AT&T won’t have the Galaxy S8 Active market cornered for long.
Samsung announced on Tuesday that the more durable version of its Galaxy S8 will come to T-Mobile and Sprint in November. There’s just one problem: We don’t quite know exactly when. But the carriers will shed some light on that — and pricing — soon. We’ve asked them both, so check back here for updates. Sprint and T-Mobile will sell the S8 Active in Meteor Gray, while AT&T additionally sells it in Titanium Gold.
We dropped, froze and dunked the S8 Active, which comes with a “shatterproof” screen, reinforced corners and a rubberized backing instead of glass. It also has a huge 4,000-mAh battery, which gave our review unit 24 hours of battery life in our looping video playback tests (in airplane mode). That’s a huge asset.
Besides those small but significant differences, the S8 Active shares the same core hardware and software features as the Galaxy S8. There’s a larger screen-to-body ratio with slimmer bezels, and a Bixby Voice button on the side… that you can’t program to do anything else.
There are some clear trade-offs with the S8 Active versus an S8 and a durable case, so make sure you know what they are before you decide which S8’s for you.
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