The Good The Galaxy S9 Plus one-ups the excellent Galaxy S9 with a second
rear camera for taking portrait photos.
The Bad Battery
life fell short of last year's model in our early tests, and the Galaxy S9 Plus
suffers from the same underbaked extras as the smaller Galaxy S9. The
dual-aperture camera tends to overexpose low-light photos in auto mode.
The Bottom Line Samsung's Galaxy S9 Plus is the more robust Galaxy S9, and
the one for power users to get.
SAMSUNG GALAXY S9 RELEASE DATE, PRICE AND
SPECS
DISPLAY
5.8-inch Quad HD curved Super AMOLED (529 ppi)
REAR-FACING CAMERA
12 megapixel, dual pixel sensor and aperture, f/1.5 and f/2.4
FRONT-FACING CAMERA
8 megapixel, f/1.7
MEMORY
None
STORAGE
64GB (plus 400GB expandable storage)
DIMENSIONS
147.7 x 68.7 x 8.5mm, 163 grams
BATTERY
3,000mAh, faster wired and wireless charging
OPERATING SYSTEM
Android 8 (Oreo)
UK RELEASE DATE
On sale from March 16
PRICE
£739
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.
That’s not to say that
the S9 is not a good phone. It’s great. In fact, if you want to get to grips
with all the things that make the S9 a superlative phone, you should read our S8
review from a year ago. It’s all still true.
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. It’ll be hoping that
these changes are so significant that we’ll overlook the fact that the guts of
the phone haven’t moved on much in the last year. As a result, we gave the S9
to photographer
Leon Chew to see if the camera measured up to
Samsung’s own marketing hype
Bixby is back... and better·
· Bixby Voice is still behind
· Bixby Vision is far more useful
Bixby
Vision returns more results... but some are not as accurate as others.
We were thoroughly
disappointed by Bixby on the Galaxy S8 last year, as it promised to be the
ultimate digital assistant and, well, it wasn't.
Improved
biometrics
· Intelligent scan is accurate,
but not as secure
·
Far easier to unlock your phone
New
speakers
· AKG tuned sound is loud
·
A tiny bit lacking in punch,
but a big upgrade on the S8
·
Same
design as last year, but stronger
·
Still
an excellent, premium-looking phone
It would be too easy
to say the Samsung Galaxy S9 is just a carbon copy of the Galaxy S8... but it's
very, very close.
There are a few slight
changes that make a big difference though, starting with the materials used to
make this phone. The fact it's using Gorilla Glass 5 is a big step forward, as
it means the phone is even better able than its predecessor to withstand
knocks and drops, removing the need for a case if you're not into encapsulating
your new expensive phone.
Screen
·
Same technology and resolution
as last year
·
Maximum brightness is boosted
CAMERA
·
Low
light performance is incredible
·
Some
photos seem oddly washed out
·
Overall
quality is still amazing
The camera is great
Now onto that S9's new rear
camera. For 2018, Samsung is trying to beat the rest by putting the first-ever
adjustable aperture camera on a smartphone. Technically, it’s really a neat
feat, letting the camera switch between a super wide f/1.5 for when you really
need every last bit of light, and f/2.4 which lets you stop down and better
control how many photons are hitting the camera’s sensor in bright daytime
shots. However, unless you’re someone who is constantly fiddling with manual
camera settings in pro-mode, the differences between the two apertures are hard
to discern.
In the right conditions and
when the subject isn’t too far away, sometimes you can notice a difference in
depth of field, which is the distance between the nearest and farthest things
that appears to be in focus. But in auto mode, the S9 will just choose the
whatever setting works best, and it’s almost always right. So most people won’t
notice when the camera’s aperture changes.
·
Battery
life is disappointing
·
Not
much change from last year
We’re disappointed
with the battery life in the Samsung Galaxy S9, as it’s not made the jump
forward we expected.
See all Samsung Galaxy
S9 deals
With the same 3,000mAh
power pack on board as the Galaxy S8 and the same amount of pixels to drive,
but with a more efficient processor, and with Samsung having had a year to
refine the software, we were expecting big things from the Samsung Galaxy S9’s
battery.
What we got was
something that’s a bit more ‘slippery’ than the Galaxy S8. Where we’d have
around eight hours of battery life left when the indicator was showing 60%
full, now we’re seeing the same numbers at 70%.
The worry with Android
phones is always that there’s a nefarious app playing around in the background,
causing more power to be drained than necessary, but our constant checking
showed that it was usually just the screen – which is brighter this year –
drawing more power.
What’s interesting here is that Samsung has clearly optimized things, as when we ran our
standard video test (90 minutes of a Full HD video at maximum brightness) the
Galaxy S9 only lost 17% of its battery.
Should
I buy it?
The camera is the big
reason to go for the Samsung Galaxy S9, along with the uprated power and
improved construction, but it's not a great leap forward. The camera flatters
to deceive at times, with the color reproduction the main issue for us.
It's annoying to see that a
photo which only looks half-decent when you snap it can be instantly improved
simply by adding an effect in post-processing – it's hard to work out why
Samsung doesn't just do this automatically.
The extra cost is going to
be tough for some people to stomach, as you'll get a lot of the features here
on the Galaxy S8, as long as you don't mind some finger gymnastics to get to
the fingerprint scanner on the back and aren't bothered about having the best
camera Samsung can create.
The Galaxy S9 could still well be the phone of
2018 – but the competition has a real chance to catch up this year.
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