Samsung Galaxy S8 may have a pressure sensitive display
Samsung needs to make a big impression with the Samsung Galaxy S8 after they couldn’t capture any late-year interest due to the Galaxy Note 7’s downfall. Rumors are already swirling around that have us confident Samsung is prepping one of the most compelling phones ever, so what else could they even do?
According to The Investor, they’re going to be trying out a pressure sensitive display for the first time in the Galaxy S8. It’s an innovation that their biggest competitor Apple has been using in recent years to help enhance their user experience, and to date there haven’t been many notable smartphones outside of a scarcely available Huawei phone to use it.
Huawei’s Mate S beat Apple to the pressure sensitivity game.
We can’t know how, exactly, Samsung intends to implement and use it, but we imagine that we’ll be seeing things like app shortcuts changing or showing more options depending on how you press them, and perhaps a zoom option that zooms faster/closer depending on how hard you press the display.
Our favorite thought, though, is what it could mean for the industry at large. Samsung does have that Apple-esque trait of helping to shape industry standards and new feature changes.
They were one of the first to go all-in on fingerprint sensors, for instance, and it looks like LG may ditch their original mobile payment plans to follow Samsung’s example with MST. Our hope is that successful deployment and subsequent refinement of the technology would compel other manufacturers to start exploring the space.
Of course, Samsung’s unique tricks — like embedded heart rate monitors — don’t always get picked up by imitators and competitors, so at this point that’s just wishful thinking.