Ongoing Review: Samsung Galaxy S8+

First Impressions

Well as per my previous blog post, I was not in the market for a new phone. But as spiritual forces acting in my favour (I think), I dropped my Galaxy S6 edge plus, onto the stone paved floor in a temple. The edge sustained the major brunt of the fall, with lines webbing over the rest of the screen.

As I needed a new phone ASAP, I immediately booked myself a Galaxy S8+ (on the damaged phone), and taking the damage to my current device into consideration I also bought myself a flip case.

So, I received it in a few days, the delivery was speedy, and Flipkart packaged the device pretty well. It came in a big box, with the text, “Here’s the S8. Enough said.”

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At first I was a little worried as I had ordered the S8 Plus, and here’s a box telling me it’s an S8 only. I open the box and find within a card from Flipkart, which opens up, thanking us for purchasing the phone (using voice, like one of those old musical greeting cards).

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That was a nice touch, now let’s get to the phone.

There below the card was the box housing the phone, I breathed a sigh of relief as I read S8+ on it, they didn’t deliver the wrong phone(Phew!).

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But there seemed to be more, below. I open another flap and find a cool diary, with Flipkart and Galaxy S8 branding on it.

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Ok, so now onto the phone…

The box covered another that needed to be slid out, and the internal one opened up using a flap that opened out revealing the device (where’s the device you say, I was photographing using the phone so that’s why it’s missing)

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Under the phone tray, is the sim tool, used to open out the sim tray to insert your sim cards.

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The Galaxy S8 uses a hybrid sim tray, where you have a choice of either using two SIMs or a Micro-SD and one SIM. This allowed expanding the storage on the device, which is already a respectable 64 GB, which is the base variant. You can add another 200 GB for a total of 264 Gb which should be enough for everyone.

I had a 128 GB card in my Surface pro, which I popped into the slot and it worked perfectly, no formatting necessary.

Turning on the phone the gorgeous 6.2 inch screen came to life, the really thin bezels really makes it look like they’re not there, totally immersing you into the phone.

I setup the phone, logging into my google account and my Samsung account as I was coming in from a previous Samsung device. This allowed for syncing back most of contacts, and settings.

Next I activated Smart Switch, which is by Samsung an app to transfer all your data from one device to the other. The adapters are included to be able to connect micro USB on the older phone to USB-C on the Galaxy S8+.

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The transfer can also be done wirelessly, but I wanted it finish without any problems so took the USB route. The data transferred pretty fast , my contacts, settings, photos and videos moved to the new phone, including the layout of the default apps on the home screen including the home and lock screen wallpaper. This made changing phones seamless.

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Will update on how the phone is performing after a week, by then I would have gotten a hang of it and would have had ample opportunity to use the camera as I’am still on vacation. Also have to test the AKG earphones that came bundled with the phone, they’re supposed to be worth 5-6k, so have to see what the fuss is all about.