Last year Samsung surprised everyone with its Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 +, even though they were flawed.
So Samsung has made some changes to its flagship and made the Galaxy S9 one of the best smartphones of 2018. The Android Beat team spent some time with the new Galaxy S9 and decided that Samsung was once again able to surprise the whole world with its smartphone. Below are the most interesting excerpts from the review.
Design
Let's start with the look. The S9, especially in the new purple color, looks amazing. It's perfectly shaped, sleek and almost identical to last year's S8, but slightly lower, and the fingerprint sensor is now in a more comfortable place under the camera. We'll talk about the sensor later.
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And no notch. Moreover, Samsung decided not to follow the trend and left the 3.5mm headphone jack. The company didn't need to add a notch to the screen to accommodate the sensors.
The 'iris' face recognition system works the same as in the previous flagships, i.e. Not perfect. In addition, it can now work in combination with standard camera-based face recognition. This feature is called 'Intel ligent Scan' and is slightly faster. However, the company is still far from iPhone X with Face ID. Poor lighting alone makes it much easier and faster to simply use the fingerprint sensor. You can even do this while you take your smartphone out of your pocket.
Camera
The main improvement Samsung has made to its new flagship is the S9 front camera. Moreover, the S9 + has a second telephoto lens, but more on that another time. The main camera of the base model received a Fast2L3 sensor, which helps to save RAM.
Data can now be captured and processed faster, i.e. you don't have to wait for the processor and RAM to collect pixel information. A separate camera RAM is responsible for this, and pictures can now be taken much faster. The S9 can instantly stitch up to 12 frames for best results, and process and analyze them to reduce noise.
You can also shoot video at 960fps in 720p quality. This is the level of professional cameras that fits in your pocket. The company added a system that senses movement in the frame and automatically starts shooting. However, for a successful video, you need good lighting and a lot of patience. The function is unlikely to be useful, but you can definitely play around with it.
Samsung system
This is a Samsung smartphone, so you get a lot of standard services and apps in the box. From the Bixby system, which most users consider useless, to the constant requests to sign in to your Samsung account. In the end, anyone will give up. In addition, you get:
- Samsung Pay / Google Pay
- Samsung Calendar / Google Calendar
- Samsung Mail / Google Gmail
- Internet Samsung / Google Chrome
- Samsung Gallery / Google Photo
- Samsung Galaxy Apps / Google Play Store
In addition, there are Samsung services that work all the time, even though you never use them. These are Samsung Cloud, Samsung Health, Samsung Reminder, Samsung Notes, Samsung Themes, etc. All of them work in the background always from the moment the smartphone is launched, and it is not so easy to disable them.
In general, we can conclude that the new flagship has retained all the necessary design elements of the Galaxy S8, and also received several changes that made it even better.