Jeddah – Samsung has unveiled its new flagship smartphones, the “Galaxy S8” and “Galaxy S8 Plus”, with high-standard features. Despite that their size has shrunk due to eliminating the main button, the new phones are characterized with bigger resolution screens compared to last year’s edition “Galaxy S7” and “Galaxy S7 Edge”.

The new device comes in two sizes, the 5.8-inch S8 and the 6.2-inch S8+. Like other smartphones including Huawei and LG, users can press on the screen to interact with the phone’s content and features. The screen offers the phone’s holder the “High Dynamic Range” technique to preview photos and to benefit from rich colors.

Samsung has also revealed the new virtual assistant “Bixby” which can be activated with a special button on the phone’s side; “Bixby” was developed to compete the Siri Assistant from Apple and the Google Assistant.

Bixby is set to support vocal interaction instead of touch with 10 compacted apps, including the photo album, text messages, and weather forecasts. The new assistant app determines the photos’ content featuring known products and touristic features, and help on searching more related information. The current version of Bixby only functions in the English and Korean languages.

Both sizes of the new Galaxy S8 enjoy an 8-megapixel selfie camera and a 12- megapixel back cam, with a 10% faster processor compared to the previous editions. The new devices can also be unlocked using eyes and facial recognition.

Samsung has also revealed other innovated products that accompany the new smartphones like the camera 360, a wireless charging station, and a dock to link the phone with separated screens, keyboards, etc.

The S8 and S8+ are due to go on sale on April 21 and will cost $859 and $969 respectively (higher prices compared to 2016).

Samsung reveals its latest Galaxy phone after last year’s failed launch of the Galaxy Note 7 due to several battery explosions, which Samsung recalled from the market, before scrapping its edition.