Samsung built the Galaxy S8+ to fill a Note7‑sized hole—and it shows. From the 6.2-inch 18.5:9 Infinity Display to DeX desktop mode and Bixby, almost every piece of this phone screams “course correction plus experiment” at the same time.
Design: Taller, Narrower, and a Questionable Fingerprint Move
The S8+ was one of the first mainstream phones to stretch past 16:9 with an 18.5:9 panel, hitting 6.2 inches without turning into a small tablet. At 159.5 x 73.4 x 8.1mm, it’s surprisingly close in footprint to the 5.5-inch Galaxy S7 edge, just noticeably taller.
Samsung leans hard on symmetry: curved Gorilla Glass 5 front and back, a polished aluminum frame, and a rear camera that’s almost completely flush. IP68 water and dust resistance arrives without flap covers, which is how it should be in this price bracket.
The ergonomics story is more complicated. The extra height plus slippery glass makes top-of-screen reach awkward, and you’ll be shifting your grip a lot. Worse, the fingerprint reader is shoved high up, off-center, right next to the camera—basically a smudge magnet that reminds you where not to touch.
You do at least get a proper hardware layout otherwise: USB‑C, 3.5mm jack, single bottom speaker, separate volume rocker, and a lone power key. Then there’s the wild card—Samsung’s dedicated Bixby button under the volume keys, which modders immediately tried to hijack for more useful shortcuts.
Infinity Display: 18.5:9, HDR, and Early-Adopter Friction
Samsung’s AMOLED reputation didn’t start with the S8+, but this is the panel where the “Infinity Display” branding got backed by serious engineering. Resolution is 2960 x 1440 (QHD+), with 529ppi on the 6.2-inch panel and an 18.5:9 ratio. Out of the box, Samsung runs it at 2220 x 1080 to save some power, letting you drop further to 1480 x 720 or bump up to native QHD+ in settings.
Color-wise, it’s aggressively wide gamut: about 113% of DCI‑P3 and 142% of sRGB, with a “Deep Red” OLED subpixel recipe using a Diamond Pixels layout. You get four modes—AMOLED Cinema (tuned to DCI‑P3), AMOLED Photo (Adobe RGB‑leaning), Basic (sRGB/Rec.709), and Adaptive, which dynamically shifts based on content and ambient light.
Brightness is where it really flexes. Lab measurements hit 870 nits on small highlights and around 647 nits with more realistic full-screen content. Contrast is effectively infinite, minimum brightness is down at 3.3 nits, and reflectivity is low enough that sunlight legibility sits near the top of the charts.
HDR support is official for HDR10, and the panel carries the UHD Alliance “Mobile HDR Premium” badge. Dolby Vision is absent—even though LG’s G6 supports it—but in practice the panel has the color volume and brightness for HDR workloads. The real bottleneck is services: at the time, Netflix’s HDR was gated behind UHD TV requirements, while Amazon promised, but hadn’t yet fully aligned, HDR streams for QHD+ phones like the S8+ and G6.
The 18.5:9 ratio is both progress and pain. Apps scale fine under Android, but 16:9 video content means black bars or cropping. You get a bit more usable area than an S7 edge either way; you’re just trading bezels for letterboxing until content catches up.
Performance, Connectivity, and Battery: 10nm Power with Smart Trade‑Offs
Under the glass, Samsung used either the Exynos 8895 or Snapdragon 835, both built on a 10nm process and paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (plus microSD via a hybrid slot on dual‑SIM models). Each SoC is octa‑core: four high‑performance cores (Samsung’s Mongoose v2 or Qualcomm’s Kryo 280) plus four Cortex‑A53 efficiency cores.
Synthetic benchmarks show the Exynos edging ahead in multi-core CPU and often in GPU (Mali‑G71 MP20) versus the Adreno 540, especially in on‑screen tests at native resolution. Either way, you’re looking at top‑tier 2017 performance: high AnTuTu scores, strong Basemark OS2 numbers, and enough GPU headroom for high-end gaming at QHD+ with some settings flexibility.
Connectivity support is stacked. Both chip variants push LTE‑A Cat16 up to 1024/150 Mbps, with the Exynos version supporting 5‑carrier aggregation and Snapdragon up to 4. Wi‑Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with MU‑MIMO and 1024‑QAM, NFC, MST for Samsung Pay, and Bluetooth 5.0 (including dual‑audio output to two devices at once) are all on board.
USB‑C here is USB 3.1 with DisplayPort Alternate Mode. That’s how the phone drives external displays and the DeX dock, theoretically up to 4K and beyond. In practice, DeX’s desktop UI renders at 1080p60, while a separate USB‑C‑to‑HDMI 2.0 adapter can push proper 4K60 mirroring.
Battery capacity lands at 3,500mAh—500mAh up from the smaller S8 but the same as the recalled Note7. Endurance hits about 88 hours in controlled tests with strong Wi‑Fi browsing and video playback results, plus slightly worse 3G talk and standby. Changing resolution between QHD+, FHD+, and HD+ barely affects runtime in most workloads.
Charging is handled by Samsung’s Adaptive Fast Charging and Quick Charge 2.0, filling the pack in around 90 minutes. Qi and PMA wireless charging are both supported, with an optional fast wireless pad that gets surprisingly close to wired speeds. The big battery wildcard is Always On Display: roughly 1% per hour, which adds up fast if you leave it enabled 24/7.
Software, Bixby, and DeX: Ambition Meets Reality
On the software side, the S8+ ships with Android Nougat and Samsung’s reworked Samsung UX. Navigation buttons are on-screen and reconfigurable, while a pressure‑sensitive virtual home area gives you a pseudo‑physical button with haptic feedback, even when the display is off.
Samsung leans into one‑hand usability with a shrinkable one‑handed mode and edge panels for quick shortcuts. Multi‑window remains more flexible than stock Android, with resizable splits, pop‑up windows, and even a cropped strip view you can dock to an edge. Secure Folder effectively gives you a second phone profile with its own apps, accounts, and hidden data.
Game Launcher groups titles, offers on‑the‑fly resolution caps, screenshot and recording tools up to 1080p, and a forced full‑screen mode to coerce 16:9 games into 18.5:9 via cropping. Combined with the GPU, it turns the S8+ into a credible mobile gaming platform, though the narrow bezels make horizontal grip and accidental touches a real issue—hence Samsung’s edge touch rejection during games.
Bixby is the big swing. In practice, though, it was incomplete out of the gate. Bixby Home works like a customizable card feed on the leftmost home screen, drawing data from Samsung apps and partners like Spotify, Twitter, Foursquare, and Uber. You can pin, hide, or completely disable cards and even keep Bixby off the homescreen if you’re not into it.
Bixby Reminder is more promising—context and location‑aware reminders that can be created from shared content, then drop you back into the exact webpage, video, or message later. Bixby Vision tries to recognize objects, text, QR codes, and wines via the camera or gallery, with predictably mixed reliability depending on category and framing.
The missing piece is Bixby Voice, which wasn’t ready on global units at launch. Samsung’s promise is voice control for almost any UI action you can do by touch, but until that ships widely and works reliably, Bixby is more interesting experiment than daily driver.
Then there’s DeX, Samsung’s desktop mode built around a $150 dock with HDMI 2.0, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet (100Mbps), and an integrated fan. Dock the S8+ and you get a 1080p desktop interface, a taskbar with notifications and quick toggles, and windowed Android apps.
Core Samsung apps and Microsoft’s Office suite scale nicely, but serious editing in Word or Excel on an external monitor needs an Office 365 subscription. Many third‑party apps run in windows thanks to Nougat’s freeform mode, though some games and older apps need restarts or show layout issues. This is more a polished proof‑of‑concept than a true laptop replacement—useful for light productivity or remote desktop via Citrix/Amazon/VMware integrations, but not enough to ditch a PC.
Camera and Audio: Incremental Main Shooter, Big Selfie Upgrade
On paper, the rear camera is nearly unchanged from the S7 edge: a 12MP Dual Pixel sensor with f/1.7 aperture, 26mm equivalent lens, OIS, and phase‑detect autofocus. The improvements live in processing. Samsung adds Multi‑Frame Image Processing, quietly stacking multiple frames per shot in the background to reduce noise and boost detail, especially in low light.
In good light, results are basically on par with the S7 family: lots of detail, wide dynamic range, vivid colors, and noticeable but generally pleasing sharpening. HDR is restrained and can run in Auto; in many scenes, HDR on/off differences are subtle, though you can occasionally see some softness and moiré in the stacked output.
Low light is where the extra processing earns its keep. At shutter speeds around 1/10s, the S8+ pulls out more detail and cleaner textures than the S7 edge under identical conditions, even though you still see the usual noise reduction artifacts. Panoramas are detailed but can show banding where exposure shifts across a complex scene.
The front camera is a clear generational jump: 8MP, f/1.7, autofocus, and Auto HDR. Selfies are sharp across the frame in both indoor and outdoor shots, with enough resolution to rival older main cameras like the Galaxy S4’s rear shooter. Samsung layers on face‑tuning modes (skin tone, slim face, large eyes, spotlight) and AR effects; used lightly, they’re fine, but maxing them quickly veers into uncanny territory.
Video capture tops out at 4K30 with around 48Mbps AVC and stereo audio. 1080p60 sits near 28Mbps. OIS is active in all modes, and electronic stabilization now works even at 4K, improving over the S7 edge’s 1080p‑only EIS. Clip length is oddly capped at 10 minutes for 4K and 1080p60.
Footage is sharp with natural color and less aggressive processing than stills. 1080p shows more noise than 4K. Low‑light video keeps decent detail and handles highlights well, though noise naturally rises. The single bottom speaker rates as “Good” in loudness testing, matching the S7 edge and Note7—acceptable but underwhelming given the chassis size. The 3.5mm jack stays, driving clean output with low distortion and above‑average volume.
Verdict: A High‑Risk Bet That Mostly Pays Off
The Galaxy S8+ was never designed to be a bargain; it was designed to reset trust and push Samsung’s hardware story forward after the Note7. On that front, it largely succeeds. The Infinity Display is class‑leading, performance is top‑tier, battery life is solid, and low‑light photography plus the upgraded selfie camera keep it competitive.
The flip side is a list of compromises: an awful fingerprint sensor position, a single bottom speaker in a phone this large, early‑stage Bixby without full voice support, and a DeX ecosystem that’s more tech demo than PC replacement. Media and app ecosystems haven’t fully caught up to 18.5:9 or mobile HDR, so you’re also dealing with a lot of transition friction.
If you want a tall, narrow flagship with one of the best AMOLED panels of its generation and you can live with Samsung’s biometric and software quirks, the S8+ makes a strong case. If you care more about price, ergonomic fingerprint access, or stereo speakers, the cheaper S7 edge and various competitors are still very reasonable alternatives.
Check back soon as this story develops.