Samsung Galaxy S8 rumored to launch March 29
Plus a glimpse at the phone purported to be Samsung's newest Galaxy flagship.
Samsung could introduce its upcoming Galaxy S8 and S8 Edge phones to the world as soon as March 29, according to Evan Blass, a tech writer also known for reliably leaking upcoming products under his Twitter handle @evleaks.
The two new flagship phones could feature larger screen sizes than even the supersize 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 7 did (before Samsung recalled it for catching fire). The S8 could come with a 5.8-inch display and the Edge a 6.2-inch whopper -- screens that could cover nearly 85 percent of their bodies and leave the phones with very little bezel to take up space, Blass wrote Thursday in Venture Beat.
The two S8 phones could also do away with the capacitive buttons usually found below the screen, which would leave more room for the display size to expand, a phone trend likely to take off in 2017. Xiaomi's Mi Mix is a recent example.
Samsung's latest flagship phones have been a hot topic for months as the South Korean company gets a new chance to show off hardware designs that, you know, don't explode or catch fire, as the Galaxy Note 7 did on two separate occasions last year. A next-generation follow-up to the Galaxy S7 that was released last March, the Galaxy S8 will be the first phone that can help Samsung regain buyers' confidence as well as attract those who've never bought a Samsung phone before.
It's also a chance for Samsung's Galaxy S8 sales to help the electronics giant ride a wave of swelling profits despite its $5 billion operating setback from the Note 7 recall (spread out over several quarters).
One question on phone-watchers' minds is if the Galaxy S8 will be able to avoid the Note 7's fiery fate, which both the original run and replacement round sustained due to a design flaw and separate manufacturing problem, respectively. Samsung assures us that its Galaxy S8 will use a revised 8-point battery-testing procedure and leave more space inside for the battery, although that wasn't an issue with the Note 7.
If the phones do take the stage on March 29 at an Unpacked event in New York, as Blass suggests, that would potentially put them on target for another rumored time frame, that the phones will go on sale either April 14, or April 18 according to another rumor from the same source.
Either way, the late March launch date marks a big change from past unveilings, which typically happened at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, set this year for February 27 to March 2. Samsung confirmed that the Galaxy S8 won't appear at the tech show for all things mobile.
Samsung declined to comment.
Read next: Everything we know about the Samsung Galaxy S8
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