Gadgetory

hey it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and we're taking a look at the galaxy s 9 plus and the pixel to excel now quick note I do have a bit of a skin at the top of mine the glass that is up here the only bit of glass on the back I accidentally cracked a little bit of it so that's why there's a bit of a different look with my pixel to excel but we will get into the design aspect in a second I just want to remind everybody that I'm just giving my main take away thoughts here in this video if you want to see the more in-depth comparison between these two we have that and also a camera comparison available at Android authority comm there's also going to be a video for the camera comparison here so you can stay tuned for that as well now the main takeaways that I have between these two devices is that Samsung really tries to put as much as possible into their phones and that's something that we've known for a while but the differences or the omissions if you will have been a little bit more obvious this time around the pixel to excel for example doesn't have the glass on glass design and because of that there is no IP certification but more to the point there's no wireless charging and while there aren't any extra buttons on the pixel 2xl compared to the Bigsby button on the s9 plus you can squeeze the device to get straight to Google assistant which is pretty nice just sort of squeeze the device it comes up really easily and it's actually pretty convenient but the other omissions are a little bit tougher to forgive mainly the headphone jack now without a headphone jack on the pixel 2 XL you have to use a USBC adapter for your wired headphones well in terms of the handling the design between these two is very similar because the screens are about the same size but I have to give some credit to the infinity display after all the Infinity display just curves on the sides to bring the screen down just that little bit to the device makes it a little bit easier for you to go back and forth with it but the flat sides of the pixel 2 XL make it just that little bit tougher to maneuver in one hand after all you have to really slide the phone around and really it's a small difference but it's something that is still noticeable as everyone has been talking about the fingerprint reader on the s9 plus and on the s9 really has been put in a much better spot so we can give the s9 credit for that and as you can see on the back here there is a dual camera setup on here and when we talk about the cameras in a little the dual camera setup is a vastly different philosophy than the pixel to excel the pixel to excel has been out for a little while now so it does have that bit of a disadvantage because it has the snapdragon 835 with 4 gigabytes of RAM while the Snapdragon 805 is what you have in the s9 plus and the s9 plus also gets a bump up to 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pretty nice so there is a bit of a performance gap here but it's not so wide and also with the stock Android that's on the pixel - you should have reliable speedy performance throughout your time with it especially with this one that I've had and I've had this thing for months you also have big speed which is right here I press the Bigsby button over on the side and it takes me to the landing page where there are a lot of pieces of information here not only the top apps that you might want to download op apps that you use but also feeds you can also hold the big speed button so that you can do voice commands and one thing I will give bigsby some credit for is when you hold the button and you say something like let me try that real quick open the camera and take a selfie right there one thing there you go you have to tell me you did it sure anyway the follow up commands are really nice in Bixby you are able to save the first part of a command and then do a follow up command so depending on what you're looking to open up it will be able to follow through now that is something on top of an existing Google assistant that you get in Android Oreo anyway by holding down on the home button so really it just comes down to how much you want to be able to do between these two devices but there are a lot of the same multitasking features and there are a lot more features on the galaxy s 9 plus that you may or may not find useful so the core experience is always going to be reliable for example all of the extras include things like the edge UX over here on the side coming from the curve of the infinity display so you can access your most contacted contacts your most used applications and there are a ton of options inside of the settings area to customize the device I even have a video a 15-second video as my lockscreen and the always-on display of the s 9 and the s 9 plus can be customized with a custom picture or logo in this case and depending on your usage the s9 plus and the pixel 2x I'll have very similar capacities and their batteries and that's very similar battery life there's only 20 more milliamp hours in this one so really the experience has been largely the same I can get a day hour a day and a half from these two phones depending on what my usage is but if you're a very heavy power user power saving modes are important also but the Samsung Galaxy S 9 plus provides even more of those including a really deep of power saving mode where it turns off a lot of the features and only allow some applications to be opened at any given time so if you really are a super power user you need your phone to last as long as possible Samsung tries to make sure that that can happen and finally we can talk about the cameras and there are two different philosophies at work here like I mentioned before we did do a camera comparison between these two and a couple of other phones and we are going to provide that in a separate piece here at Android authority the main lens has an F 1.5 aperture and there are actual Blaze in there that stop down to F 2.4 so you can take advantage of those two apertures if you know what you're doing and then there's a telephoto lens that allows you a 2 X optical zoom at F 2.4 aperture itself the pixel 2 has a 12 megapixel camera on the rear and an 8 megapixel camera up front but both of them have been treated to provide great processing based upon Google's massive database machine learning and all of that all those buzzwords basically means that all the photos that Google has amassed over the years can be used to provide the best possible processing for any given photo that you take so even in low-light shots the pixel 2 can provide very detailed photos even if they're not perfectly exposed because of the lower specifications and by that I'm highlighting the s 9 f 1.5 aperture which just does a great job of really lighting up a photo even in really dark situations and you can see the difference here and it also provides a lot more options including the super slow motion and also the AR emoji if you want to have some extra fun with augmented reality emojis of yourself but those are all things that we've covered in other videos as well where the pixel 2 really shines is in its portrait mode especially since I'm the front-facing camera you get the same processing where all of the data that Google uses helps to provide a proper cutout from the background and also provides great selfie photo you've probably seen it already there are a lot of people on Instagram and all over the place that use this phone and get some great front-facing camera portraits and selfies are just that much easier on this phone however there aren't really any extra enhancements to put on top of there like on the galaxy s 9 plus like beauty modes and also enhancements like AR emoji and makeup ar where you can actually put makeup on yourself in an augmented reality fashion so you can actually change kind of completely the way that you look but really that's the take away between these two devices the galaxy s 9 plus just has basically everything plus the kitchen sink and you can pretty much ask it to do whatever you want and it probably has the tools to do it but the pixel to excel still provides that kind of Spartan experience something that's a little bit easier for those who don't really want too many tools because they don't need them they know how to get their stuff done and even if you can get those same tasks done with the galaxy s 9 plus at least there's not a whole lot of extra clutter surrounding everything that you need so what really matters here in this comparison and the reason why you want it to take a look at these is because we wanted to ask you guys what you thought you can get into the comments down below and talk about which one of these two phones you would pick and you can also talk about this comparison if you have any questions at all you can also let us know in the comments down below and we are going to respond to those comments down there but also some of the top comments might actually be used in a future piece of content so make sure you stay tuned for that as well so thank you guys very much for watching I just wanted to give my quick thoughts on these two phones and if you haven't already please subscribe to the Android Authority YouTube channel and if you're already a subscriber head over to that subscription button and hit that bell on the side so you get notifications for times when we put content out which is really often actually so keep up with all of that and more by heading over to Android RDECOM for all the coverage we've done on these two phones you can eat it more information we have the separate reviews but we also have a longer form comparison at Android RDECOM for you to read so keep it tuned here and remember that we are your source for all things Android