After weeks and months of leaks, the Galaxy S8 Active hasn’t left much to the imagination. We’ve already seen the phone from virtually every angle and got a sneak peak of a prematurely launched carrier page last week, to boot. The only thing left was for Samsung to officially make the thing official.
The company’s doing just tht this morning, a day before the rugged handset goes up for pre-order through AT&T here in the States. For the time being, it’s a carrier exclusive — the sort of thing you can still get away with on a fairly niche device. It’s a quiet sort of launch a couple of weeks ahead of the expected Galaxy Note 8[1] announcement.
No surprise, Samsung had to ditch the S8’s most iconic feature, the Infinity Display, in order to make the Active sufficiently rugged. Even with Gorilla Glass on both sides, the edge-to-edge glass makes the company’s flagship extremely vulnerable to drops, to which plenty of YouTube videos can attest[2].
The rugged upgrades render the phone basically unrecognizable as an S8, in spite of the company’s strong commitment to aesthetic consistency across product lines. The sides are completely incased in a bumper, monopolizing considerable bezel space on the front. The glass back was ditched as well, in favor of a harder, textured surface.
The fine print says the phone can survive a five foot drop onto a flat surface, though “drops may cause scratches or other damage to device screen or body.” Well, yeah, sure. It’s also water resistant in five feet for up to 30 minutes — the same rating as the standard S8.
Samsung’s on-going dedication to Bixby in spite of its rocky...
Read more from our friends at TechCrunch