A three day stint with the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus and a short lived affair.

A three day stint with the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus and a short lived affair.

Ever since the Galaxy S8 and S8 were launched I was quite tempted to give the new flagship a try even after knowing I am more comfortable with iOS than Android. So finally went ahead, sold my iPhone 7 Plus and got a Galaxy S8 Plus. Here goes my opinion on it.

Screen – Wonderful, wonderful and super wonderful! You just can’t stop staring at the beautiful screen. The colours are bloody vibrant and the screen is so immersive. Watching 4K YouTube videos was mindblowing. On the flip side the scrolling and touch sensitivity were too off compared to iPhone. Seen very inconsistent scroll backs quite often.

Camera – front facing camera was a huge boon but even after tweaking the settings a lot I see that the photos smoothen faces a lot which makes the phoots look a bit artificial. The rear camera didn’t seem too great and it was a mixed bag. Went for a candle light dinner so it was a perfect occasion to test low light photography. Compared the pics taken with my wife’s iPhone 6S. The pics from iPhone 6S were lot more grainy than S8 Plus but the colours weer very innacurate and saturated on S8 Plus. Overall if I include the Portrait mode, better panos and more natural colours of 7 Plus I would still prefer a 7 Plus over S8 Plus. This is my personal choice though.

Battery life – again a mixed bag. Watching YouTube videos drained the battery much slower than it did on 7 Plus but on a typical day I see myself running below 15% by 05:00 PM whereas my iPhone 7 Plus used to hit similar mark around 7:00 PM or 08:00 PM. For my usage scenario 7 Plus squeezed out better battery life.

Heating – a pain in the butt! The phone always, I mean ALWAYS, stay warm or a bit hot. I don’t know what’s wrong with Samsung phones, I noticed something similar on S7 edge too last year. Mat be people find it normal but for me it’s a bit too inconvenient. When I take calls I am switching to loud speaker after a while as my ear hurts because of the heat from the phone. I am not sure what the issue here is. Do note, I use my phone on 3G/4G all day with WiFi switched off. Never had such issues with my 7 Plus though.

Operation – A big lol to the new processor. Even basic tasks animations still stutter a bit, just like it did on S7 edge. I mean, compare with a nexus or OnePlus or Pixel or even Moto phone. Why do these OEMs mess with such a beautiful OS google develops? Is it necessary to add the skin/functionality to such an extent that it kills the experience?
Bixby- he he he. Never mind.

Keyboard – didn’t use the handset long enough to learnt he words that I use which are not in the dictionary so auto correct was a pain. Apart from that, it was surprisingly very comfortable to use. In fact it felt better than the keyboard on iPhone 7 Plus. Used the Samsung default keyboard.

Update on 23rd May 2017

Samsung Pay: Totally forgot about this. The best feature in this phone for me. Unlike Apple Pay which relies purely on NFC, Samsung Pay relies on MST (magnetic strip) and NFC too. So what it does essentially is to mimic a magnetic strip card while you use it at a payment terminal (Card swiping machine). In India there are hardly any stores that have a NFC equipped machine to swipe cards so having MST support is a huge boon. I used Samsung Pay for 13 transaction in 3 days and not once did I have any problem. Such a seamless and useful service that iPhone users can never have sadly.

The best thing about this experiment. Sold my iPhone 7 Plus 128GB on OLX, added just 2k to get a 11 days old S8 Plus, then sold that S8 Plus and got iPhone 7 Plus 256gb at the exact cost I sold my 7 Plus 128gb for. So after all this experiment I could upgrade from 7 plus 128gb to 7 plus 256gb at no cost

And got to use the Galaxy S8 Plus for a few days too.