The latest offering from Samsung Mobile, the Galaxy S8 and its big brother, the S8 Plus, could quite possibly be as perfect of a design as any smartphone could ever have. It’s true. After seeing the device in person, holding it, and using it for a very short period of time, the S8 is just about as perfectly designed device as it is possible to make today. With a gorgeous display, plenty of storage and RAM, a great camera (both front and back) and the inclusion of an external storage slot, the S8 family really has come about as far as anyone could expect a phone to come, within reason. With such high praise, it may be tough to stomach this next statement, but here goes… You probably don’t want or need one, even if you want one.
The facts are, smartphones have been ‘dialed in’ over the last few years. Some offerings from long time makers like Motorola provide a much better price to performance ratio than the S8 will ever offer. New comers (and we say new – like last 5 years) like Huawei, OnePlus and Xiaomi are blowing the doors open on the performance levels of lower priced devices as well. The issue at hand becomes how much is enough and how much money is too much? The Samsung Galaxy S8 retails for $750 at AT&T*, T-Mobile and Sprint also have the S8 at $750, but do not offer the BOGO deal that AT&T does for bundling your phone and TV service. Verizon Wireless has the phone at a lower retail of $720 but a higher monthly cost for service than both Sprint and T-Mobile. Any way you slice it, a pack of Galaxy S8’s for the family is going to set the budget back about $3000. Spread this over $120 a month, it doesn’t seem so bad, but when you can pick up the very capable Moto G5 Plus for under $230 a piece, it’s a bit tougher to swallow that premium handset price.
This is not to say that the S8 and S8 Plus aren’t worth the additional cash, because the devices are brilliant, but there should come a point in time where families, and frankly anyone, begins to look at what they are purchasing and how much it is costing them each and every month verses how much they are using it. For example, you could go buy a new Ferrari to commute to work in, but sitting in traffic, it just looks pretty and it doesn’t hold nearly the amount of groceries that a Honda Civic does. It’s practicality. It’s something that is lost when we go online and see a new phone for “just $30 a month” when you sign up for easy pay. Here’s a news flash for you – if you talk less than 1000 minutes a month and don’t use much over a GB of data, you can get your phone and service for a full year for about that cost. It’s scary to think what a family could do with an extra $2000 a year, isn’t it?
That said, it’s one of the easiest statements we’ve ever made, “The Galaxy S8 is possibly the best smartphone design we have ever seen,” but you probably want to look elsewhere for something to spend that extra $500+ a device you’d save if you went for something like the Moto G5 Plus instead.
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* – AT&T is offering a Buy One Get One Free deal if you subscribe DirecTV and purchase the devices via the AT&T Next program.
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