![]() It's the hope that simply doing more makes the S8 better than the competition. It's the endless array of features, useful or not, that Samsung throws at its phones. The iris scanner, the heart-rate monitor and Bixby in its current state exemplifies what's wrong with Samsung's approach to mobile. Dex is due for release at the end of April. Those who pick up the dock will be able to run multiple windowed Android apps and drag them around and multitask just like on a desktop computer. Dex features a HDMI port for a connection to an external monitor, USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, and even a small fan to help keep the S8 cool. Samsung intends the Galaxy S8's excellent multi-core performance to come in handy for Samsung Dex, a dock that turns the phone into a desktop PC. (A new version of Samsung's Gear VR, which features a small wireless controller, has been released alongside the S8.) That might seem trivial given the low hardware requirements of Android gaming, but it has its benefits in demanding virtual reality, where a few extra frames are the difference between smooth gameplay and feeling nauseous. The improvements in multi-core performance (where the Eynos chip comes in faster than Apple's A10) and GPU performance mean there's more power on tap, and more grunt to push higher frame rates in games. The virtual home button also provides some tactile feedback when you push down on the screen, but it's not as convincing as Apple's implementation on the iPhone 7. You can now put the back button on the left and the multitasking button on the right, just as every other Android phone does and has done since Google introduced them with Android 4.0 back in 2012. By moving to software, Samsung has finally fixed its most irritating quirk: flipped back and multitasking buttons. Since the Galaxy S8's slender bezels leave little room for capacitive hardware buttons, it instead uses software buttons. WIRED particularly likes the ability to illuminate the edges of the screen in unique colours when a call or a message comes in. ![]() Everything is generally well laid out, and you get extra customisation options over stock. Samsung has juggled a few things around in the settings app, but if you're not a stock Android stalwart it makes little difference in day-to-day use. ![]() The quick settings and notifications window – accessed by swiping down from the top of the phone – is near identical to stock Android, bar a change in colour scheme to electric blue. Google Now is easily installed from the Play Store. Google Assistant already runs on any phone with Android 6.0 and up, including the Galaxy S8. The voice feature common to every other virtual assistant isn't even available in English at launch.įor a company with a history of creating forward-thinking, if half-baked, features like multitasking and floating app windows, Bixby is an odd feature. These are lofty goals and Bixby, in its current state, feels like a beta product. Bixby wants to be all things to all people: a set of daily updates, reminders and transport advice like Google Now a powerful image-searching tool like Google Goggles and a voice-activated assistant like Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, or Apple's Siri. No better is this reflected than with Bixby, Samsung's take on the virtual assistant. If you've spent the better part of a decade slowly handing over all your most intimate data to Google in exchange for free email and online storage, though, it's tough to let go. All are perfectly decent, with the browser, in particular, being surprisingly fast. That said, there's no pressing need to uninstall Samsung's apps. Read more: Samsung Bixby: first impressions of the Galaxy S8's Siri-rival It even made us use a physical cable (included) to move data from a Google Pixel. WIRED’s only real criticism is that the Galaxy S8 insists on using its own app to transfer data from another phone, rather than the Google one common to most Android phones. Even those that can't be uninstalled (such as the calendar app or home screen launcher) are easily switched off in the settings. You can uninstall the mail app, messages and browser and replace them with stock Google alternatives. Large portions of Samsung's software suite are optional.
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