Gadgetory

it's a question that we kind of explored in our full review and it's also something we've heard from a lot of users the question of if I have the Galaxy s8 should I upgrade to the Galaxy S 9 well it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and we're here to explore that a little bit we don't really have a full vs. between these two but we did get some camera samples and that for the most part or rather in a nutshell is the main difference between the galaxy s 9 and this the samsung galaxy s 8 for the most part there's one little anecdote that I can give that basically sums up most of this comparison at times when I had the galaxy s 8 and the galaxy s 9 just sort of sitting together especially when they were face up I kind of mistook one for the other now as a review or a second glance is pretty much all that's needed for me to figure out which one is the SI and which one is the s9 obviously with the smaller s eights the main thing you're going to look for is the fingerprint reader and its placement it's a lot better on the s9 this time around so it's a lot easier to reach as compared to having to reach up pretty high on the s8 and the SI plus speaking of which the s8 plus in the s9 plus that's even easier to figure out because the s9 plus has a secondary lens which pushes the finger / reader even further down on the body so it's easier to reach that sensor on that larger body so I went ahead and used the galaxy s 8 for a few days because I sent my s 9 plus over to another team member for further testing what I wanted to do was see if the day-to-day experience was actually any different between these two now obviously I'm going from the plus model down to the regular model but that just kind of reinforces what I said in my full review I would prefer this smaller addition mainly because it's just easier in the hand but aside from the placement of the fingerprint reader there's really not a whole lot separating these two lines all of the buttons are in the same places including the big sweet button over on the side and you still have that haptic feedback home button on the front just below the screen so if you press hard on the bottom portion of the screen then you have effectively a home button and the infinity display is basically the same they didn't really put any changes into it at all and the specifications still bring quad HD to a Super AMOLED screen that looks pretty great now performance is something that you might want to upgrade to when it comes to the galaxy s 9 because it has the Snapdragon 805 and also the galaxy s 9 plus has 6 gigabytes of RAM so you might want that little Bob for multitasking and just overall performance boosts but the Galaxy s8 has the snapdragon 835 and has been working perfectly fine I've been able to play plenty of games on this especially with Bluetooth controllers as I've been trying out lately and I've been able to get pretty much everything done during the day and the experience hasn't changed a whole lot if anything certain features might be different like for example Android Oreo is now onto Galaxy S nine but that should be coming to the sa pretty soon but even then things like the picture in picture that foreo provides the s9 are already covered by different multitasking tools like the pop-up view that is in the sa and in TouchWiz already so that means that the only real holes are in big speed after all Bixby got a couple of updates mainly in the AR side of things it got augmented reality versions of live translation and even food recognition which are kind of cool it's debatable whether or not it would be useful for most people but if it is for you then obviously the s9 has that trump card granted Bigsby does get updated fairly regularly in Samsung's camps so it may not be that long until you start to see these features come on the previous models so obviously it's all about this camera and on the Galaxy S a to add F 1.7 aperture lens that still did a really good job in low-light but it got even better in the galaxy s 9 with F 1.5 aperture and that's not even putting in all of the hardware enhancements adding actual blades into the camera that stopped the aperture down to F 2.4 aperture it's just a feat of engineering but the S 9 does try to really enhance its photos not only with this dual aperture but also with multi frame processing Ram is actually built into the camera module it takes a ton of photos and uses all of that data to create the best final results now this isn't fully confirmed but one thing I did notice during my review of the s 9 plus was that the multi frame processing seemed to only work on the main lens even on the zoom lens it didn't really seem to be doing its magic and it simply wasn't working in the front-facing camera so that DRAM that they built into the camera module is only really in one place which kind of makes sense because they have to build at those camera modules for also the smaller s9 so of course it would be in the main lens and probably nowhere else one of the obvious omissions in the SI compared to the s9 or all of the new mode that were added in if you look over to the modes at the SA there really isn't a whole lot to get excited about there compared to the newest model you have super slow-mo in the Galaxy S nine and also a are emoji if that's something you really want to use but of course the main thing we want to look at when it comes to these cameras is the camera quality and whether or not the s8 really falls short compared to the s9 so we took a bunch of photos with the s8 when we did that huge camera comparison and you can see a bunch of those videos and the full camera comparison here at Android authorities YouTube channel and over on the website check the card so you can see the large camera comparison that Edgar and I did so we focused more on low-light shooting and this was our main metric for comparing the two phones in night conditions with just the lights on this bridge to show us the way the s8 was still able to bring out a pretty good shot and it was comparable to that of the s9 Samsung does tend to work its cameras a little bit harder trying to get a more exposed photo which is a little bit of a trade-off because it's at the slight expense of an accurate recreation of the scene but it's kind of hard to deny that Samsung is quite impressive in these really dark situations one last thing we'll talk about in terms of the s9 plus is a feature it has that might sway things in its favor the portrait mode because there are two lenses on the back the phone is using both of them in tandem to get the best possible type of portraits with good bokeh effects behind the foreground subjects now arguably it is better because it's using both of those lenses and not relying on software but in our testing we found that the cutouts are mostly the same among all of the devices with the s9 plus just being a bit more consistent and so there you have it after using this Galaxy s8 for the last few days I found that if I just owned this phone and it wasn't broken or anything like that I'm probably in good shape at least until the next note comes out or you might even be able to extend it until the next Galaxy S device comes out aside from higher specifications particularly in the s9 plus all of the enhancements in the smaller s9 don't completely change the day to day experience so maybe a Galaxy Note 9 is in your future or maybe the s10 or whatever they're going to call it in about a year but until that time no matter what amount of time you choose well the s8 should still have you covered keep it tuned to andrew authority for more about the galaxy s 9 maybe a little bit about the Galaxy S a and you can see the views for all of these phones at Android authority common here on the YouTube channel speaking of which make sure you subscribe to our channel and hit that Bell on the side to make sure that you are getting notifications for all of our videos and from there you can stick around and remember that Android authority is of course your source for all things Android