It will be an epic smartphone battle in 2017 with Apple and Samsung as the leading characters. The latter is rumored to release the Galaxy S8 as early as March next year while the former is set deploy the iPhone 8 in the last few months of 2017. Picture a slugfest between Godzilla and King Kong, a new report said.
But Investor's Business Daily did not say which is which - who plays Godzilla or King Kong. Perhaps due to swirling rumors that hardware-wise and in terms of build and design the two 2017 flagships will be of equal standing.
Rumors and analysts' forecasts have been saying that the next iPhone is an all-glass device with a chassis that is of aluminum or stainless structure. The iPhone 8 profile when completed is a big departure from the same industrial design that Apple has employed in the last three instalments, beginning with the iPhone 6 in 2014.
And included in the next-gen iPhone reengineer mix is the switch from LCD to OLED display panel and embedded with the screen are touch sensors that will make the physical control keys unnecessary. This upgrade supports the rumors that the Home button on the front panel will be no more and in its stead a key that activates when tapped by users.
The iPhone 8 virtual home button, according to Investor's Business Daily, "offers a sleeker look," that only highlights the equal emphasis given by Apple on aesthetics and handset functionalities.
Buy in comparison, the Galaxy S8 will be equally gorgeous if the rumors are to be believed. If the next iPhone is all-screen, it will be edge-to-edge for the GS8 with the device's home button also rendered 'invisible' due to the ingenious embedding on the front glass panel.
And as the iPhone 8 is set to take in more computing muscle and speed with the rumored 10nm A11 processor as its main engine, the GS8 will depend on Qualcomm's flagship SoC for next year - the 8-core Snapdragon 835. And like the A11, the SD 835 is a huge leap from the last Qualcomm chip (the Snapdragon 820/821) - mightier, faster and even more energy efficient.
The two rival handsets will even have an interesting fight in the artificial intelligence or AI platform. That's because Samsung is expected to make full use of its recent Viv Labs acquisition. Viv Labs, of course, is the same outfit that originally developed the electronic digital assistant in iPhone now known as Siri.
Yet in the coming showdown with the iPhone 8, the Galaxy S8 is seen hobbled not only by the Galaxy Note 7 battery fiasco but the one real thing that analysts see as the limiting factor on Samsung's part. Having full control of iOS, Apple is free to innovate on the software and hardware features of the iPhone and iPad, Investor's Business Daily said on its report
But the same is not true with Samsung as Android is Google's property. With limited and regulated access to the mobile OS, Samsung's borrowed ecosystem is ending up as the inferior counterpart of iOS, which somehow dictates on the yearly outcome of the two's flagships' bitter rivalry. And that would be Apple's iPhone always wining over Samsung's Galaxy.