Newsletter
Oreo is beginning to hit the unlocked Galaxy S8 U.S. models alongside the unlocked Galaxy S8 Plus, meaning the wait should finally be over for the majority of users in the region who had purchased their Galaxy S8 devices directly from Samsung in an effort to have a version of the flagship that was not locked down by the carrier they subscribe to. This follows the carrier releases of the same software update to the exact same phones, showcasing that Samsung is a bit slower to roll out these new updates.
This is all by design though according to Samsung, as unlocked models of the phone have to be tested with different firmware versions to fit each carrier, as people will be using the unlocked phones across a wide variety of carriers in the U.S. while the carrier versions only need to be tested with that one particular carrier.
As this is an update to Oreo from Nougat, and the phones will be jumping from one major version of Android to another, users should expect the software update downloads to be fairly significant in size. To be more precise, the download file will about over 1,300MB or about 1.3GB, so the download will take quite a few minutes to complete and it’s recommended that users wait until they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network before starting the update, unless they’re not worried about going over a monthly LTE data speed limit. Just like with the other Galaxy S8 devices that have already received Oreo software, the Samsung Experience 9.0 UI will be part of the upgrade, which means new features specific to Samsung devices and a couple of UI tweaks that may present things a little differently than before, but overall the UI should look mostly the same so it won’t be too unfamiliar. The update appears to have started hitting devices as of this morning, so if hasn’t shown up for your device yet, then you can always check manually from the settings menu.