Revealed: Samsung's virtual home button doesn't “burn†the Galaxy S8 screen
Ever since the first Samsung Galaxy flagship rolled out, the AMOLED screen on these phones was one of the standout features. The screens produce deeper black colours and eye-popping hues of other prominent shades, which is for you to experience in the latest Galaxy S8 with its gorgeous “Infinity Display”. However, one major issue with the AMOLED screen is the issue of burn-in, i.e. an image could achieve permanent retention on the AMOLED screen if it was displayed for too long.
When Samsung launched the Galaxy S7 Edge last year, they introduced an “Always-On Display” feature which would display simple widgets like clock and calendar on the screen even when it was locked (inspired from the “Glance Screen” on the defunct Lumia series of smartphones). For this year’s Galaxy S8, Samsung has used that feature to emulate the home button virtually on the screen. The always-on virtual home button is there to replicate the physical home button from the previous Samsung phones. This raises one major question – will the Galaxy S8 feature a burn-in patch on the lower half of the screen?
The answer to that question is – no. Samsung hasn’t spent millions of dollars to make a new type of AMOLED screen but rather employed a clever trick to pull off that 24x7 virtual home button.
On the Galaxy S7 Edge, the widgets on the Always-On screen used to move around to prevent the AMOLED pixel from over-burning the spot, preventing any permanent patches. On the S8 and S8+, the same trick is used to display the home button continuously. Now, it would be weird to see your home button moving up and down on the screen, like the widgets. But, the Galaxy S8 has got a lot of pixels on its AMOLED screen. The home button changes its position very slightly around the centre spot. It moves at few pixels a time, thus preventing the burn-in while giving an impression of a static home button.
Now, that’s a genius move pulled off by Samsung. No one ever thought of such a simple idea to implement a beautiful virtual home button on the Galaxy S8 display. We would love Samsung to implement most of the S8’s display advancement (especially the Infinity display) on the lower Galaxy smartphones as well so that more people can enjoy the marvel of simple but brilliant ideas like this on their affordable Galaxies.
