SamMobile is reporting today that Samsung’s next-generation Galaxy S8 smartphone will replace the physical Home button with a non-moving variant embedded right behind its AMOLED screen. The firm is also said to adopt USB-C for charging and data transfer and ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack to make the phone thinner and lighter.
The Galaxy S8 should be unveiled in February 2017 and could beat Apple’s rumored iPhone 8 to the virtual Home button.
This means that Galaxy S8 owners will need to purchase a USB Type-C adapter (which Samsung may include in the box with the device, like Apple does with the iPhone 7 series) to connect their existing wired headphones. And like with the iPhone 7, Galaxy S8 owners won’t be able to plug in the phone and use wired headphones at the same time.
Removing the 3.5mm headphone jack should let Samsung engineer a thinner device with more space inside for a bigger battery and other features, such as stereo speakers which some sources believe will be made in collaboration with Harman, a company that Samsung is acquiring for $8 billion.
In another post, SamMobile claims that the device will ditch the physical Home button, retaining 2K pixel resolution (2,560-by-1,440) of its predecessor rather than upgrade the display to 4K pixel resolution. The phone is thought to use a new material to boost the quality of its Super AMOLED screen.
From that report:
The new Super AMOLED display of the Galaxy S8 is going to have the standard RGB arrangement, it will consume less power and will have a longer service life. The RGB array is going to provide a noticeable improvement in virtual reality environments.
We’ve also heard that Samsung is going to ditch the home button in its next flagship. The screen-to-body ratio is going to be very high and the design will be similar to that of the Galaxy Note 7. The fingerprint sensor will be embedded within the display itself making the Galaxy S8 the first handset to feature proper optical fingerprint identification.
Aside from these rumored features, the Galaxy S8 is also said to integrate the praised Viv personal assistant which was developed by Siri creators a few years ago and purchased by the South Korean conglomerate in October 2016.
Korean news site ET News reported that following Note 7 fires, Samsung is now “paying extra careful attention” towards Galaxy S8 development because the handset will reportedly bring out “huge changes” in terms of industrial design and hardware features.
Digital Music News first reported back in September that the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Edge (respectively code-named“Dream” and “Dream2”) may replace the 3.5mm jack with either a proprietary port or USB-C.
Source: SamMobile 1, 2