April probably can’t come soon enough for Samsung. With the company still trying to dust itself off from last year’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, Samsung is undoubtedly hoping that the impending release of the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus will help people forget about the most dramatic product recall in tech history.
As previously reported, Samsung will officially unveil both devices at a special event in New York City on March 29; but why wait a few weeks when you can get the full scoop on Samsung’s next-gen smartphone lineup today?
Over the past few weeks, Galaxy S8 rumors have been coming down the pipeline at a rapid clip. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that there isn’t much we don’t already know about what the S8 and the S8 Plus will bring to the table. If you happened to miss it, we even managed to snag exclusive photos of a pre-release S8 earlier this month.
Now as for what the S8 will deliver in terms of features and specs, a new research note from reputed KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (originally seen by 9to5Google) seems to confirm what we can can expect to see from Samsung’s 2017 smartphone lineup.
The 5.8-inch S8 is said to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor and will feature a WQHD+ resolution of 2960×1440 along with the same 3000 mAh battery as last year’s Galaxy S7. The 6.2-inch S8 Plus, meanwhile, will reportedly sport a healthy 3500 mAh battery.
Kuo’s note adds the following design details:
(1) Full-screen display with no physical home button; (2) all models equipped with 3D-curved cover glass; and (3) six cutouts at the top front consist of a proximity sensor, ambient light sensor (ALS), IR-LED transmitter and receiver for iris recognition, front/ sub camera, and receiver.
Interestingly, we saw a rumor floating around last week claiming that Samsung is contemplating the addition of a facial recognition feature to its S8 lineup to compensate for slow performance from the aforementioned iris scanner.
Camera wise, the S8 will reportedly sport a 12 megapixel sensor on the back and a 8 megapixel sensor on the front, a decent bump up from the 5 megapixel shooter used on the Galaxy S7. With respect to RAM, models in the U.S. and Europe will have 4GB of RAM while Kuo relays that models sold in Korea and China will have 6GB of RAM to work with.
Also worth mentioning is Kuo’s claim that the S8 will be released in seven colors: silver, gold, black, matte black, blue, orchid, and pink. Kuo further adds there will be four modules mounted next to each other on the back of the device: “a main camera (middle of the four), fingerprint scanner module (right), camera flash (top left), and heart beat measurement (bottom left).”
Additional S8 rumors we’ve seen elsewhere indicate that the S8 will boast 64GB of storage and will run Android 7.0 Nougat.
Lastly, Kuo writes that the S8 will hit store shelves on April 21, perhaps alleviating any concerns raised by a recent rumor that the launch date may have been pushed back to April 28.
