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What happened? Samsung’s Galaxy S7, released last year, was a very nice smartphone: comfortable to hold and a pleasure to use. It was Samsung’s best Galaxy model ever-not so much the new Galaxy S8, which goes on sale today and ships on April 20.
The Galaxy S8 seems to suffer from the same disease afflicting Apple’s latest MacBooks: engineering navel-gazing leading the product design astray.
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Poor ergonomics make using the Galaxy S8 a pain
Take the new shape. It’s taller, the fingerprint sensor is moved to the back, and both sides of the so-called Infinity display are curved. These changes have unfortunate implications in everyday usage:
* The Galaxy S8 is hard to use one-handed, because much of the screen is too far from the finger reach of most people. I tested the smaller 5.8-inch unit; I can only imagine the larger 6.2-inch Galaxy S8+ model has to be double-handed like a small tablet. Yes, the Galaxy S8 includes Samsung’s one-handed mode optimizations (in the Settings app) available to previous Galaxy models, but with the new taller aspect ratio of the Galaxy S8, one-handed use is still awkward. There’s no real benefit to that extra height.
* The fingerprint sensor is hard to work with because you can’t see where it is. And you have to pick up the phone to use it, so forget about quickly checking status from the phone resting on your desk or airplane seat tray. Worse, the sensor is right next to the rear camera, so it’s harder to find by touch and results in the camera lens getting covered in fingerprints. (Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL also have a fingerprint sensor in the back, with similar issues resulting; at least Google...