Samsung Galaxy S8 vs Apple iPhone 7: flagship phone shootout

Samsung's latest smartphone is very good – but is it good enough to convince iPhone users to make the switch?

Apple and Samsung have been duking it out over the title of world's best smartphone for years now. While Apple has taken the top spot in the past, the Korean manufacturer has been steadily improving, with devices like the Galaxy S7 offering a pretty compelling iPhone alternative.

With Samsung's newest flagship now on the shelves, the battle is more intense than ever. 

We’ve reviewed the Galaxy S8 and iPhone 7 in more depth previously (along with their larger siblings, the Galaxy S8+ and iPhone 7 Plus), and clearly, Samsung's latest flagship is an outstanding smartphone. But is it good enough to topple Apple's throne? And if so, is it compelling enough to tempt iPhone users to make the switch? 

This head-to-head comparison will reveal all.

Design

Straight off the bat, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is a nicer-looking device than the iPhone 7. Samsung's curved and virtually edgeless Infinity Display is breathtaking to look at, creating a unique and alluring package that the iPhone just can't match. On top of that, there's no unsightly camera wart where the lens housing protrudes from the back.

On the other hand, the iPhone 7's matte-black and red colour schemes are much more attractive than any of the options for the S8, and the aluminium chassis will be much less prone to picking up greasy fingerprints than the S8's glass backing.

Overall, however, it's the S8 that takes the cake in terms of design and visual appearance. The iPhone 7 may be nice, but it's nothing that we haven't seen time and time again, whereas the Galaxy S8 feels different and exciting - it's impossible to mistake it for any other phone.

Winner, design: Samsung Galaxy S8
 

Display

The Galaxy S8's screen knocks the iPhone 7 into a cocked hat in terms of resolution, with the QHD+ screen running rings around Apple's panel. It's much larger, too, measuring almost 6in across the diagonal compared to just 4.7in.

It's just as impressive when you get down to the nitty-gritty - although the iPhone 7's 95.8% sRGB colour coverage is nothing to be sniffed at, Samsung goes one better with a whopping 99.9% result. It's brighter than the iPhone 7 to boot, and thanks to the AMOLED panel, it's got rich, vivid colours and perfect contrast. As a final treat, the S8 is one of the first HDR-enabled (high dynamic range) phones, which translates to brighter highlights and deeper shadows when viewing compatible content.

The Galaxy S8 takes the crown here, but not on resolution - at this level, the extra pixel density over the iPhone 7's display just doesn't make that much of a difference. Instead, it's the extra vibrancy, colour accuracy and contrast provided by that AMOLED screen that nets it the win. The fact that it's wrapped up in a gorgeous edgeless display doesn't exactly hurt, either.

Winner, display: Samsung Galaxy S8
 

Specs and performance

Generally speaking, Apple's hardware is unparallelled when it comes to performance, but the Galaxy S8 comes closer than ever to closing that gap. According to our Geekbench 4 tests, it was more than 15% faster than the iPhone 7 at multi-core operations, and closer than any other phone we've tested to matching its single-core speed.

Under the hood, the S8 packs an Exynos 8895 octa-core CPU (or possibly a Snapdragon 835, depending on where you bought the phone), with 4GB of RAM. The iPhone, meanwhile, uses Apple's quad-core A10 Fusion processor paired with 2GB of memory.

In practice, both devices feel sufficiently nippy - you're unlikely to notice much of a difference between them unless you're pushing them to the absolute limit, and even then it'll be negligible at best. They really are very fast devices.

Winner, performance: Apple iPhone 7

Next: Battery life, features and overall verdict