The Galaxy S8 is proof that Samsung is getting better and better at designing smartphones. Gone are the days when Samsung tried to convince buyers that it’s perfectly acceptable to build a $600+ smartphone out of plastic. And with the Galaxy S8, it looks like Samsung is paying even closer attention to the little details that users might not even notice during day-to-day use. For a perfect example, look no further than the new virtual home button, which moves ever so slightly on the screen to prevent any damage.
Discovered by GalaxyClub, Samsung’s home button trick is meant to prevent the burn-in phenomenon that you might experience on an AMOLED display. The longer you display the same image on an OLED screen, the more likely it is for the organic light-emitting diodes to be damaged. As a result, remnants of an image may remain visible as a ghost on the screen even when the diodes stop glowing when the screen is off.
Last year, Samsung said that the Always-On Display feature on the Galaxy S7 would not suffer from any burn-in effect because the clock and notifications that are shown on the screen keep changing their positions. Now, the same trick has been applied to the home button on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+.
You might not notice the movements with the naked eye, but it happens. The home button is visible almost all the time, but the image actually isn’t stationary. Instead, it moves ever so slightly, so that different pixels turn on and off. The following set of images shows the home button’s slight repositioning.
