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It's great to see Samsung's Galaxy S8 include a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (unlike some other phones).

But the future of music listening is undoubtedly wireless, which is why it's also great the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are the first smartphones to include Bluetooth 5.0 with support for not one, but two pairs of wireless headphones or wireless speakers simultaneously.

SEE ALSO:Samsung's Galaxy S8 has a killer feature that nobody's talking about

Compared to Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth 5.0 has four times the range, two times the speed and eight times the broadcast message capacity, according to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the body that develops, licenses and helps set standards for the wireless protocol.

All that increased bandwidth means more reliable and robust Bluetooth connections, because let's be real, Bluetooth connections today are still spotty.

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Bluetooth 5.0's potentially game-changing feature, at least as far as the Galaxy S8 is concerned, is the aforementioned support for two wireless headphone or wireless speaker connections.

In days past, the only way for two people to listen to a song together was to share a pair of wired earbuds, with each person getting one earbud, or blast the song through a speaker (a far less intimate experience).

With the S8 and two pairs of wireless headphones (or earbuds), you and a friend can listen to the same song without needing to share any physical hardware. Heck, you guys don't even need to be in the same room or even near each other since Bluetooth 5.0 has a range of up to 800 feet.

This could also be really useful for two people to wirelessly jump onto a single conference call from a single S8 phone.

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TopicsAndroidBluetoothSamsung