Samsung Galaxy S8's coming to India!

The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ have been up for pre-registrations in India for quite some time now, and the handsets will be officially available on Friday, May 5. Himanshu Juneja gives a preview of what the phones offer

Looking at the considerable hype and excitement surrounding the Samsung's big release of the year 2017, it is clear that the South Korean conglomerate giant has been largely successful in making a strong comeback, putting behind the fiasco of the Note 7 batteries.

While it was expected that the S8 handsets will outperform the Galaxy S7 duo, Samsung has stacked their latest phones up with wide range of features. There is the iris scanner, the fingerprint scanner, and the password of course to unlock the device.

The cameras on the S8 and S8 Plus gets a 'sidegrade' from the previous generation, but almost everything else witnessed an upgrade.

Another thing to notice is that Samsung decided to do away with the 'flat displays' entirely. Both the Galaxy S8 models now come with curved edge 'Infinity Display' units.

But everything is not hunky dory with the upcoming Galaxy S8 handsets.

Early adopters have complained of a red tint on the screens, while there also have been reports of multiple restarts the handsets have been triggering due to app freeze.

The former issue has a fix which is already being rolled out in countries (India included), but it remains to be seen how Samsung tackles the reboot issue.

For the time being, let us dwell a bit deeper on what the latest of the Samsung Galaxy handsets have to offer.

Talking first about the more pocketable of the two: The Samsung Galaxy S8 sports a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED QHD panel. The screen comes with a resolution of 1440 x 2960p and the phone has plethora of sensors lined up right atop the magnificent display.

There is an 8MP camera at the front, and a 12 MP dual pixel camera at the rear, which carries the optical image stabilisation (OIS) technology.

Both the cameras come with a f/1.7 aperture.

The Exynos 8895 is the version offered to the interested buyers in this region and it comes with 4GB of RAM. Tucked inside also is the Mali-G71 MP20 as the GPU. With 64GB of storage space and a microSD card slot with capacity upto 256 GB, there is plenty of space to move things around.

The handset gets a sealed in 3000 mAh capacity battery.

The more beefier of the sibling, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, differs only in the screen size and battery capacity. With its QHD display real estate measuring 6.2-inch, the 1440 x 2960p resolution of the Super AMOLED panel has a slightly higher pixel density of ~529 vs the ~570 of the Galaxy S8.

Bigger screen also requires a bigger battery and hence we see a 3500 mAh (non user replaceable) battery pack here. Both the handsets support wireless charging feature.

There is no physical button upfront as Samsung has incorporated a pressure sensitive strip instead, allowing the edge to edge display take the center stage.

The handsets will be the first ones in India to feature an SoC with a 10nm framework. This should result in better efficiency and battery performance.

Coming to the software part, both will come rocking the Android Nougat (ver 7.0), with Samsung's TouchWiz slapped on top.

Samsung's own personal smart digital voice assistant 'Bixby' will be making its debut, and while it mimics Google's own voice assistant, Samsung considers it important enough to warrant a dedicated physical button on the handsets.

Bixby will only be functional after an update, and how much traction it will gain, remains to be seen.

Galaxy S8 has been priced at Rs 57,900, while the Samsung Galaxy S8+ is priced at Rs 64,900. The handsets will be available in two colours: Midnight Black and Maple Gold colour options.