Samsung officially unveiled its Galaxy S8 today. Since the device was leaked extensively, there’s very little in the way of news here, but there are still a few things I thought were interesting.
Most notably: DeX, a dock which turns your Galaxy S8 into a desktop computer. An old idea, of course, but still a holy grail companies are trying to obtain. The DeX dock looks kind of clever, and my absolute favourite part of it is that it has a fan to keep the phone cool while it’s in desktop mode. Any application with proper Nougat support works just fine with windowing, but developers can also optimise for Samsung’s own windowing features – which no developer will, of course, so you can forget that right away.
Curiously, the S8 comes with a new personal assistant built by Samsung with its own dedicated hardware button on the side of the device. It sports a 3.6mm headphone jack, and comes with a 99 USD wired Harman AKG headphones in the box, which is a nice touch.
The S8 will start at 750 USD or 799 EUR, and will be available this April.
3.6mm, or 3.5mm?
Which is probably going to make it impossible to use with landscape car docks. Samsung, you suck.
Where’s the laptop dock? and the car dock, and the TV dock…. So this is basically the Motorola Atrix, but done poorly. Whereas the Atrix just needed more ram.
Hardware wise and design wise this is the first Samsung device ever I would even consider buying.
Pity the thing is still running the incredible FUGLY Touchwiz skin.
Edited 2017-03-30 05:53 UTC
For most people, TouchWiz isn’t ugly. It has bright colors and a simple interface.
This is what I like about the free market. Why is “ugly” is not defined by seniority, steer cred, l33tness of whatever, but by the number of wallets that open to buy a certain thing. And the number of people buying Galaxy phones is huge. So, i think it would be better to say “the IMO incredible FUGLY Touchwiz skin”.
A similar thing happens with upgrades. People who want Galaxy features combined with Nexus/Pixel upgrade speeds will whine and whine at Samsung being evil to not provide that, but in reality there are many people who like Samsung’s feature-packed ROM and don’t care about upgrades. I am not in that camp, but I have to admit that there are reasons to be in that camp.
Edited 2017-03-30 11:17 UTC
For what it’s worth, if the S8 is using the Grace UX that the Note 7 had, it is tons better than the older Touchwiz. Plus.. as said Ugly is very subjective. I’d much rather an ugly interface that has all the options and features available (touchwiz?) vs something that is a complete flat design and terrible from a UI perspective with missing features (default Android).
If developers follow typical Android patterns, they’ll probably code for Samsung’s windowing system and leave Google’s as a second-class citizen, just like they do for audio control APIs. Yay fragmentation!
Name me a developer who’s gonna spend time on this? At least one that isn’t paid too.
Have either of you ever used the multi-window on Samsung devices? It seems to work quite well with almost all the apps I’ve thrown at it that I’d want to have more than one app on screen (pretty much any non-game).
E.g. in the Netherlands, Samsung has about 80% of the Android market (which is already 80% of the market). Other European countries may fare similar. So that’s a big market then.
Ha, exactly. Pretty much the people here may buy ‘Android’ phones, but the majority of people on the planet buy Samsung or Apple phones, they don’t care what operating system is on it. Samsung just happens to have phones from low to high end, whereas Apple only really hits the high end (at least if you’re buying new).
I’ll probably sit out this upgrade cycle and wait for the foldable Galaxy X or LG products.
In a year if something better hasn’t come along maybe I’ll get a Galaxy S8 for half price then.
Firefox for Android has had a setting to request desktop pages by default for 4+ years now. Ghost Commander, mpv, and Termux, will all scale wonderfully to lage screen sizes. This is actually pretty intriguing and I hope there’s some standard for Android “continuum” mode in the future.
I also love that Firefox tends to default to the requested desktop page on larger screens as well (like my Galaxy Note Pro 12.2. It works exactly like Firefox if you put it in full screen on a desktop computer.)
Does it or does it not have one? Searching literally results in every other page saying it does and doesn’t.
Duck duck go: has one, doesn’t have one, going to have one, not going to have one…
And it doesn’t seem to say one way or the other is their specs page.
Edited 2017-04-02 16:04 UTC