Samsung Galaxy S8 unboxes Bixby, but still lacks the awe

Samsung Galaxy S8 launch: New intelligent assistant and desktop accessory only new features

If you were hoping against hope there would be something in the Samsung Galaxy S8 that you did not know about earlier, then there was disappointment live streamed from New York. The Samsung Galaxy S8 was everything it was expected to be, sadly so.

It’s not that this is a bad phone, but it didn’t offer much surprise, that aha moment you would expect at a smartphone launch. Of course, the Infinity Display is great, but then Samsung has had curved edge displays for a few years now. The infinity display is a natural progression at the best. So is the camera, the 10 nanometer processor and better battery. Isn’t this what we expect from S7 to S8. Yeah, there is the Iris scanner, but it was there in the jinxed Note 7 too. So what’s really new?

Yeah, there is Bixby. Which distills your interactions with the phone to talk, see, recommend and remind. Yes, that’s all we do actually, summarised succinctly. Well, Bixby is not just all voice as you can use touch too to interact with this contextually aware, intelligent Jeeves in your phone. Bixby also sees and let’s the camera initiate the search. It’s, at least on first sight, a few steps ahead of Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. It can also grow more intelligent with time, and should be able to control the entire range of IoT devices you will soon have at home.

Bixby’s struggle would be to get people to use it and to get developers to integrate its features into their apps. That’s the problem with cutting edge tech, be it the Siri or the Cortana. It is another thing your device can do, but not the first thing you will do. I guess getting this tech to be at the heart of what you do is still a few years away.

When the phone makes its way into India in a month or so, it will without doubt be among the best Android phones you can buy. But the Samsung Galaxy S8 is coming to a very different world from its predecessors. There is the superb Google Pixel which is struggling to find buyers, there are the Asus and HTC flagships whining under the weight of their price points, and there are the mid-range Androids that are selling so well because they do what the flagships can, at half the cost.

The S8 is no longer the Android flagship, it is just another Android flagship. Hope there is more to the phone, just enough to take it ahead of the competition.

For the top end users, it might be Samsung Dex that gives the S8 a cutting edge, at least for those buyers who need productivity. Again, not something really new. But Samsung’s implementations seems seamless. Still, getting serious professionals to work on Android, even if on a larger screen, might be tough.

But with some Microsoft apps thrown in, Samsung might just be able to crack it with those who have serious jobs but don’t really need a read desktop computing or its processing power. If there are such serious professionals around. Maybe the smartphone-powered workstation might be the next big enterprise (cost saving) idea. Has Samsung unboxed something?