Samsung Galaxy S9: Australian hands-on review of Samsung’s potential iPhone X assassin
REVIEW: The Samsung Galaxy S9 is significantly bigger. It dwarfs its Apple rival — the iPhone X. But while there are new features, the new smartphone has its downside.
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STOP me if you’ve heard this one before.
There’s a new flagship smartphone coming out with a face scanner, a dual camera with one lens stacked on top of the other, and animated emojis you can personalise and send to friends.
If you think it sounds like the Apple iPhone X, you’d be right.
And if you think it sounds like the new Samsung Galaxy S9+, you’d also be right.
It would be wrong to assume that Samsung copied these features, however, or even that one of these flagship phones could ever be confused with the other.
Holding the Samsung Galaxy S9+ in your hand, the differences are evident.
Most obviously, Samsung’s new top phone is significantly bigger. It dwarfs its Apple rival with a 6.2-inch screen made slightly larger this year by a subtle whittling of its corners.
MORE: Samsung releases the next iPhone X killer
It also retains the now recognisable Samsung design, with curved glass down either side, and it keeps some of the elements Apple has ditched or disregarded. This phone does have a standard headphone jack, for example, will support an extra 400GB of storage, and continues to embrace the charging-friendly USB-C connection.
Samsung has even added extra volume and Dolby Atmos certification to its two speakers, retained water resistance, issued live foreign language translations for its Bixby voice assistant, and offered purple, the Pantone colour of 2018, as an exterior option.
But can Samsung really beat Apple in the features it has in common? We briefly tested its biggest additions at a Mobile World Congress event to find out.
BETTER CAMERA
Smartphones live and die by the quality of their cameras, and the Galaxy S9+ photographic upgrades give it the best chance of an extended existence.
Samsung has not only rearranged the two 12-megapixel cameras on the back of this smartphone — they’re now stacked on top of one another and no longer within smudging distance of the rear fingerprint sensor — but the company changed the amount of light the cameras see.
The wide-angle lens now has two light sensitivity settings — one f2.4 aperture and a second f1.9 aperture to capture photographs in incredibly low light.
Samsung says this allows in 28 per cent more light than its Galaxy S8 and, in a side-by-side comparison with the Google Pixel 2 smartphone, was particularly impressive capturing a darkened room.
It’s also worth noting the camera on the smaller and cheaper Galaxy S9 will also feature two aperture settings, though not a second, telephoto camera.
The Samsung camera’s other big addition is Super Slow-Mo that can create a mesmerising six-second video from just 0.2 seconds of fast-moving action.
When in the right mode, the Galaxy S9+ captures and slows down the action automatically, and presents the results in gif form for easy sharing.
It can be tricky to capture just the right effect, however, so this is one we want to test further.
There are plenty of additional camera modes worth a longer look too, including one feature Australia won’t get at launch.
Called ‘Food’ mode, it promises to scan, recognise, and estimate the calories in the food on your plate.
It has a touch of ‘Not Hotdog’ about it for fans of the Silicon Valley TV series, but could be seriously handy if it works and when it launches in Australia.
AR EMOJI
You probably can’t justify spending $1499 on a new smartphone just to get your own emoji but it’s certainly one for the ‘pro’ column.
While the Apple iPhone X offers a host of cartoon heads you can animate, Samsung scans 100 points on your face to create a cartoon likeness, and then lets you personalise it.
Strangely, my spectacles and fringe proved an issue for the initial 3D emoji scan — you have to take everything off your face for it to work — but it created an impressive caricature after I did so.
You can add new spectacles, change your emoji’s hairstyle, and pick an outfit for your virtual self, and save 18 expressions to share in messages or on social media afterwards.
You can also animate your emoji in a video, while the S9’s facial scanner tracks the subtle movements of your eyebrows and mouth. It won’t let you move your arms, however, which could be a tough one for expressive gesticulators.
FACE SCANS
Samsung is no longer the only face-scanning smartphone maker in town. Apple nailed that part of its iPhone X and, perhaps in response, Samsung is making what sounds like a handy change in the Galaxy S9.
While Samsung’s iris scanner is ultra secure, it also requires raising the phone to your eyes in an unnatural pose.
By comparison, Samsung’s facial scanner is a lot easier to use but a lot less secure.
The company will combine the two in a new feature called Intelligent Scan that will rely on the more convenient facial scanner to unlock access to the phone and the iris scanner to unlock access to more secure parts of the phone, such as banking apps.
Combined with better placement of its fingerprint scanner, the Galaxy S9+ might strike an even balance between security and convenience.
POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS
If you didn’t like the look of the Galaxy S7 or S8, this smartphone won’t do it for you either. Samsung’s newest flagship smartphone is virtually indistinguishable from its predecessors, unless you look at the cameras on the back or invest in the striking lilac model.
Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby does get some useful additions in this phone, including immediate foreign language translations using the camera, though it’s still not as accessible or easy to use as its rivals.
This phone also lacks the rumoured in-screen fingerprint scanner we’ve seen from one Chinese manufacturer, as well as the long-promised, futuristic, fold-up screen, and it matches the Note 8 for the most expensive Samsung smartphone to date.
SHOULD YOU BUY IT?
The Samsung Galaxy S9+ shows enough promise to warrant serious investigation if you’re in the market for a new smartphone.
Its camera, at least on paper, has the potential to shake up mobile photography, and its AR Emoji are even more useful and personal than Apple’s iPhone X effort.
Improving its facial scanner, boosting its on-board memory to 256GB, and keeping the headphone jack should also win fans.
If its high price doesn’t put you off, the S9+ could be a solid investment and the new bar for Android smartphones.
The Samsung Galaxy S9 is available for pre-sale on February 26 and out on March 16.
Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Samsung.
Originally published as Samsung Galaxy S9: Australian hands-on review of Samsung’s potential iPhone X assassin