The noise of the leaks and rumours surrounding Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ is gaining momentum every day — and there is still nearly two weeks until the announcement. Overnight we saw more information come to light from Samsung Italy’s website and also from a South Korean news outlet.
The Investor website/news outlet from South Korea has reported overnight that Samsung Display (the display-making arm of Samsung Electronics) is working on a pressure-sensitive display based on organic LEDs not just for the upcoming iPhone but also for the Galaxy S8’s “virtual home button”. Using different touch sensitivities will allow users to use the home button to navigate the phone and open menus — more than just a standard home button.
The pressure-sensitive touch technology is expected to come to the entire display is future Samsung phones such as the Galaxy Note 8.
In another Galaxy S8 moment overnight the Italian Samsung website has confirmed the name of the AI to be included on the Galaxy S8 — Bixby (as expected). In their privacy statement for mobile devices, in the Voice Services section the website says (translated from Italian by Google) that:
Depending on your model and in your area, you can order the mobile device to activate certain functions, such as playing songs from a playlist or Internet searches using S Voice. In addition, you can control all operations with the touch interface using voice commands with Bixby.
From this statement it seems that maybe Samsung will be bringing Bixby to more devices than just the Galaxy S8 models. With Google rolling out Google Assistant to so many devices now we would expect Samsung to attempt to do the same so consumers use their AI and not Google on their devices.
Bixby is expected to have support for eight languages at its launch but aside from that little is known about Samsung’s successor to S-Voice and their answer to Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant etc. At the Galaxy S8 launch on March 29 (New York time) we expect more will be revealed.
So while there has been no new images of the Galaxy S8 overnight the well has not been dry and we expect this to continue. The Galaxy S8 hype is building to a fever pitch, so much so that one may suspect that it could well be being orchestrated by someone. The phones have a lot to live up to. Do you think it will be able to?
Yes it does appear from that statement that the aweful S-Voice is hanging around. I had way too many issue with it be really be useful. I hope Bixby is well integrated into the operating system and uses natural speech rather than set phrases and is optimised for Australia (I hate searching for gas stations instead of servos ?). I really want to be able to use my phone hands free. And my that I mean more than a Google search and call someone. True hands free will be awesome as I spend a lot of time driving or with… Read more »
So S-Voice is hanging around as a Google Search clone and Bixby is coming in as a Google Voice Access clone.
Nice, Samsung. Nice…
*slow clap*