This is Samsung Galaxy S9, you're probably wondering if it's worth your money for an upgrade you may also just be wondering if it's a good phone or not, so I think the best way to describe this phone is it's a nearly perfect Samsung phone, what I mean by that is if you've liked Samsung phones in the past or you have an old Samsung phone and you like what they do with the software, with the great cameras,
with the awesome design, with their build then this is the best and most complete version of that they've ever made, but conversely if you already don't like Samsung phones like if slow Android updates aren't your thing or you just don't like what they do with the skin then this isn't going to change your mind so it's a nearly perfect Samsung phone.
Last year the Galaxy S8 had the infinity display this year again galaxy S9 has one of the absolute best displays in any smartphone sandwiched between even slightly thinner top and bottom bezels and last time and they've even done a slightly better job hiding the sensors and things in that top bezel so the black looks more seamless and that your piece also now doubles as a second speaker front-facing speakers so you kind of have a bit of a stereo speaker thing going on here, it's not quite the same obviously as two big dedicated front-facing speakers but at least now it's a bit louder and clearer if you accidentally block the bottom speaker which can happen you don't completely miss what's going on so it's better.
Last year you also had USB-C and wireless charging fast charging all that that is also all still here. USB-C, fast charging, wireless charging, a headphone jack, water-resistance is great, clicky buttons and just overall A+ build quality. Now it's still glass which means you're still going to get smudges so if you want to pick up a D brand skin this new black carmo might not make your phone invisible but it'll make all the smudges and scratches disappear and then the biggest change on the outside has to be obviously the fingerprint reader placement it's now in the middle instead of up at the top next to the camera and that makes a huge difference even more than people are giving it credit for it's perfect now it's raised slightly so it's easy to know when your fingers on it when you're not looking at it and registering your fingerprint is now just a slow swipe like you roll your finger down the scanner once which is actually really cool, I thought it was a glitch usually you kind of you know you have to press it on the fingerprint reader a whole bunch of times to enroll your finger, but during this phone setup you just roll your finger down at once and it's a hundred percent done that is awesome.
There's also now on the back of this phone a blood pressure sensor in addition to the heart rate monitor so the heart rate monitor is not new we've had that for a while, you can measure your heart rate that's quick but the blood pressure sensor usually you haven't been able to do that with anything other than like the rap and the tools in the doctor's office to actually get that reading in that number, I wasn't able to get that reading with S-health or any of the health apps on my phone but I like a really good video from Dave 2d on how exactly this works there's a certain way to get it to help you if you do want to use this phone to measure blood pressure, but as of right now it's just a pretty cool new addition.
Last year's galaxy S8 also had top notch specs when it came out S9 here keeps that up and bumps it up to again for 2018 snapdragon 845 and four or six gigs of ram and this does definitely feel like the smoothest Samsung phone yet,
it still doesn't match stock Android you know there's still little performance hiccups like when opening up Bixby for example and occasionally in some other Samsung apps but in my a couple of weeks with this phone that's about it everything else nearly matches pixel 2 and smoothness and I'm really happy about that and then there is all the Samsung software again they're still really not shy about their colorful look on top of Android so it's not going to change your mind if you already dislike the Samsung stuff but it's all better.
It still has a ton of advanced features it added iris scanning from the note which is a little slower but more secure than regular facial recognition using a front-facing camera and there's also a new intelligent scan which combines face scanning and iris scanning basically using which one works better depending on light conditions, so I'm really into the new fingerprint reader so I haven't necessarily used these as much but it's cool to have all the options it still has a bunch of Samsung's and big green tricks and app shortcuts you still get the edge shortcuts and some more customization options, sometimes with all the stuff that can feel like Samsung is just kind of dumping as many features as possible on you and maybe they are hurt but that's part of what they do.
It still has Bixby and the Bixby button and everything Bixby is good for okay, I could have just disabled the Bixby button from day one I know that but I decided to give it another chance I've left it enabled since day one every day using Bixby and it's still not that great, Bixby voice can still do a lot of those like really intricate digging into the settings and longer strings of commands and the phone that other assistants can't do as well so that's pretty cool.
This is clearly still unapologetically a Samsung phone in a software department for better or for worse there's still two browsers out the box, two smart assistants, two calendars, two messaging apps all the classic half-hearted Samsung ecosystem push is still there but it's also Android you can get rid of that stuff that's annoying if you don't want it.
Battery life I think is the biggest weakness of these new phones the s9 and s9 plus, it's not terrible but among all the other great things about these phones the battery life is definitely not great, I spend most my time with the s9 Plus which has the bigger screen but also bigger battery 3500MAH and it would be dead by the end of the day and most of my heavy use days with a lot of navigation a lot of music playing a lot of screen on time watching videos and social media that would be enough to kill this phone in a single day, I don't even do that much mobile gaming but if I were that would kill it too.
The upside of that as it always is with Samsung is fast charging and wireless charging, it charges really fast with the right charger the one in the box of course or one of several other USBC chargers like the MacBook Pro charger, but can be kind of picky the dash charger for example didn't work if you're curious, but being able to top up really quickly during the day for me I've said this before it does offset the slightly weak battery this phone has it would be great if it had better battery but for me that's good enough depends on who you are.
The biggest most re-imagined new change in these phones that would be the camera, there's a new 12 megapixel camera on the back and if you get the S9 plus it gets the second telephoto camera as well and it's the first modern smartphone with a variable aperture camera it can physically switch between F 1.5 and F 2.4 depending on your lighting, so it defaults to F 2.4 which is roughly average for a smartphone camera actually and that's for your Sharp normal daylight photos most of the time when you do get to low-light under 100 Lux that's when it's going to switch to wide-open F 1.5, technically speaking the mechanism to do this is really impressive, but it only matters if you can see the difference in photos, so does it make a difference?
Generally photos from the galaxy S9 camera are pretty damn good photos are a little bit less over-processed and a little less over sharpened than they used to be, but it's clearly still the Samsung look we're used to with the bright vibrant colors, dynamic ranger says it’s the most noticeable improvement but that's something they've actively worked on so it's good to see, something you'll notice looking through all of these though is Samsung's tendency to overexpose still pretty much every photo I take on the galaxy S9 in Auto mode is just a little bit too bright it's just a little bit, but then it can also be a sort of an advantage when you take it to low-light galaxy S9 low-light photos look pretty good and that really is thanks to the F 1.5 aperture letting in way more light.
The question of is this variable aperture making a difference? well low-light shots have seen a real bump up there's less smoothing because it gets rid of less grain because there's less grain because there's more light being let into the camera, so fundamentally, yes it's working. It's still not the best camera in any smartphone though that's still pixel 2 hands down and I'd say it still falls a little bit behind iPhone 10, but I don't think anyone will be disappointed with the third-placed performance of a great galaxy S9 camera.
Something people have also noticed recently is it shoots video in the REC 2020 color space instead of rec 709 that's what happens when you turn on or leave on HDR if you turn that off they can be rec 709, so it's trying to look better again and more saturated on the Samsung displays but you can turn that off.
Back in the impressions article, I did mention that seems like Galaxy S9 plus will have a pretty big advantage over the regular Galaxy S9 because you're getting now more RAM, more screen, more battery and more cameras so it turns out most of S9 isn't actually that big of a deal in the more RAM Department yes Galaxy S9 plus has 6 gigs of RAM while the regular S9 has 4 gigs Ram both are plenty hardly ever going to notice the difference in regular everyday use, it could be nice for future proofing now the S9 plus obviously has the second telephoto camera for live focus and for optical zoom sometimes may or may not every use that if you do obviously go that's 9 plus but you might not miss that and then of course the size difference means your 5.8 inch display versus 6.2 inch and then your 3,000 to 3,500 milliamp hour battery again both of which are somewhat mediocre so not a huge difference between them, so it's a toss-up if you're choosing between them but I think the biggest thing I got out of this galaxy S9 plus existing now at this price point is there is way less reason to buy a Galaxy Note 8 right now.
The note 8 is really all about the stylus and comes in at about a thousand bucks I would definitely pick the S9 plus over that because of the lower price even though you get a slightly smaller screen all the same advantages are there if you don't use that stylus and even a lot of the other reasons people might have gone towards the Galaxy Note in the past like your media experience, the huge screen this tends to do a lot of that just as good if not better since you also get stereo speakers, but that's just if you're picking between Samsung phones. my point from the beginning of the article stands this is just about the optimal Samsung phone that you can get right now with all the pros and cons that come with that,
get all the pros and upsides of the Samsung experience taken to the max the awesome displays, the A+ build quality, the checking of pretty much every box, stereo speakers, headphone jack, expandable storage and a pretty damn good camera, but you also get all the cons of the Samsung experience too like your double apps, you're slower Android updates, your occasional hiccups bixby, so this thing really is great it's perfect for the Samsung lover but I as you probably already know am NOT that person I will be switching back I think to my pixel 2 as a daily.
With the Galaxy S9 it makes it really easy to under appreciate it, because it seems like it's just a minor upgrade it's not that much better it's like an sas and you could say it's a jack-of-all-trades but the master of none, but that's actually what makes this phone so good first of all it is the master of one the display there isn't really any better than this but it's actually so good at so many different things and bad at so few things especially being so good at the hardware suite that's what makes this phone so easy to recommend and so I recommend the Galaxy S9 it's really good.
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