Samsung is going to try to recreate its hardware navigation button layout with software buttons on the Galaxy S8.
We always knew the day would come (or did we?) when Samsung would do away with its capacitive navigation buttons and physical home button for something a bit more… flexible. Now, it looks like exactly that is happening, based on earlier leaked photos and some illustrations from the upcoming Galaxy Tab S3 manual.
The Galaxy S8 will indeed have on-screen navigation buttons, but according to leaked images, they will be reversed from the standard format found on most Android devices today — and in accordance with Samsung’s reverse order that it maintained for so many years. While this makes sense from a continuity perspective, it also finds Samsung continuing to go against the grain of the rest of the Android industry. Perhaps there will be an option to reverse them, as many devices from the likes of Huawei and LG offer.
The illustration, which cannot be confirmed as genuine right now, depicts the Galaxy S8 with a rear fingerprint sensor next to the camera, too.
Finally, the manual shows the Galaxy S8 sitting in its Dex computer dock, ostensibly used to interface with a laptop or desktop computer. With the Galaxy S8 expected to be one of the most powerful devices released this year — a Snapdragon 835 or Exynos 9 chip depending on region — it should have plenty of performance to power a desktop environment.
What do you think of what you’ve seen of the Galaxy S8 so far?
