Samsung S8: New Galaxy phone to lose headphone jack and home button and be one big screen, just like iPhone 8

The company hopes that the new phone will help it through the issues with the exploding Note 7, which was reportedly the result of chasing Apple too hard

Visitors experience Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge devices during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea (Getty)

Samsung is about to launch a new phone that will include all of the iPhone 8’s biggest features.

The upcoming Galaxy S7 will drop the physical home button so that the entirety of the front of the phone can be one big screen, according to reports. That will allow it to have much the same design as the one rumoured for the upcoming iPhone 8 – which is also expected to be made entirely of glass and not have any bezel.

The new phone will also lose the headphone jack, according to reports. Apple dropped the headphone jack in its last iPhone, telling people to use wireless headphones instead, a decision that caused huge controversy.

The company hopes that by including those new features it can undo the vast damage caused by its last flagship phone, the Note 7, which had a tendency to blow up while it was charging. It will also allow it to look to catch up with the iPhone, its primary competitor in the high-end smartphone market.

Samsung hopes to release the phone in March, according to a report from Bloomberg. But that could be pushed back to April as a result of the tougher testing that it has instituted it in the wake of the Note 7 scandal.

That problem was reportedly caused partly because of rumours that the iPhone 7 would offer only relatively small improvements on its predecessor and include the same design. Rushing to add extra features to it phone to seize on that, the company failed to do rigorous enough testing on its phones, reports have said.

All phone companies have been looking to reduce the bezel of plastic, metal or glass that sits on the side of phone screens, so that the display can take up more of the front of the handset. Samsung has done so in part by offering curved displays that move around the side of the handset and give the appearance that the screen is bigger than it is.

Both Samsung and Apple have also been looking to drop the home button as a way of making space for that screen. Apple dropped the physical home button from the iPhone 7 and instead included a pressure sensitive button, which works with a vibration motor to feel like it is really being pressed – a move that was widely seen as it preparing to get rid of the real home button entirely.

Samsung is also expected to take on Google and Apple with a new voice assistant, of the kind that the former showed off in its new Pixel phone just weeks ago.

And it had also planned to include a dual-lens camera of the kind that Apple introduced with the iPhone 7 Plus, Bloomberg reported. That plan has been abandoned because the camera cost too much to build.