Newsletter 
2016 has been a pretty ordinary year for Samsung whichever way you look at it. The company has been embroiled in many a controversy worldwide over the past few months, and just when it seemed like all those reports of exploding smartphones and disintegrating washing machines were fading into the background, the company has been dragged into an unseemly corruption scandal back in its homeland. However, all through its trials and tribulations, the company continues to dominate the global smartphone industry alongside American tech giant Apple. The Galaxy Note 7 may now be history, and many of its recent top-loading washing machine models may have been recalled for safety reasons, but Samsung remains one of the largest conglomerates on the planet and a pillar of the global consumer electronics industry.
Talking about being a global leader in consumer electronics, Samsung has a couple of popular premium handsets in the market currently – the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. However, with both of these devices starting to show their age against newer handsets from rival smartphone makers, a lot is riding on Samsung’s next-generation Galaxy S-series offering, which will likely be unveiled at the MWC trade show in late February/early March. Expected to be called the Galaxy S8, the device will likely be launched at the beginning of April, if recent history is anything to go by. Recent reports have already suggested that the device will come with a number of interesting features and now, the latest rumor seems to suggest that the Galaxy S8 may very well be the first smartphone in the world to officially support Bluetooth 5.0.
It was just last week that the standard was officially adopted by the Bluetooth SIG as the latest version of the popular technology. It will reportedly come with a number of improvements over the Bluetooth 4.x standard, including twice the transfer speed, four times range and eight times the broadcast message capacity of the current yardstick. Then again, Bluetooth 5.0 will hardly be the first new thing that Samsung’s upcoming smartphone will reportedly introduce to the market. If earlier rumors are anything to go by, the device will also apparently be the first to come with an optical fingerprint scanner, which is likely to be embedded underneath the screen itself. That should eliminate the need for thick and unsightly bezels on the bottom, allowing the device to potentially have a display that’s curved on all four sides.