Samsung's Galaxy S8 Active Looks Like a Rugged LG G6 (theverge.com)

The Wireless Power Consortium has released a leaked image of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 Active. While it's only one photo, the image shows a smartphone greatly resembling LG's G6. The Verge reports: First, the display: the S8 Active won't have curved edges, like the regular S8. The big question this year was what Samsung planned to do about the screen, since curved glass may be more susceptible to cracking, and Samsung seems to have decided the best option was to get rid of it altogether. Instead, the S8 Active has a flattened out look but retains the S8's rounded corners, making the front of the phone look a lot like LG's G6. Samsung seems to have made the bezels a little bit larger on the S8 Active, particularly on the sides. But overall, the front of the phone still seems to get fairly close to the nearly all-screen look of actual S8. The second thing this photo shows is that Samsung isn't putting buttons back on the front of the phone. That's not necessarily a huge surprise, but it'll make the device a bit harder to handle when wet, since owners will be relying on the touchscreen. And finally, this photo reveals a bit of what Samsung is doing to make the phone rugged. All four of its corners bump out, suggesting they've been reinforced to absorb shock should the phone get dropped; it looks a lot like what Samsung has done in the past.

Comments

Re:How many patents does this infringe?

[Beau1080p]

Who cares about suing samsung. If you look at BeauHD's TWIT-ter feed, you can find him talking about how omigosh gah-reat this fone is and how daddy is going to advance his contract and buy him yet another $1800 fone b/c hez still 'n skull.

My name is Beau1080p, and I approve this message.

The real news

[Zemran]

It is a phone.

Re:How many patents does this infringe?

[JustNiz]

Love these morons that make such macho statements yet don't even have the balls to post as themselves and stand behind their own words.

But can it start a fire?

[Anonymous Coward]

But can it start a fire?

Re:But can it start a fire?

[TWX]

Given that it's for an "active" lifestyle which presumably means outdoorsy stuff, hopefully they've added a parabolic curve to the glass screen so that it has a focal point about six inches from the screen, so tha you can concentrate sunlight when you're lost in the wilderness to make a cooking or signal fire.

Re: How many patents does this infringe?

[JustNiz]

I agree its not much but even that is clearly more than your tiny brain/testicles can come up with.

Omg

[fluffernutter]

Oh my God and they can both make phone calls! How does a person choose one over the other?

Re:Omg

[TWX]

Simple. If you've ever dropped anything, avoid the regular one.

Wonderful

[iampiti]

How Samsung can make a rugged Galaxy S8 which I presume it won't sell many units but can't be bothered to make one with a removable battery.
The conclusion is not many people care about removable batteries or they'd rather keep the programmed obsolescense of fixed batteries than cash our money

Re:Wonderful

[TWX]

When you replace your phone every chance you get because they've convinced you that it you must, it doesn't matter if the battery is removable because you'll never wear it out.

We saw this with cars back in the day. Old cars from the fifties, sixties, seventies weren't built better than modern cars. They might have been physically tougher in the chassis, but in some ways that has proven to be a problem as it leads to occupant death in crashes. Those era cars were not really expected to exceed 100,000 miles. Cylinder heads had soft valve seats that would sink valves. Interiors were very poorly constructed and would wear badly. Support components like waterpumps and power steering pumps would fail. Bushings in the suspension systems would go bad. Car bodies were prone to rust if you talked about salt around them and the retainers for trim would break and the brightwork would come off. This didn't matter though, as most new-car buyers bought new vehicles often, the cars simply didn't have to be built that well because it didn't hurt sales.

Modern cars are expected to reach closer to 200,000 miles before major problems threaten to take the vehicle off the road, and build quality is a lot higher for generally all components, albeit with each manufacturer having their own weak points in their designs. We should probably think about our electronics like this too, especially when the average buyer won't use whatever enhanced capabilities the new phone has. Maybe if we're a little more judicious about when we replace devices we could get our manufacturers to do a better job supporting the existing stuff so that we can actually get OS updates.