Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S8 is shaping up to be one helluva flagship Android smartphone.

Though we already got a glimpse of what the S8 will supposedly look like last month, newly leaked photos give us a closer look at the front glass panels — and depending on your taste, it's either going to be the hottest phone ever created or the ugliest.

According Twitter user Benjamin Geskin (via BGR), the images below, posted to China's Weibo, are the front panels of the S8:

The leaked images align with previous leaks and rumors that claim the S8 will lose the home button below the display to make way for curved, much larger pressure-sensitive screens (similar to the kind on the iPhone 6S and 7) in two sizes.

The smaller S8 will reportedly have a 5.8-inch screen and the larger "S8 Plus" a 6.2-inch display — both would be larger than the existing S7 and S7 Edge, which have 5.1- and 5.5-inch screens, respectively. Heck, both S8 models would have larger screens than the short-lived Note7.

One thing that might upset fans is the the top bezel, which — slim as it looks — is filled with cutouts for the earpiece, front-facing camera and presumably an iris scanner. Maybe one day, all of those components will be integrated into the display, but not this year.

Bigger curved screens won't be the S8's only drool-worthy feature. In addition to being powered by the newest and fastest Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, the S8 will also reportedly come with its own AI assistant called "Bixby".

It was originally believed that Bixby would be powered by Viv, the AI assistant developed by Siri's creators. However, a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests Bixby might merely be an evolution of S Voice, Samsung's voice assistant that never quite matched Siri.

Regardless of what the underlying technology is, Bixby is expected to be an integral part of the S8 with reports claiming the phone will have a dedicated button located on one side to activate it. Bixby will also reportedly integrate with the camera and use optical character recognition (OCR) to scan text into digital format, and be able to control all of the S8's native apps.

The WSJ also corroborates reports that Samsung will not remove the headphone jack on the S8. As for battery life, The Investor claims Samsung will play it safe with batteries similar in capacity the S7 and S7 Edge, which is probably the best route to go since the company definitely doesn't want a repeat of the Note7.

While the S8 is not expected to launch until April, we should get our first official sneak peek of the S8 with a one-minute video teaser at Mobile World Congress later this month, according to The Korea Herald.

Source:
courtesy of MASHABLE

by RAYMOND WONG

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