Will Samsung’s exploding batteries in its Galaxy Note 7 force the company into an early release of the Galaxy S8? Regardless of when its flagship handset and successor to arguably the best smartphone on the market is released will it be worth the hype that I along with others are propagating? Let’s take a look at the latest rumors, possible specs and release date.
Source: FlickrEarly release for the Samsung Galaxy S8?
Nearly without fail, Samsung has used the Mobile World Congress in February/March, held in Barcelona, Spain each year, to release its flagship phone and wow the world. And let’s be clear, they truly have wowed the world on a number of occasions and most reviewers or those simply who have had a chance to test drive the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge largely believe it the best smartphone on the market. Essentially, you would have to be an iPhone or iOS lover in order to disagree.
Now the question becomes whether the company will fast track the release of the Galaxy S8 owing to the loss of revenues while the company cleans up the mess that is the Galaxy Note 7’s horrible tendency to explode starting fires and often injuring the owner.
Expected features from the Galaxy S8
Whenever Samsung releases a new flagship phone, it releases a new Galaxy model which is considerably faster than the last. While these are all rumors, which should be taken with a grain of salt, I’m pretty confident saying that the Galaxy S8 will be faster than this year’s Galaxy S7, which does not suffer from performance issues.
Presently, the S7 is running Qualcomm‘s Snapdragon 820 processors or Samsung’s own Exynos chips depending on the region it’s purchased, not necessarily used. With this understanding, I would expect the Galaxy S8 to rock Qualcomm’s upgraded Snapdragon 830, or as SamMobil has suggested the Exynos 8895 processor and Mali-G71 graphics chip working in tandem to nearly double the graphics output of the Galaxy S7.
It the Mali chip is used, it will provide instant support for VR and tempt Samsung to use a 4K screen. It’s quite possible that Samsung will also look to add more RAM in order power these processors and chips.
Samsung’s Galaxy line has consistently been at the forefront of resolution and screen technology. Samsung has gone from HD, to full HD, and presently the Galaxy S7 provides Quad HD. Don’t be surprised if Samsung is one of the first, if not the first, to roll out a 4K display that would give Samsung a real edge in the growing VR realm.
It’s quite possible that in addition to 4K support for its new screen, Samsung may finally drop the flat screen following the success of the S7 Edge and the Galaxy Note7’s curved glass screens.
One would think that given the dual-camera setup recently released for the iPhone 7 Plus and the popularity of Huawei’s P9 and Honor 8 dual camera array as well as that in LG’s G5 and V20, it’s hard to see Samsung not going with a dual-camera release for the Galaxy S8 and Samsung patents back up this thinking.
I don’t necessarily see Samsung speeding the release of the Galaxy S8. If Samsung could get in store windows prior to the holiday shopping season, they should, but that seems a big stretch for the company that generally releases its flagship offerings in February/March.
