SAMSUNG GALAXY S9:Top-drawer Android phone in the era of incremental gains.
There’s a lot about the Samsung Galaxy S9 that feels very familiar from last year’s S8. The phones have the same battery capacity, same screen size, and resolution and are almost indistinguishable in terms of design.
Even where Samsung has made changes to the design, they are often barely perceptible. The S9 is a smidgen shorter and thicker than its predecessor, the fingerprint scanner has shifted half an inch to the left (thankfully) and tiny fractions of bezel have been shaved off, giving the phone a higher screen-to-body ratio than the iPhone X.
But for this review, we're going to stick to what’s new with the S9. Samsung’s whole shtick around this latest release is that it has reimagined the camera.
The camera
The S9 has a 12-megapixel dual pixel sensor, much like the S8, but this time Samsung has added a dual aperture feature that is supposed to boost the camera’s performance in low light conditions. When light is low, the camera automatically selects a wider aperture to let in loads of light, but automatically switches back to the narrower setting in normal light conditions. It also takes 12 shots for every photograph and combines those images to reduce the noise that is often present in dark photos.
Biometrics
On the biometric front, the S9 and S9+ introduce "intelligent scan" for the first time. This combines iris scanning with facial recognition to authenticate your identity and unlock your phone quickly and, supposedly, easily.
For me, however, that wasn’t the case. In around one out of every five unlock attempts, intelligent scan gave up trying to recognise me after a few seconds forcing unlocking the phone by entering a pattern.
This might be my fault, of course – frequently the S9 told me my eyes weren’t open enough .
Specifications
Verdict
The Samsung S9 is an excellent smartphone – one of the best Android phones you can buy today. The screen, in particular, is superb. The colors are crisp and extremely detailed, and the ample screen real estate makes it well-suited to watching videos in horizontal mode. I’m not a fan of watching films on smartphones, but the S9 almost had me convinced.The sound, too, is great. The S9’s speakers are 40 percent louder than those in the S8, which gives it a surprising amount of sonic presence for a smartphone.All this adds up to a flagship phone that falls short of its own hype. The new camera is definitely an improvement on the S8, particularly when it comes to low light photography, but it’s not quite the reimagining that Samsung is billing it as. Really, the S9 is just another top-drawer Android phone in the era of incremental gains.
