Samsung might not deliberately leak an awful lot to the press directly, but it does give a fair bit of information to 3rd party case and accessory makers ahead of its big reveal, to ensure that there are cases, accessories, chargers and the like available fairly quickly after their top-shelf phones are launched. Why? Because who wants a phone that they can’t buy accessories for … it’s a frustrating experience.
Thanks to one case maker, who has (for obvious reasons, chosen to remain anonymous) we have a set of three case renders which – we understand – are based off the final dimensions and schematics for Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8.
Here’s the stand-out features:
- The curved display certainly appears to be there; it’s more pronounced, pushing the bezels right towards the back of the phone.
- There’s no home key, and the fingerprint reader is apparently under the glass display.
- Speaker grills both above and below the display, giving us stereo speakers.
- The 3.5mm headphone jack is shown, though the port appears to be a MicroUSB. We’d suggest this is an assumption on the part of the case maker, rather than a final decision by Samsung.
On that MicroUSB, it just doesn’t fit. Both the Galaxy Note 7, and the even-newer Galaxy A (2017 range) feature USB-C ports, and there doesn’t seem to be any indication or even likelihood that Samsung would take a step backwards with the Galaxy S8; we’d suggest the case maker probably has used an existing asset/element and thrown in the MicroUSB port just so you could see any port there, but our money is on USB-C.
I guess we’ll know in a little while. It seems likely that Samsung will be breaking with tradition and not announcing at MWC 2017, but we’ll know in a few weeks whether this is the case or not. As I remarked to my colleagues last night, MWC would have a very different feel without a huge announcement from Samsung.
Worthy replacement for my Nexus 6.