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Samsung's new Galaxy S8 (and its bigger sibling, the Galaxy S8+) are designed to reintroduce the public to Samsung as the company tries to put the fiery death of the Galaxy Note7 behind it.
And, as first impressions go, this is a doozy. If Samsung is trying to wow us into trusting it again, it's done a pretty good job with this highly-polished, distinctive pair of devices.
Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy S8
Peter Wells takes a first look at Samsung's latest mobile device at its New York launch.
The obvious star of the show here is the screen, which takes up nearly all of the front of the new smartphones. The result is surprisingly impressive. Kicking out the home button does make a noticeable difference on the phone - giving you more screen on which to surf, work and watch videos.
The phone is also very fast and feels powerful.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the look and capabilities of the S8 and S8+, and would tentatively say it's worth upgrading from an S7. (And certainly from an S6.) That said, there's so much about the phone that we still don't know. Yes, of course, there's the question of whether it will suffer the same battery problems as the Note 7 - unlikely, given Samsung's new safety measures, but also not impossible.
It's worth remembering that the Note7 had rave reviews, too. Until the fires started.
And there are also some things that Samsung has promised that I'll need to try for a while before I pass final judgment. For example, I didn't get any real sense of how effective Bixby, the company's new voice assistant, worked in conversation - demonstration halls are notoriously noisy. The features I did see, including its ability to search online for product just by snapping a picture of something, were still in tightly controlled demonstration mode.
That's a pretty important feature to try before coming to a decision on whether this is a phone I'd recommend over, say, Apple's iPhone. Because while the new screen design is nice – and it is, it should be said again, very pretty – a little bit of beauty is not what's going to tip people over the edge when looking to drop $1199 or $1349 on a phone.
The Galaxy S8's role as the saviour of Samsung is yet to be assigned.
Washington Post, with Fairfax Media