Samsung Galaxy S8 review: The best phone on the market comes at a cost

What’s remarkable about the Galaxy S8 is how much more screen real estate it gives you compared with the S7, while still offering a compact and lightweight design. The S8’s 5.8-inch screen is housed in a 5.5-ounce, 2.7-inch-wide chassis, whereas the 5.1-inch S7 weighed 5.4 ounces and had the same width. The S8 is taller, but it’s still easy to use with one hand.
The screen on the S8 looks great, as you’d expect of a Samsung Super AMOLED unit. Colours are bright and vivid, and it’s readable in all conditions. In normal use in the browser, I recorded an impressive peak brightness of 569m/2 on a fully white screen with auto-brightness enabled, and 415cd/m2 with auto brightness disengaged; sRGB coverage is an impressive 99.9%; and contrast, since it’s an AMOLED panel, is perfect.

Perhaps more significant is that it’s the only mobile phone screen currently that’s been certified by the UHD Alliance to the Mobile HDR Premium standard. That means, like a high-end TV, it’s capable of playing back HDR (high dynamic range) video content, meaning brighter highlights – up to 1,000cd/m2, according to DisplayMate – for an ultra-realistic image.

As I’ve already mentioned, the screen is curved along both long edges on the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ phones this year and this brings into play similar screen functions to previous Samsung Edge phones. Swipe a finger in from the right and you can access shortcuts to your favourite apps and contacts, plus various other Edge screen apps, including a compass and news feed. 

More significant is how the curved edges result in a wider display on a thinner phone. Edge apps are gimmicky; a display without bezel is genuine innovation.