Samsung Galaxy S8 Teardown Points to Unfinished OIS Hardware for Front Camera

There has been a flurry of teardowns of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ as the smartphones hit market shelves. The latest in the series by JerryRigEverything has suggested that Samsung did include OIS hardware in its front camera. Additionally, a Samsung Galaxy S8 user took to Twitter to raise a query about the Always-on display on the phone.

The teardown video by JerryRigEverything shows that the front camera can move inside the module just like the rear camera. The front camera, however, gives optical image stabilisation (OIS) feature a miss. JerryRigEverything points out that Samsung has given the idea a miss despite having all the requirements for OIS to be enabled for the front camera. It's unclear at the moment as to why Samsung didn't include OIS feature in the front camera. 9to5google checked with Samsung about the OIS feature in the front camera. The company declined to comment on teardown video but did confirm that the device does not utilise OIS on the front camera.

In separate news, a user tweeted out to Samsung asking whether the Always-On Display on the Galaxy S8 will result in burning out the Home button which has been integrated in the home button. Samsung Netherlands responded explaining that both the virtual clock and home button on the Samsung Galaxy S8 will "skip" to avoid burning pixels.

GalaxyClub further investigated what Samsung meant by "skip", and saw that the home button "shifts" slightly to prevent burn-in. GalaxyClub also reported with some images of the home button which confirm that the home button moved but not to an extent that could be spotted. The report also adds that the clock seen on the Always-On Display also moved in the same pattern as the Home button to prevent burn-in.

Samsung has already confirmed that it will be rolling out two software updates for the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones this week which will be fixing issues reported by users so far. The new updates are said to fix the red-tinted screen and patchy Wi-Fi connections.

Notably, the software patch announcement from Samsung comes just days after the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ went on sale in the Canada, South Korea, and the US.

Some early adopters of the Samsung Galaxy S8 had previously reported that they were seeing a permanent red-tinge visible on the display of the device they received. Some analyst claimed that it was because of a colour balance problem in production of OLED panels.

Samsung, however, has declined claims and has said that none of the issues reported by users so far for the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ were "product defects."