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Samsung Galaxy S9
Put the Samsung Galaxy S9 next to the Galaxy S8, and you’ll struggle to find an immediate difference between the two. Samsung’s latest flagship, announced at Mobile World Congress 2018, boasts quality of smartphone life improvements: Minor changes to the Galaxy S8’s design make for a much better smartphone experience. In particular, it addresses one of the biggest disappointments of the S8 — how similar its camera was to the Galaxy S7. With the Galaxy S9 and especially the Galaxy S9 Plus, the camera has been “reimagined,” with features we’ve never seen before on a phone. It’s exciting, but also a little perplexing. Let’s take a closer look.
Refined design
Ever taken a look at the Galaxy S8’s Iris Scanner and think it sticks out like a sore thumb? Do you hate the placement of the fingerprint sensor on the S8 Plus? These are the sort of things the design-savvy among us fret about, and items Samsung has pondered and refined on the S9 and S9 Plus.
The Iris Scanner is now darker so it blends in with the edges around the screen. These edges or bezels are also slightly smaller, giving you even more screen real estate than before. Other than these two minor improvements, the front of these two new smartphones looks undeniably similar to that of its predecessors. That’s a good thing, because the Galaxy S9 continues to look stellar — super sleek and ultra-modern.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Perhaps more important, Samsung has placed the fingerprint sensor in a new position on the back of the S9 and S9 Plus, directly underneath the camera. The old placement made the sensor difficult to reach; it’s certainly much improved now. And this is largely a part of the biggest and most noticeable design difference between the S9 and the S8 devices, The sensor is lower, the flash is on the right side of the camera, and specifically on the Galaxy S9 Plus, you’ll find a dual-camera system. It’s the first time the Galaxy S-series features dual cameras — the first Galaxy device to utilize them is the Note 8.
The back of the phone doesn’t mention the device’s name, it just has Samsung’s logo in the center, a minor change over last year. There’s still the curved edges (also on the front), along with the all-glass back for fast wireless charging.
We’re still mesmerized by the Infinity Display.
The right edge of the phone is where you’ll find the power button; the left edge holds a volume rocker and the famed Bixby button below it. On the bottom edge is a bottom-firing speaker next to a USB Type-C charging port, and you may be surprised to hear there still is a headphone jack. The speaker, for the first time, works in tandem with the earpiece at the top of the phone, offering stereo sound tuned by AKG that’s 1.4 times louder than the Galaxy S8. Best of all, the speakers utilize Dolby Atmos technology, which helps make it room-filling and immersive. We’re impressed with the sound quality and how loud the speakers got from the brief music we heard. Still, it’s a bummer Samsung didn’t use dual front-facing speakers.
Both phones still manage to feel compact, while maintaining a large screen. The Galaxy S9 has the same 5.8-inch screen, and the S9 Plus comes in at 6.2 inches.
We love the design of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, and we’re still mesmerized by the Infinity Display, even if it’s not much different from the screen on the Galaxy S8. The changes do improve the user experience, and we’re happy to see them. Better yet, there are a few beautiful colors coming to the U.S. we’re excited about — lilac purple, coral blue, and midnight black.
A mechanical camera, and super slow motion
Before diving into the specifications, let’s check out Samsung’s biggest selling point for the S9 and S9 Plus. The company’s heavily pushing the idea of a reimagined camera, and it’s right in saying so, because the S9’s camera has something we’ve never seen before on a phone — a mechanical aperture.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
An aperture is the hole in a camera that takes in light. The bigger the hole, the more light the camera can use, which is notably important for low-light photography. An aperture is measured by F-stops, and the lower the number, the bigger the hole. (For more info, read our guide to camera settings and controls.) The Galaxy S9’s 12-megapixel camera has an f/1.5 aperture, the lowest ever yet on a smartphone, as well as an f/2.4 aperture.
We’ll have to do more testing to see the benefits of having a mechanical aperture system.
It’s a mechanical lens, which means if you look at the back of the camera, you can see it switch between apertures. Samsung said the camera uses the f/2.4 aperture during the day, when the camera doesn’t need to take in as much light, while it automatically opts for the f/1.5 aperture at night to absorb as much as possible.
The switch occurs automatically, but you can change it yourself in manual mode. Yes, it’s fast, but we’re not sure quite yet why we need to switch between two apertures — why not just stick to a fixed f/1.5? We’ll have to do more testing to see the benefits of this mechanical system.
You’re meant to never really notice this change happening when you use the camera, so how does it fare in general use? The S9 took photos quickly, and in the limited time we had, the results looked good. We’ll be experimenting with the camera during Mobile World Congress, so we’ll add more thoughts here once we’ve spent more time with it in varying lighting conditions.
The Galaxy S9 Plus does indeed come with a second lens — a 12-megapixel, f/2.4 telephoto lens. It does the same thing as the second camera on the Galaxy Note 8. You can take Portrait Mode-like photos with the Live Focus tool, where a blur effect is added behind subjects, and you can utilize the 2× optical zoom to take close up photos of remote objects.
It’s a shame the second camera isn’t available on the regular S9, but we’re happy both get the unique mechanical aperture camera. There’s also an important improvement in the camera processing software worth mentioning — multi-frame noise reduction. Tapping the camera shutter icon on the Galaxy S9 now technically captures 12 photos, more than ever before, and this will bring a reduction in graininess or noise by 30 percent. Samsung showed us comparison shots from the S8 and the S9, and the latter had significantly less noise in darker parts of the photo. We’re excited to see how this impacts the overall low-light results from the camera.
The camera app itself has been redesigned to make it easier to swipe through modes, and it functions a lot like the iPhone camera app. If you swipe to the left from the Auto mode, you’ll be introduced to a new category on a Samsung phone: Super slow-motion. Like Sony’s Xperia devices, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus can shoot slow-motion video at up to 960 frames per second. That’s about 32 times slower than real life. Samsung’s version can predict the part of the video you likely want to slow down, and it worked without a hitch when we tried it.
The quality is limited to 720p resolution, and the technology uses machine learning to apply a music track (from a small database) depending on the context of the video. So it can throw in a romantic song if you’re doing a slow-motion video of pouring wine, or something more upbeat if you’re popping a can of confetti. The software will automatically convert these video files into Loop, Swing, or Reverse GIFs so it’s easy to share.
AR Emojis
Yet another new addition is AR Emoji, and sadly it’s a pale imitation of the iPhone X’s Animoji. You can become an animated character, like a bunny, and the camera will loosely track your movements and facial expressions. We say loosely because it didn’t follow details such as raised eyebrows and other expressions as accurately as the iPhone’s True Depth camera. Perhaps it’s because the front camera on the S9 is the same 8-megapixel f/1.7 camera as on the S8, with no fancy 3D depth-sensing features.
A feature called Create My Emoji lets you take a selfie that generates an AR Emoji in your likeness. You can then customize it further, and then use the AR tracking feature to create fun videos as the emoji, just like you can with Animojis.
AR Emoji is sadly a pale imitation of the iPhone X’s Animoji.
The Create My Emoji will also create an animated sticker pack with the AR Emoji version of yourself, and you can use this in any messaging app as it’s all saved in the gallery, or right in the Samsung keyboard. But would you really? We found ourselves unlikely to use these in conversation as they simply don’t look fun to share. Samsung does have a partnership with Disney to add characters you can become through the AR Emoji experience, so hopefully those will look significantly better.
Bixby improvements
Improvements to Bixby are almost entirely limited to Bixby Vision, the camera-specific experience of Samsung’s AI assistant that the company unveiled last year for the S9. For example, image translation has improved to include instant live translation, in which the phone can overlay translated words on a subject without having to take a picture — just point the camera at a foreign phrase you want to understand. It works fairly quickly, and it uses Google Translate’s database. It also translates more languages than before, and can even convert up to 63 currencies in the same way.
Samsung Galaxy S9 Compared To
Cat S61
Asus ZenFone 4
Honor View 10
BlackBerry Motion
Huawei Mate 10 Pro
Honor 7X
Alcatel Idol 5
OnePlus 5T
Moto X4 Android One
ZTE Axon M
HTC U11 Life
Google Pixel 2
Google Pixel 2 XL
LG V30
Samsung Galaxy S8
Other new additions include a new Makeup tool, where you can browse and apply makeup from Sephora and Cover Girl on your face in real time. If you like the look, you can buy makeup directly from the camera app. You can also point the Galaxy S9 camera at food, and it will pull the estimated amount of calories, allowing you to log it directly in S Health. We didn’t get to test a working demo of this, but the makeup tool works quickly and mapped onto faces accurately. This technology is already available through certain services, including Sephora’s own app, but it’s nice to see it built into a phone.
Top-notch specifications, Android 8.0 Oreo
The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 processor, which should improve speed and efficiency by 30 percent, according to the chip giant. Apps opened quickly and the camera performed reliably — we’ll have to do more testing, but this phone will undoubtedly be powerful. Only the S9 Plus will come with 6GB of RAM, however, as the regular S9 packs 4GB. It’s a part of what you get for paying more for the Plus, according to Samsung, including the second camera. Both phones come with 64GB of storage, and a MicroSD card slot lets you add plenty more if you need it.
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
The AMOLED screen hasn’t changed, with both devices packing a Quad HD+ 2,960 × 1,440 pixel resolution; the S9 has a slightly higher pixel density at 570 pixels per inch (PPI), whereas the S9 Plus has a 529 PPI. As usual, the screen gets incredibly bright, and it’s eye-poppingly colorful. It’s sharp, and with the Infinity Display design, it’s easy to get lost staring at it.
Even the battery sizes are the same, with a 3,000mAh capacity on the smaller S9 and a 3,500mAh battery on the S9 Plus. Both phones come equipped with fast wireless charging as usual, as well as fast wired charging.
We would have liked to see more secure face scanning technology.
The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus run Android 8.0 Oreo, but it doesn’t look much different from the software experience on the Galaxy S8 thanks to Samsung’s own user interface. You’ll get access to all the Oreo features including picture-in-picture mode; read our Android 8.0 Oreo guide for all of the details. We’ll take a deeper dive to see what other improvements there are here in the software, but we’re disappointed to see there’s no major improvements to Bixby other than the newly announced camera features. Bixby is still slow to open when you press the Bixby button.
Samsung lets you unlock the phone with your iris or face, as well as with the fingerprint sensor, but it has added a new feature called Intelligent Scan. We didn’t get to test it out, but it mixes both iris and facial scanning technologies, and falls back on the latter if iris recognition doesn’t work. We would have liked to see more secure face scanning technology here that could be adopted by other services, notably banks, but it looks like the iPhone X will continue to maintain that advantage.
Both phones still have an IP68 water-resistance rating, which means you can submerge them underwater up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes.
Price and availability
The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus will be available for pre-order on March 2, with official retail availability starting on March 16. Grabbing the Galaxy S9 from Samsung will set you back $719.99, or $30 a month for 24 months, while the S9 Plus will start from $839.99, or $35 a month for 24 months. If you’re looking to upgrade from an older Samsung Galaxy device, then Samsung is also offering a trade-in program that could see a maximum of $350 taken off the price of a brand new Galaxy S9 or S9 Plus.
Is there a reason to upgrade from the Galaxy S8? Not really, unless the fingerprint sensor bothers you that much, or you hate the camera. If you’re coming from a Galaxy S7, the camera will easily impress, as will everything else. We’ll need to do more testing to see how the phone fares against the current competition.