarks

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor hasn't been a benchmarking superstar. In initial benchmarks by Anandtech, the 835 shows slight advantages over the Snapdragon 821 on integer functioning, but seems to have seriously backslid on floating-point. Apple fans will chortle.

Simply equally Qualcomm never tires of saying, the Snapdragon 835 platform is much more than than the processor. It likewise includes the GPU, digital signal processors, a defended image-processing chip, an audio chip, and an LTE modem, none of which show upward on most benchmarks.

If the 835 is a stellar performer, that could throw the value of CPU-focused benchmarks like Geekbench and Antutu into question, driving reviewers and smart buyers to results from more application-focused benchmarks like PCMark.

Killing Screen Measurements

The Milky way S8 and S8+ are five.viii and 6.ii inches. Sounds huge, right? That's i area where Samsung's spec canvass looks artifically proficient rather than unrealistically bad.

The Galaxy S7's screen was 5.2 inches diagonal at a 16:ix ratio, making it about eleven.six square inches. Because the S8'southward screen is extremely tall and narrow, its 5.8-inch screen is probably effectually 13.four square inches. But wait! The same v.viii-inch screen at the Galaxy S7'south attribute ratio would be fourteen.4 foursquare inches. So you lot're losing a square inch of infinite through the aspect ratio change.

In my mind, that goes to proficient use: the S8 stays narrow and manus-friendly. Just information technology messes with the spec sail. Practice we demand to outset measuring screens in square inches rather than diagonals?

Killing Battery Size

The Milky way S8 and Galaxy S8+'s batteries are three,000 and three,500mAh, respectively. The commencement ane is the aforementioned size as the S7'southward, while the S8+ has a slightly smaller one than the S7 Edge did. Yet Samsung says they'll have better battery life considering of new chemistry and software that extend the life of the battery: a new S8+ may have slightly shorter bombardment life than an S7 Edge when it'due south right out of the box, but information technology'll have longer battery life a yr afterward. If that's actually true, it makes information technology really hard to shop by battery size.

Killing Identity

The Galaxy S8's fingerprint scanner is on the back of the phone, in a horrible location correct next to the camera. Then Samsung is trying to sell us on iris scanning and face up recognition as secure ways to authenticate and unlock our phones.

In that location aren't a lot of other phones out there with iris scanners. If the iris scanner works well, information technology could create a whole new category of identity verification platform that people will look for, much every bit Windows Hello has started to do on laptops and Windows tablets.

Killing Megapixels

The Milky way S8 uses the aforementioned master camera sensor equally the Milky way S7 did, a 12-megapixel unit of measurement. But Samsung says the S8 has better depression-low-cal performance, in part because of those parts of the Snapdragon 835 that don't get measured by Geekbench.

Megapixels have been expressionless for a while, but some people insist on shopping by them. The Google Pixel and Galaxy S7 had the best smartphone cameras last year, and they weren't the highest megapixel. The real question here is whether Samsung can evidence improvements in its photographic camera performance purely through software. The industry may be moving towards DxOMark as a style of measuring overall camera performance, but that benchmark is really opaque. And so we're going to have to find a new fashion to draw camera operation, now that megapixel numbers verge on meaninglessness.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/mobile-phones/14834/with-galaxy-s8-samsung-tries-to-break-the-spec-sheet

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