Samsung S8/S8+ review: gorgeous design, build quality, great camera, but fingerprint scanner is in awkward spot, Bixby's useless, preinstalled apps are annoying
The new S8 and S8 Plus aren't perfect, but they are damn close — People “aren't excited by new phones anymore.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's flagship arc is remarkably consistent: the Galaxy S7 review a year earlier praised the same trio of build quality, design, and camera while dinging software bloat, and the S8 repeats the pattern almost beat for beat. The open question from March's Galaxy S8 hands-on — how Bixby would stack up against rival assistants — now has an answer, and it isn't flattering.
What makes this review matter is what it flags for the next cycle: the misplaced fingerprint scanner and the dead-on-arrival assistant are the two flaws Samsung can actually fix in hardware and software respectively.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between the S8 and S8 Plus get near-flagship hardware with two daily-use irritants — a rear fingerprint reader sitting next to the camera lens and a Bixby button that mostly gets in the way.
- Samsung ships the phone with preinstalled apps it can't fully remove, meaning carriers and Samsung's own services ride along on every unit sold.
Second-order effects
- The fingerprint placement criticism lands directly on Samsung's industrial design team, and the follow-up Galaxy S9+ review confirms they moved the sensor — evidence the review loop actually steers the next product revision.
- Bixby's weakness leaves the assistant slot on the home screen effectively unclaimed, ceding voice-assistant engagement on Samsung's own devices to rivals rather than building a defensible software moat.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the S7-to-S9 span — hardware praised every year, Bixby called a failure by the S9 review — Samsung stays a hardware company whose software differentiators never compound, keeping its flagships dependent on component excellence rather than ecosystem lock-in.
The trend: Samsung's flagship line is converging on excellent, annually refined hardware while its first-party assistant software stalls, leaving each generation's differentiation to rest on the next industrial-design fix.