Gadgetory

something has just taken the curtains after you galaxy s ninth and the guards s nine bus so we're gonna have a quick chat about exactly what we think Jess top-line thoughts any good yeah I think from what we've seen so far there are some small improvements over last year's Galaxy sa at NSA plus those were both really beautiful phones from the front they look almost identical the bezels of button ever so slightly thinner you still have the very slightly curved screen you still have this edge toolbar on the side and it's it's a really beautiful device they both are when you flip them around is when you start to see a difference namely the fingerprint scanner has moved from the side of the camera where it was impossibly awkward that was a real problem it was a big problem for me too because my hands are a lot smaller than yours so I felt like I was just like leaping across the phone in order to do that now Samsung has done wet everybody else in the industry does and they've moved the fingerprint scanner to below the camera another big change you'll notice on the galaxy s 9 plus there are two camera modules here not just one so this is something that Samsung has done that kind of copy is the iPhone technique I guess which is that the smallest version has a single lens the medium version or the larger version of that has two lenses and then we expect that the galaxy note mine will continue to keep its two cameras right yeah exactly so I would say you know there are a couple enhancements under the hood as well you'll see a faster chip and I could make the phones up to 25% faster than last year's model and could also improve battery life on a single charge the latest Qualcomm the 855 I think it is a 45 other regions will get Samsung house-made Exynos processor the latest version but if it weren't for this beautiful purple color or this beautiful coral blue color that you have I you know if you have the two phones black wins side-by-side if you're looking in the front you might not really notice the difference between the II between the old model now they are very similar and I think that's fine because for me the the s8 was such a good looking phone that I don't really think something needed to do a complete overhaul of the other look of this phone yet it still got a little bit more milking to do of that design language certainly we've complained with other manufacturers like Apple who've kept on that same design gear on year it does get tiring but this isn't the year to replace that just yet next year I might feel differently and if we don't get the s10 being something a little bit more dramatic a little bit more exciting there yeah yeah well I mean we have colors so that does we have got there is also black and gray but these are my favorite bloodline is boring stands out yes so let's see the difference between the s9 and the s9 + Wow yes it's bigger as you've noticed we've got a 6.2 inch screen on here in a 5.8 inch display on this guy on the s9 cameras so two of them on this guy that means that you get the portrait mode I mean you get a telephoto zoom lens as well if you want to get in on the action but that's not that's not reducing the quality it's not like a digital zoom where you literally just crop into the image you still get that full resolution make a pixel camera eight megapixel front-facing camera okay so you've got screen space you've got that second camera you've got a larger battery capacity on there about day yeah it's still the same as last year's if you're keeping track but with the new chipset in there you might get like a little bit more life out of it but you're still going to need to charge your phone every night especially if you're using it really heavily and then also the price so this is going to be the s9 a plus is going to be more expensive than the s9 yeah I don't know we don't we don't know exact prices off the top of my head I think 739 pounds for the small one and eight hundred and something for the bigger one so it really varies so in US currency you're gonna have $120 difference depending on which care you're going to and that's just for the s9 or the s9 plus and so that's something you're definitely going to have to shop around but crucially I don't think there's any difference as far as I'm aware in the process of performance or the resolution of the standard camera so actually between the two phones whichever one you go for it's really down to what I think feels most comfortable in your hand for me I am used to having bigger phones but I prefer the smaller size of the galaxy s 9 I really like the size of the iPhone X that's a lot smaller and it just feels more comfortable one hand so my money would go for the smaller one being happy that I'm not having to really compromise on performance there how about you well I do like a portrait mode option is it worth the extra money I mean maybe I also kind of feel like I want the option to have it if I want to use that I wouldn't want to be like disappointed that I couldn't take those pictures however you don't lose a lot of the poor functionality Samsung has upgraded the camera in both of these phones they don't get the same upgrades and a really big part of this is something called dual aperture and you are a big photo pump so why don't you explain what that is so this is the first phone actually has an aperture that will physically change that's something that you will see in traditional dslr's with with with with professional lenses where you can change the aperture that's physically the size of the hole that lets the light in and really what that means is the bigger the hole the more light can get into your sensor and this one you can change it between an F 1.5 which is very wide doing it right now the bigger that aperture lets in a lot of light so this should be really good in low light we have seen some examples already that Samsung has shown but do they very impressive but of course they taking those up to optimal lab conditions so we're going to have to reserve our judgment until we can sort of take this out into the field maybe even around Barcelona and see how it really performs at nighttime maybe we'll have to take it into a bar with some beers and see how it performs there I think we're definitely I think that might have to happen yeah you're never supposed to notice if you go into pro mode you can force this and you can change the setting but the beauty is that it's supposed to be automatic so that when you do go into the bar the dark environment or your rear with your friends that will just happen very seamlessly and you won't even notice that you're getting better lectures another thing that Samsung did with the camera was that the company introduced super slow motion video so they already had some motion video now it's even slower it was before I think 240 frames a second but now it shoots at 960 frames a second so that takes I think about two seconds of video point to 60 seconds so if you're slapping your friend in the face throwing a cake on the floor your dogs catching a ball that'll happen to you personally very very good for sharing of your friends and fun for YouTube or that kind of thing and or we don't know at the moment I don't think is the resolution 720p so I did take several slow-motion videos of myself I watched the Mac and it does the crazier you know you're you're not gonna it's for fun it's for sharing the dogs really I'm not ashamed because last year Sony launched their exed premium I believe it was and that also had a 960 frames a second super slow-mo and that also did it in 720 so it would kind of be nice for Samsung to up the ante a little bit with a full HD option maybe even hire mean I think 4k will be pushing it but certainly I think hitting that Full HD mark on here would have been good yeah Sony's the way Sony did it as well was very difficult to capture that moment of when you want the slow-mo to happen and I haven't tried Samsung's yet but they have got a few features like an automatic mode which should hopefully make it easier to get what you want in slow-motion so one other camera feature that I want to point out this is and new to the galaxy s 9 its selfie focus so oftentimes you get that portrait mode by having two cameras on the back you only have one pip front-facing camera but the phones will actually use software to kind of simulate that focus so I don't think I can get it close enough to the camera but the idea is that your background will blur out and you and your friends will kind of pop out and sharp really of course that's not the only exciting thing that you can do with the front-facing camera because Samsung has a little bit jumped on the Apple bandwagon with B ma are emojis but what Samsung's turn is when you take a selfie of yourself of course you can then that will then be turned into an animated character of yourself which will then talk as you're talking into it and so you can use that to send us messages do all kinds of things rather than it just being like Apple are talking poo or a talking fox it actually is supposed to look a bit like you with the rabbit or Disney characters there is an agreement with Disney so err emoji does two things the first thing it does is it does create an avatar of yourself then it kind of splits into two tracks so you can stylize and edit that and as again you said record a video although it's creepy it doesn't work very well and I recorded some I tried to smile and instead of smiling so I went like this and it went a grimace this looks like doing a lot of pain the second thing so you can share that with others not shares in a movie file and and the other thing that it does is it will basically create eighteen animated gif stickers that you can send messages and those are pre created so when you set it up you're not even smiling you just kind of have a passport photo face where you stare at it and then it creates those stickers and you can use them if you've ever used bitmoji it's like that it's almost identical to bitmoji actually and my character that I created when I tried this looked almost identical to by bitmoji character and I really like using bitmoji sending all the different things so I think this you have 18 at launch but I'm sure that as it as it as it has it takes off and people start doing their own thing with it and I imagine some people probably release that that apk out to other developers who may start bringing that into things so it could well be that we start seeing a lot more of these things and certainly if it Modi themselves get ahold of the Developer Kit they could actually bring that into bitmoji profit I'm not really hot on this future from what I've seen so far it's early days there could be a lot of software improvements but I just don't think the tracking is really good I look at it I don't think it looks like me other people have seen out other editors tried it their skin tone their hair was smoothly off do you really want to sit there I mean you're supposed to have some sort of you know identification with this character that's being created that's what makes it personal and I just feel like it right and what works with an emoji is that it tracks really well so when you move your mouth it moves you have a tracking is better much better on Apple's do you think that makes this seem a bit like a me to game dude I do feel that way I think that the front-facing camera has a lot to do with it the iPhone turn that this is on and has a 3d tracker yeah in the camera this is using 2d so this is just a matter of generation I think the note 9 or I think next year's Galaxy phones could improve just when that front facing camera improves the technology is out there but it's coming slower to introduce some features that we do still have though it's still IP 68 waterproof so you can't don't take it swimming but it's safe if you get it splashed or if you take a phone call in the rain we've also got micro SD card expandable four cards up to four hundred gig in size I mean they're about 200 pounds or what $300 so you might not want to buy one of those but at least you can if you wanted to so that's neat that we have still got that and Samsung were very keen to point out though there is still a headphone jack on the bottom of this so they haven't got rid of the headphone jack wireless charging also a future they used to see in here of course you have Samsung pay I want to say something about a speaker which is next to the headphone jack yeah which is what we saw so Samsung has enhanced the audio for the s9 in the s9 plus we've got the microphone is bottom and a speaker up at the top these are combined with a Dolby codec so Dolby software that you'll find similar to what you might see in it'll be cinema theater and it creates richer louder sound I thought it sounded really good in the demo it sounded pretty rich but I also don't think that that was difficult to attain compared to previous versions just speakerphone audio through the speakers has never been a strong suit so it's nice to see Samsung kind of come to the table but a lot of the makers have and I'm definitely looking forward to kind of testing that out of just for a battle of which food has the best audio which ones allowed us definitely it's not going to be a feature you're not going to use this music to to power your party for example we've got some noise going on behind us but it's it's loud enough that if you're listening to maybe a podcast while you're cooking your dinner or you want to show you a friend and video yeah it's great for that but but it's not it's it isn't going to replace a good set of headphones or a good Bluetooth speaker okay so we've gone over a lot of the main features I think the remaining question is how is this phone going to perform against some of the others that are out there the iPhone 10 the Google pixel - and - Excel and other things that are going to be coming down the line that are very quiet what's your hat take I mean I think Samsung has its take that si was already a very good phone and it already held its own against those other phones so it has taken that and added a little bit extra so that's good I think people are going to respond to that I think this is going to is definitely going to sell well because it's a new Samsung Galaxy phone they always sell well so I think they're definitely onto a winner here for me there isn't it's not a huge jump over the si and certainly if you already have a galaxy si there's no need to upgrade to you can safely think okay this one is not for me I'll wait till the the s 10 next year or maybe even the note 9 later on in the year it doesn't have that pizazz of other here's a new phone I agree with you and I also think that a lot of this is going to come down to the camera there are people who have older versions of Samsung phones or other phones and they've been waiting to see do I buy an iPhone or GOI buy the next galaxy and I think that when we dive into that camera when we dive into the speed dive into battery life the things that we haven't been able to test yet they take time and you don't even have the review units yet so when we do that I think that's going to really decide if this is the iPhone 7 killer or not when the beats gonna be on sale right so they go on pre-order March 2nd and they go on store shelves March 16 yeah so it means that by mid-march you should be able to get your hands on one of these and hopefully by then we may have even been able to give one the full review treatment because there is a lot of things that we want to test with this to do of course make sure to hit any questions that we haven't covered in the comments or you can find us on Twitter Jess you are and I am at battery HQ and of course you can reach CNET with at CNET on pretty much every social channel that you can find alright that's it for now