So I did the thing. Preorders for the Galaxy S8 opened up on the 7th and I put mine in two days later, which if you're keeping track means I spent an entire weekend refreshing Samsung's site instead of doing literally anything productive. Midnight Black, the regular S8 not the Plus, because I have small hands and I'm not ashamed to admit it. $750 unlocked, which still makes me wince a little every time I type it out. Ships around the 21st, apparently, so I've got almost two weeks of just staring at press photos like an idiot.
I've been on a Nexus 6P since late 2015 and the battery's been doing that thing where it just shuts off at 30% like it's making a personal decision about my life. So the timing worked out. But I want to talk about the two things everyone's already arguing about, because I have opinions and this is my blog.
The fingerprint sensor. They moved it to the back, right next to the camera lens, instead of putting it in the home button like every other Samsung phone for the last few years (there's no home button anymore, it's all screen now, which is its own thing). Whoever signed off on putting a fingerprint reader directly adjacent to a camera lens has clearly never actually used a phone. You're going to smudge that lens every single time you unlock it. I've seen this complaint from basically every outlet that got hands-on time with the thing at the unveiling last month, and it's not going away just because the display looks incredible. It looks incredible! The bezels are basically gone, the screen wraps almost to the edges, it's genuinely the best-looking phone Samsung's ever made. And then you flip it over and there's this baffling little rectangle sitting right where your finger's going to end up greasing up your photos.
Bixby. So the voice assistant, the whole reason for the dedicated Bixby button on the side that you apparently can't remap to anything else (seriously, why), isn't going to be ready when the phone actually ships. Samsung's confirmed this week that Bixby Voice won't work in English at launch, it's coming "later this spring" or some similarly vague timeline. So you get a hardware button, permanently wired into the side of a $750 phone, that does nothing useful for an unknown number of weeks. I get wanting to compete with Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri, I really do, the space is clearly where everyone thinks the puck is going. But shipping the button before the software is like handing someone a car key for a car that isn't in the driveway yet.
Here's the thing that actually got me to preorder anyway, though, and it's a small one: the headphone jack is still there. I know how petty that sounds given everything else going on with this launch, but after watching Apple rip theirs out of the 7 last September and everyone acting like dongles were the future we all deserved, it's nice that at least one of the big phone makers looked at that decision and just… didn't. My car doesn't do Bluetooth audio worth a damn (it's an '09 Civic, don't ask), and I was not looking forward to relearning how to plug in an adapter every time I wanted to listen to a podcast on the drive to work.
Anyway. I'll do a real writeup once it's actually in my hands and I've lived with it for a week or two, not just regurgitated the same specs everyone's been passing around since the New York event. If the camera's as good as the early sample shots suggest I might finally stop carrying my old point-and-shoot around, which would be nice, that thing takes AA batteries and I always forget to buy more.
Also, completely unrelated, but my Switch's left Joy-Con has started drifting slightly in Zelda and I'm trying not to think about what that means long-term. One phone problem at a time.