Samsung Galaxy S8 Pre-orders Kick Off, Unlocked Pre-orders May 9

The Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone is now official which means if you like the idea of the device you can pre-order it right now starting at $650 depending on carrier. Samsung is guaranteeing that the device will arrive by April 20 if you make your pre-order by April 17. If you do pre-order you will get a free Gear VR headset with controller to enjoy with your smartphone. If you don’t want to be tied down to one carrier, pre-orders for unlocked devices supporting all carriers will start on May 9 reports CNET.

If you want to add another $99 to the price of the pre-order, you can bundle headphones by AKG and a 256GB memory card with your purchase. As rumors suggested the big feature of the S8 and S8+ is the edge to edge Infinity Screen. The screen on the S8+ is 6.2-inches and the S8 has a 5.8-inch screen both with the same 2960 x 1440 resolution. The smaller S8 has 570 ppi while the larger S8+ has 529 ppi.

Both phones have the Bixby assistant and improved cameras. The image sensor on the cameras is a 1.4nm unit with 8MP resolution for the front. The rear camera on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ is a 12MP unit with optical image stabilization, 1.4nm pixel size, slow motion capability, RAW support, panorama mode, and more. Both cameras support the Bokeh effect.

The processor varies by country, but is an octa-core 2.3GHz quad + 1.7GHz quad or 2.35GHz quad + 1.9 GHz quad 64-bit 10nm unit. That chip is paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The phones have all the other stuff you expect like LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, ANT+, and a USB Type-C port. The phones can use dual SIM cards, but you give up the microSD slot for that second SIM. The OS is Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.