Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 will feature an ‘all-screen’ design, according to Bloomberg

After several months of speculation from a variety of sources, Bloomberg has weighed in on Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, corroborating many of the rumours we’ve heard in the past few weeks.

According to unnamed sources with “direct knowledge of the matter,” the Galaxy S8 will feature an “all-screen” design with a bezel-less display that features a virtual home button hidden in the lower part of the phone (think: Xiaomi’s recently introduced Mi Mix concept phone).

Samsung will reportedly release two S8 variants — a 5.1-inch model and a 5.5-inch model. However, both models will feature wraparound, ‘edge’ displays.

On the processor front, some S8 units will ship with Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 835 SoC, while other units will include one of the company’s Exynos processors. If history is any indication, then Samsung will likely ship the Qualcomm variant to the U.S. and Canada, while it sends the Exynos variants to European and Asian markets.

On the software front, meanwhile, the S8 will ship with the company’s new voice assistant. Built upon technology developed by Viv Labs, a startup made up of some of the people that worked on Siri, the feature will be “significantly differentiated” from other personal assistants on the market, according to Bloomberg‘s sources.

Samsung reportedly plans to release the S8 sometime in March, following its usual cadence of announcing new S family iterations at Mobile World Congress.

However, the company may push the release date back one month to April to allow more time for safety testing. Following the disastrous Note 7 recall, Samsung has implemented more stringent testing procedures.

One last thing to note is that Bloomberg does not mention whether or not the S8 will include a 3.5mm headphone jack, which seems to suggest the rumour earlier in the week about the S8 dropping the headphone jack could be untrue.

[source]Bloomberg[/source]