Gadgetory

here's the new Galaxy S 9 and s9 plus from Samsung now if you squid even slightly you might think you're looking at last year's Galaxy s8 because the differences between it and the s9 are well minimal at best but this is the Android phone that more people will buy than any other this year and it does come with a few new things that those people appreciate and besides it's not like the SI is a bad phone to start from the overall design of the s9 is unchanged from last year it's still a glass of metal sandwich it still has curved glass on the front and back it still has an extra wide 18 point 5 by 9 display and minimal bezels it's really nice and it's really well made but the glass back is kind of a fingerprint magnet and it can be slippery to hold the smaller s9 is the 5 point 8 inch screen while the s9 plus is a six point two inch display both are Super AMOLED panels with 2965 1440 pixels of resolution both are really nice to look at with vibrant colors sharp resolution and excellent viewing angles they're also slightly brighter this year which is always appreciated if not always noticeable and they still remain the best displays you can get on any Android phone they even up to par with the screen on the iPhone 10 provided you don't mind slightly more saturated colors the s9 is the same fast wired and wireless charging as before the same ip68 water resistance as before and the same 3.5 millimeter headphone jack as before if you're looking for a high-end phone with a headphone jack in 2018 your choices are fewer than ever so it's kind of great to see Samsung stick with it for the s9 now the big design change is the placement of the fingerprint scanner which is the move from the side of the camera to just below it it's much easier to use in the SI it's especially if you're using the larger plus model but it's still weirdly small and too close to the camera I frequently swipe on the camera lens when I'm trying to use the fingerprint gesture to see my notifications which is kind of annoying and then of course there's that dreaded bixby button which is still there it's still in the same spot just below the volume buttons on the left side now you can disable it from launching bixby now which is progress but samsung still doesn't provide a native way to reprogram it to something more useful now and it's worse it's annoying and at its best it's a little fidget button that you can press without having to worry about doing anything if you actually disable pick speed the other new hardware feature here is stereo speakers which basically catches Samsung up to what everyone else has been doing for a couple of years they are noticeably louder and fuller than the single speaker on the SI and they're really great for watching video I'm not gonna say that the best phone speakers I've ever heard but they're still great and I'm happy to see them here the rest of the hardware improvements are all on the inside it's got Qualcomm's news snapdragon a 45 processor either 4 or 6 gigabytes of RAM depending on which model you choose and a new LTE modem that supports even faster gigabit speeds now those respects we're gonna see in virtually every Android flagship this year but Samsung is the first out of the gate with them performance at least during my review has been great everything is really fast and responsive and the network performance is just as impressive as last year's and to be honest noticeably better than the iPhones though unchanged of the size of the battery in the internal storage you get a 3000 milliamp hour battery in the s9 and it's 3,500 million power battery in the s9 plus both of them has 64 gigs of storage and microSD card support I really would have liked to see Samsung increase the battery size this year it's not to say that the battery life is bad on either model but it's not the best you can get and heavy users are gonna even deplete the s9 plus battery after a long day so despite all of that sameness Samsung did upgrade one important aspect to the S line and it did so in a pretty big way the S lines rear camera is all-new it's kinda improved sensor and a new variable aperture lens that can physically switch between a really bright F 1.5 and a smaller F 2.4 aperture the s 9 plus skeins ii telephoto lens for portrait mode stuff like Samsung used on no date last year on top of that everything is optically image stabilized samsung claims significant improvements in low-light photography over the s8 scamper and it's true that the s9 definitely can take some really great photos in low-light the F 1.5 aperture let's in more light than last year's F 1 point 7 lens and the improved processing helps reduce noise overall and unless impressed with a switching aperture feature it feels more like a parlor trick than anything else now since a digital camera can just compensate its shutter speed for how much light is in the room I don't really ever feel like I would ever need to shoot at f/2 point for now if you are in the pro mode of the camera app you can actually switch between the two modes so here for an example or shoot this image at 1.5 and then I'm gonna shoot this image at 2.4 and overall there really isn't much difference between the two images the F 1.5 has a slightly blurry background then the F 2.4 which has a little bit longer depth of field but in terms of like sharpness there really isn't a difference there so I'm not sure why I would ever shoot a F 2.4 on this phone I'd probably just leave it at 1.5 and forget about it the s 9 + is ii telephoto lens is similarly gimmick Samsung's live focused portrait mode just isn't as good as apples or Google's at separating a subject from the background and in challenging lighting conditions the image quality is kind of bad the s 9 can shoot 4k video at 60 frames per second or slow-motion 1080p video at 240 frames per second which catches us up with what the iPhone can do now both modes produce nice quality video but you have to make sure you have plenty of light for the slow motion mode where you'll see a lot of noise in the video overall the S Alliance camera is definitely an improvement and it's very good on its own but if you weren't a fan of samsung's image processing before you still won't like it now sure there's less noise than before and the colors are pleasing but all the images definitely have Samsung's look to them which is different than what Apple or Google scampers produce at this point it really comes down to personal preference but it's definitely something to be aware of and one thing I wish Samsung did spend some time on is the front camera on the s9 it's the same 8 megapixel camera as found on the s8 it does have autofocus which no other front camera has yet to replicate but its portrait mode just isn't as good as Google or Apple's so all that stuff is great and it's gonna keep the s9 at the top of phone rankings for most of 2018 but there's a ton of other things that Samsung is pushing with the marketing for the s9 here and to be honest you'll probably never use them it's almost as if Samsung just couldn't help itself the first up is a our emoji Samsung's take on the iPhone tens an emoji feature here's how it works it scans your face and then it produces a bitmoji looking character based on a hundred points of your face and that kind of maybe sometimes looks like you then it takes this character and it creates a bunch of reaction guess with it that you can then send in messaging apps then there's also some weird-looking animals that you can create video clips with like you can do with an emoji on the iPhone now there's a couple of issues with Samsung's AOR emoji first off Samsung isn't using any special tech to capture your face or movements it's just relying on the camera so tracking is pretty bad second the characters it creates are just the wrong kind of creepy and nobody have tested it with has been like oh that's something I like and then the animals on top of that are just kind of weird it's definitely something that Samsung built just to compete with Apple and frankly it's not very good now Samsung is also trying to eighth the iPhone 10's face ID with its new intelligent scan feature it combines iris scanning and face detection to unlock the phone but it's still slow and now it shines a bright red light in your face when it scans a good thing there's a fingerprint scanner that's easier to reach on the back because that's faster and more reliable than Samsung's face scanning options next is the new super slow motion mode in the camera the s9 can shoot up to 960 frames per second which sounds really neat but it can only do so for 0.2 seconds at a time and only at 720p resolution now there's two ways you can shoot it you can try to manually trigger it to capture the point two seconds of action you want or you can use an automatic mode that looks for a specific movement in an area of the frame and then capture a slo-mo when it detects it but in practice both are really hard to use and they're really more frustrating than anything else worse you need a ton of light to make it work and even if you have lots of light imagery quality is kind of crappy and if that wasn't enough there's the awful music the app overlays on the clip automatically if you don't bother to edit it after the fact now Bixby it's not new but it's still here and it's still bad it's kind of fresh go to paint and it's slightly faster than before but it's still way slower than the Google assistant and isn't as good at parsing my voice commands there's a couple of new features like an integrated makeup store that lets you try makeup out virtually and then buy it directly from Sephora or covergirl but I really can't imagine anyone using that more than once anyways here's what I look like with a face full of makeup and then there's the perennial complaint with Samsung's software why are there so many duplicate apps the unlocked s9 I've been testing has two email apps two gallery apps two browsers two app stores and two payment apps now a couple of Samsung's apps are good mostly the Samsung Browser and Samsung pay but the rest are inferior to the Google apps that are also installed on the phone which just makes them kind of annoying and if you care at all about software updates samsung is one of the worst manufacturers when it comes to delivering new versions of Android as of this review last year's Galaxy s8 still doesn't have Android 8.0 in the US and that was released by Google over six months ago okay so it sounds like I just took a huge dump on the s9 but like I said most of these bad things can be ignored you can turn off fix feed never bother to use a are emoji or super slow-mo and disable most of Samsung's apps the only real sticking point for some people will be Samsung support update history but that leaves the rest of the s 9 which is actually really great still has modern design it has great performance a great screen and a very good camera outside of the display the s9 isn't a class leader in any category but it's good enough in all of them that the whole package makes for a great phone chances are if you're spending between 700 and 900 dollars on a new phone this year the s9 is gonna be one of the best options you can get but if it doesn't do it for you you might want to wait for Samsung's next big thing what