Revered smartphone leakster Evan Blass yesterday leaked out what appears to be a genuine press shot depicting Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 flagship.
Not only does the image give us a better look at the device’s extra button, said to summon Samsung’s new Bixby digital assistant, it’s a preview of sorts of the kind of form factor we’re expecting from Apple’s iPhone 8 when it launches in September.
The phone appears to rock Samsung’s Super AMOLED display with curved sides and rounded corners, with utterly minimal front bezels. The physical Home button is no longer seen on the device’s front as Samsung is said to have built either an in-screen fingerprint reader or put a physical sensor on the rear of the phone.
An array of sensors can be seen just above the display where the earpiece and front camera are located, one of them possibly being a rumored iris scanner. There’s also an additional hardware button on the left that prior rumors indicated might be dedicated to Bixby, Samsung’s new digital assistant based on its purchase of Viv Labs.
Here’s Samsung’s Mobile World Congress teaser of the upcoming phone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iNTxLXO-Iw
Apple, too, is expected to redesign its handset.
A brand new OLED-based iPhone 8 model should join mostly iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates. iPhone 8 is widely expected to have its sensors, the front-facing Face Time camera and Touch ID embedded into the display, resulting in a drastically reduced top and bottom chin.
As a result, iPhone 8 could squeeze a Plus-class display into a body similar in size to the current 4.7-inch iPhone models while freeing up space currently occupied by the bottom chin for what KGI called a function area.
Samsung is set to unveil the next Galaxy on March 29.
According to leaked Galaxy S8 specs, the phone should release in April.
Source: Evan Blass on Twitter