The phone will be able to tap into the more advanced cellular networks that the carriers are just starting to kick on now.
If you think the Galaxy S8 is fast now, give it a few months.
The headline change in Samsung’s flagship phone, introduced this week in New York, is the massive display the company was able to cram into the device, thanks in part to the removal of the home button and much of the edges around the screen.
But hidden inside is another feature — one that won’t get to fully shine for another few months. The phone is the first to use the Snapdragon 835, the newest and fastest processor from Qualcomm. The Snapdragon 835 includes the ability to connect to so-called Gigabit LTE-class speeds, a benchmark that every US carrier is moving toward this year.
After battery fire issues plagued the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung has launched two new phones to win back customers. The Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus have displays that curve over their edges, and they feature a new artificial intelligence assistant called Bixby.
What’s Gigabit LTE? Simply put, it’s your 4G LTE connection with full afterburners on. The Galaxy S will be the first phone to tap into network speed as high as 300 megabits per second, or nearly 18 times better than the average speeds posted by Verizon and T-Mobile’s recent performance in an OpenSignal test. To put that in perspective, it would take you 15 seconds to download a two-hour movie.
Yeah, fast.
Gigabit LTE won’t just mean faster browsing — it’ll also enable new services like live 360-degree video streaming for virtual reality, and help power Google’s vision of « instant apps , » which are programs that load immediately like a website, according to Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
