- [Alex] The Samsung Galaxy S8 is probably
the most important Android phone of the year.
It's also really, really good.
The S8 Plus is my daily driver right now,
I love the enormous display,
the phenomenal design, and the whole direction
that Samsung's taken in its software this year.
But, like any phone, after you've been using it for a while
there are things that start to grate.
Some small things, some not-so-small things,
that just make the phone less enjoyable.
So it's time to take a look at a few of them.
I'm Alex with Android Central
and these are the top 5 things
that I hate about the Samsung Galaxy S8.
(thumping upbeat music)
What a surprise, it's Bixby.
The name Bixby conjures up images of, like,
a dog in a monocle and a top hat or something,
at least to me.
But we're talking about Samsung's new AI thing here,
which, currently, is basically a non-feature.
Hello Bixby is basically a 2012 era Google Now clone
and nowhere near as useful as the real thing.
Some of the widgets here are just comically useless.
The Twitter card, for instance, shows you trending hashtags.
I don't need a widget to tell me it's World Penguin Day.
Got nothing against penguins,
that's just not relevant information to me.
You also got Bixby Vision, which uses the vast knowledge of,
uh, Pinterest... uh, okay...
to roll the dice and maybe show you something
vaguely similar to the thing right in front of you.
Okay, so there are some neat things you can do here,
like identifying different kinds of flowers and animals.
It's just so limited right now,
especially the Amazon Shopping tie-in,
which is nowhere near accurate enough to be worth your time.
The thing that'll actually make Bixby worthwhile,
the voice control feature, isn't live yet outside of Korea,
and I can only hope it works as well as Samsung claims.
It's support to let you use your voice
to do anything you would normally do with touch.
If it works, great.
Until then, it's just an unnecessary button
that you can hit accidentally every time
you go to take a screenshot.
Slow fast charging.
Samsung still using adaptive fast changing in the Galaxy S8,
which is its rebadged version of Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.
And it's not bad, it's reasonably quick,
but it's also behind the times.
We've been using this going back to the Note 4 in 2014,
back when Android looked like this.
In a world of Dash Charge and supercharging,
which push more juice at up to five amps
for quicker refills, Quick Charge 2 just seems old hat.
It's kinda surprising to me that Samsung hasn't just done
its own thing here like Wallway and OnePlus have.
Maybe it will one day,
but in the meantime I'm stuck charging
at nine volts and two amps like a caveman.
I'm gonna be a bit harsh here,
Samsung's button haptics on the S8 are kind of a mess.
This one's a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things,
but it's still something that bugs me.
You've got this invisible home button in the centre,
which is the only part of the screen
that responds to a hard press.
You can hard press to unlock the screen when it's off,
or go back home in a fullscreen app
when the keys are hidden.
But most of the time a hard press will just do nothing,
it'll take you home, like a regular tap on the home button.
And yet, you still get the same haptic feedback.
But then a long press will activate Google Assistant,
regardless of whether it's also a hard press as well.
And then when the Home key is shown
on the Always On display, tapping it does nothing,
instead you have to hard press to wake the phone up.
What's even more incongruous
is that you can turn on a different kind of haptic feedback
for taps on the on-screen buttons.
So a tap give you your regular vibration response,
but a hard press still does the special clicky thing,
yet on the Home key both kinds of actions do the same thing.
It's like Samsung was so focused
on making this faux clicky Home key,
that it forgot how these different kinds of button presses
are supposed to make sense in the user's mind.
Anyway, it's a small thing, like I said,
but it is an annoyance for me.
(sighing) Yeah, it's the fingerprint scanner.
It's in an awkward place on both phones,
and I can only assume no left-handed people work at Samsung
because, seriously, how is this supposed to be usable?
It's awkward on the smaller S8 and will be near impossible
for some people on the S8 Plus.
Then there's the fact the actual sensor itself
seems to be no more accurate than earlier Samsung models,
which have always been hit-and-miss for me.
So even if you have giant E.T. fingers
and are somehow able to actually reach this thing,
you'll deal with more unlock errors
than, say, a Pixel or a G6,
or even a cheaper phone like an Honour 8.
It's also markedly slower than those phones,
which is crazy for a flagship device
from a company with the resources of Samsung.
There's also the potential to gunk up your camera lens
with finger grease when you grope
around the back of this thing,
which Samsung knew was a problem
because it gives you this pop-up message
once you set your fingerprint.
Between all of these factors, every aspect
of using the fingerprint sensor on the S8 is just bad.
In fact, I've gone back to using Google's Smart Lock feature
on my S8 Plus because it's just less hassle.
But at least there are other ways
to unlock a Galaxy S8, right?
Well, the iris scanner and face recognition
work pretty well, but neither works reliably enough
all the time to truly replace fingerprint.
Iris unlock is great outdoors,
but utterly hopeless in bright daylight,
and face unlock has the opposite problem.
Of course, you can't use both at the same time
so there's no one unlock method that's 100% dependable.
Face unlock is probably the fastest,
though also the least secure, it can be fooled by a selfie,
but it has the added problem that it unlocks
as soon as it sees you,
which is actually kind of annoying
if you're just checking notifications on the lock screen.
It thinks you never wanted to look at it directly,
like it's gonna steal your soul or something.
Unlocking a phone is something you do dozens,
maybe hundreds of times a day,
and it's a shame that it's such a mess here
on an otherwise outstanding phone.
So those are the things that bug me about the Galaxy S8.
Of course, I'm nitpicking here,
overall, this is still a fantastic device,
almost certainly the best out there.
Hit the comments section below,
let us know what you love or hate about this phone,
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too much as they land.
That's it, thanks for watching.
I'll see you next time.