Samsung’s Masterpiece
With a new slogan of “Unbox Your Phone,” Samsung Electronics has unveiled its new strategic smartphone “Galaxy S8.”
The Galaxy S8 features near bezel-less screen and no physical home button. Samsung Electronics has broken a conventional frame and created a new one in seven years after releasing the Galaxy series.
Some industry sources say that Apple will ditch the home button when it debuts a new “iPhone 8” model in September. Ben Wood, a smartphone industry analyst with UK-based CCS Insight, said in a report, “As voice recognition technology gets more advanced, an increasing number of home button will naturally disappear from smartphones.”
The Samsung Galaxy S8 unveiled on March 29 (local time) was hailed as “the most ambitious Samsung phone” and “the most advanced phone in the market” by major foreign press. In particular, its “Infinity Display” with near bezel-less design and the capability of hitting gigabit download speeds have received favorable comments. Some press even said that Apple’s smartphone design lags behind Samsung’s.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said, “The S8 is Samsung’s biggest masterpiece and its ace in the hole is screen technology. iPhone owners will have difficulty in controlling impulse to buy the S8 in the next few months.” CNBC reported, adding, ”Thanks to its large screen, the Galaxy S8 has become the most beautiful smartphone this year.”
U.S.-based IT news outlet Recode said that the Galaxy S8 shows how much Apple falls behind smartphone design trends. It said, “While Apple pioneered the all-screen phone concept with the first iPhone, Samsung and other companies have recently pushed it further.” The Samsung Galaxy S8 has minimal bezels to take up nearly 83 percent of the front panel.
During an interview with Fortune magazine, Grant Castle, vice president of T-Mobile, the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier in the number of subscribers, said, “When converging with “Carrier Aggregation” technology, which combines a number of separate frequency bands into one frequency to improve the speed, the Galaxy S8 can achieve the data processing speeds of gigabit per second.”
Fortune magazine said, “Samsung’s AI system Bixby can also answer user questions like its competitors, but where it might shine is that Bixby can send a file in the smartphone to someone in the user’s contact list.”