The Samsung Galaxy S9. It’s finally here – and Samsung claims that they have reimagined the camera. Since it is a brand new generation of flagship smartphone by Samsung, they’ve equipped the new Galaxy S9 with the latest and greatest hardware and software, too. Featuring nifty features like variable aperture and quirky ones like AR emoji, the Galaxy S9 has something for everyone.
Let’s take a deep dive into what the new and groundbreaking benchmarks that the Samsung Galaxy S9 is going to set.
Unboxing
In terms of the packaging design and overall look and feel, it’s no different from the previous generation. It still has the embossed blue “S9” printed on the sleeve which is slid out from the top or bottom to reveal the box.
The box – still the same as the the S8 era – is black and has the name “Samsung” embossed on it. Very minimalist and feels highly premium.
Opening up the box reveals a similar packaging design as the previous generation. The layout and all the included accessories are pretty much the same, too. Except for the included case. The Galaxy Note8 that we reviewed here came with a hard shell case – but the Galaxy S9 came with a smoked TPU case instead.
Speaking of the TPU case, it’s packaged in the little box on the top of the box. Yes, I know – there are many boxes here. Boxes within boxes. It’s elaborate – but tidy.
[nextpage title=”Display”]
I’m pretty sure all of us have heard and have a high chance to at least see smartphones from a year ago that has this elongated screen. Samsung started the trend with the Galaxy S8 that has an 18:5.9 aspect ratio display and dubbed it the Infinity Display. Since then, other manufacturers have been following Samsung.
Samsung does have the upper hand this time as they manage to up the ante by equipping the Galaxy S9 with a new display. DisplayMate, world’s leading evaluator of screens, said that the Galaxy S9 has “the best performing smartphone display that we have ever tested,” and has awarded the device its highest-ever “Excellent A+” grade.
Let’s not look at specs and alphabets and look back at the screen. The Galaxy S9 does indeed have a much brighter screen, and somewhat a little more reflective than the previous generation. The display now peaks at 1,130 nits, which is 10% brighter than its predecessor.
That translates to real-world use case as well. The first time I booted up the Galaxy S9, I realized how bright the display is. I have to tune it down to about 20% while on auto brightness. As for the size and resolution, it sports a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED 18.5:9 display with 2960×1440 resolution, scalable down to 1080p or 720p. Obviously, it’s a tradeoff between performance and crispness of images on the screen. More on this later.
[nextpage title=”Design”]
As for the design, Samsung didn’t change much when it comes to the physical shape and feel. It’s similar to what we have for the Galaxy S8, and it’s no surprise that many people will mistaken the brand new Galaxy S9 for the S8 or vice versa.
Samsung didn’t fix what’s not broken – and they did fix the fingerprint scanner location. It’s now located at the center, just below the camera. The heart rate sensor remains on the side of the camera, but that’s alright.
The buttons are still around the same location and still feels magnificent to press on. The left side is where the volume rocker and the Bixby button are found, whereas the power button is located on the right side.
None of these buttons are textured so it’ll be quite easy to accidentally press on the wrong button – especially the Bixby key.
The smoked TPU case that Samsung included is a boon, too. It has these little dots at the back to prevent the case from making direct contact with the Galaxy S9’s glass back. It might seem trivial, but this is also to prevent scratches. Also, the TPU case has a smoked color to it, so it’s not that prominent when it gets dirty or starts yellowing.
While on the subject of the TPU case, the case accentuates the keys to be a little more prominent so it’s even easier to press.
The entire Galaxy S9 weighs only 160 grams whereas the case adds another 17 grams to the scale.
[nextpage title=”Connectivity”]
The Galaxy S9, being a flagship smartphone that it is, sports only the best of the best when it comes to connectivity. It didn’t differ much from last year’s flagship since no new development in connectivity has been made.
It still has Bluetooth 5.0, you can still connect to different Bluetooth speakers at the same time and play music together.
Of course, being the lovable people like they are, Samsung also included the 3.5mm audio jack beside the USB-C port. Thank you Samsung!
While we’re at the bottom of the phone, it’s also worth noting that instead of having just a few holes for the speaker grill, Samsung gauged out quite a lot of space internally for the speakers. They just look like two deep holes.
Tuned by AKG for better bass since it has a larger chamber perhaps? And yes, the speakers do sound fantastic this time around. There’s an option to enable Dolby Atmos too. The option to enable it is hidden pretty deep in the settings menu, but there’s a shortcut key on the shortcuts bar in the notifications. I suggest you to long-press on the Dolby Atmos to quickly access to its settings instead.
Also, as per usual, the Galaxy S9 has a single dedicated Nano SIM slot and another Nano SIM/microSD combo slot.
[nextpage title=”Camera”]
This is where the first major difference between the Galaxy S9 and S9+ comes. The Galaxy S9 only has a single camera at the rear. With the Galaxy Note8 that we reviewed here sporting a dual-camera system, why doesn’t the S9 have dual-cameras too? Maybe it’s due to the engineering challenges to cramp that many components into the already compact Galaxy S9.
Whichever the case may be, we did discuss back here that dual-cameras don’t necessarily produce better images. Dual-cameras can provide more information for a single image or offers more flexibility with the second camera, which either has a zoom lens or a wide-angle lens.
The Galaxy S9 does have a trick up its sleeve. It is the first smartphone to have variable aperture – and that means a lot. It can switch between f/1.5 or f/2.4 according to the lighting mode, or you can change it manually in Pro mode. Technically, it’s not variable aperture – more like binary aperture since it can only be in one of the two aperture sizes. f/1.5 has a larger opening, hence allowing more light to enter. This is especially useful for low-light shots without prolonging the shutter speed which will cause blurriness.
Here’s the spec for the cameras on the Galaxy S9:
- Rear-camera
- 12MP sensor
- f/1.5 or f/2.4 aperture
- 1/2.5-inch sensor
- 1.4μm pixel size
- Dual-pixel PDAF
- OIS
- Selfie camera
- 8MP
- Has autofocus
The thing is, I tried to capture the aperture changing to and from f/1.5 and f/2.4 – but the transition was still too fast at 960fps. I managed to capture, however, the OIS zeroing in on the camera module after the aperture transition. Interesting find, I’d say.
Now, how does the Galaxy S9’s camera perform? Let’s take a look at the pictures below.
The full album of all the images taken are available on our Flickr account.
Rear-camera
While looking at these images, there are a few points that are quite apparent. Firstly, the images taken are really sharp. I mean, they really do stand out. Individual strands of eyelash can be seen, and I took that image at a mamak at night. It was a random shot, too. The Galaxy S9 took that image effortlessly, and the skin tones were on point.
While on the subject of colors, the images produced by the Galaxy S9 is looking pretty on-point too. There are some indoor shots where the image is just overexposed by a tad bit too much. Other than that, excellent camera for the to use and post stuff on social media.
As for low-light shots, Samsung bumps up the ISO by quite a lot to maintain a rather low shutter speed. It still looks great in most cases, but I found out that a night city skyline shot on auto mode just doesn’t look good. Noise is all around the transition where the city lights fade into darkness.
Dual-PDAF does help to speed its focusing time as well. Perhaps it will need the second camera to really help pinpoint its focusing even faster.
Selfie camera
I’m not much of a selfie person here – but for all I can say, the camera does perform really well in low-light condition. The picture here is taken when I was on the street at night. There’s a lamp post about 100 meters away from me, and this is the image that I got.
The place is actually a lot darker than what is shown in the image, by the way.
Camera UI
When it comes to the camera UI, it’s actually very intuitive – most of it, at least. The basic features are presented nicely and cleanly.
Everything that’s needed is laid out in this menu right here, and you can actually manually change the aperture through its nested options. It does keep everything clean, but needs a few more taps to get to those options that you want.
In auto mode, everything is just as simple as it can get. Just a bottom row of quick settings, that’s it. Samsung has differentiated things well enough to keep the advanced features at a place where normal users won’t get confused with.
Other camera features
Samsung also promote their new slow-mo feature a lot. They’re not the first to have such a feature on a smartphone, and their implementation is somewhat intuitive to use. It does take a bit of exploration and getting used to.
There are actually two modes to the slow-mo feature here. Firstly, you can have it capture multiple slow-mo points within a single video shot, or have only one slow-mo point in a single video.
By default, capturing slow-mo will need you to frame your shot within a little square frame. When the Galaxy S9 detects motion in the square frame, it’ll automatically record at the native 960fps. Samsung, being the genius that they are, included a “manual” mode for the slow-mo feature too.
It’s not exactly a “manual mode” per se – more like a “capture slow-mo whenever you like” mode. With just the press of a button, you can record slow-mo according to your will. Though, it does need a bit of practice in timing to capture slow-mo at the right moment.
The variable aperture on the other hand, can be changed accordingly while in manual mode. If it’s in auto mode, the aperture changes between f/1.5 and f/2.4 according to the lighting condition – obviously, but has about a 1~2 second delay before the aperture changes.
It’s also worth noting that by default, the camera “rests” or “idles” at f/1.5.
Let’s not forget about AR Emoji either. It’s a fun little feature where it transports your face into a set of emojis in GIF format so you can share them with your friends on social media.
[nextpage title=”Software”]
When it comes to the overall look and feel of the software, the brand new Samsung Experience 9.0 brings a lot of smaller quality of life improvements under the hood. Now, whenever I install some apps that support the app twinning (known as Dual Messenger here), a notification will appear asking if I want to clone another copy of the app for my second account.
Since the fingerprint scanner is moved to a more appropriate position, I find that the “swipe fingerprint scanner to show or hide notifications” become useful. You’ll have to enable the fingerprint scanner gestures for that.
Speaking of the fingerprint scanner, the Galaxy S9 now has a total of 4 different methods to unlock the phone. You have the usual password or pattern unlock, fingerprint, the iris scanner, and also face scanning. It’s only natural to add face scanning unlock since there is an emphasis on “3D face scanning” tech for the past few months.
Also, Samsung now has something called Intelligent Scan where you can unlock the phone by using both your iris and face data together. There is about a second delay, from my tests – a picture can’t fool the Galaxy S9 to unlock. If the place is too dark for face scanning, the Galaxy S9 will bump up the brightness a little so that it illuminates your face for the face scanning to work.
[nextpage title=”Performance”]
Of course, the flagship smartphone here screams top-of-the-line hardware with flagship performance to boot. The Galaxy S9 is equipped with these hardware:
- 10nm process technology
- Exynos 9810 Octa chipset
- 4x 2.7GHz + 4x 1.8GHz octa-core processor
- Mali-G72 MP18 graphics
- 4GB RAM
- 64GB storage
The new 10nm process technology here means an improvement in battery life, efficiency, and performance. Learn more about why it matters here.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the benchmarks.
Looking at the benchmarks above, the Galaxy S9 is obviously the highest in our charts.
While playing games, I’m surprised that Honkai Impact 3 was suggesting me to run that game at medium settings instead. Screw that. I bumped it all to the highest settings at 60fps, and wow. Everything is gorgeous yet buttery smooth. On many phones, even tilting the phone to change the 3D parallax effect will be jittery – but not on the Galaxy S9.
Benchmark scores aside, the user experience is just magnificent. Everything is just smooth.
[nextpage title=”Battery”]
For those who are already eyeing on the battery, the number itself may not sound magnificent. “Only 3,000mAh?”, you might think. Now, the Galaxy S9 does have a few specialties up its sleeve.
Firstly, its SoC is manufactured with 10nm process technology. In short, that means better efficiency and even better performance. Learn more about it here.
Secondly, the Galaxy S9 – just like its predecessor – can switch between resolutions. The change is applied system-wide and not application-specific, so the it will downscale from its 1440p resolution down to 1080p or 720p. In number of raw pixels, downscaling from 1440p to 1080p results in a 56.25% drop – but how much does it affect your battery life in everyday use?
We have the answer here.
Charger
Samsung did include the usual adaptive fast charger too. 9V 1.67A. In charging speed, it can reach from about 15% to 100% in about 1.5 hours. Pretty good. It does reach 75% mark in less than than an hour. Now that’s good.
Here’s a little bonus data – if you turn off fast charging, the charging curve is pretty much the same overall, just that the time is obviously prolonged. It took about 1.8 hours to charge it up to 100% – which is about 1 hour and 48 minutes.
Just like last year’s Samsung charger, it can collapse to become flatter too. Easier for transportation and for travels.
[nextpage title=”Wrapping up the Samsung Galaxy S9 review”]
Here goes – the Samsung Galaxy S9. It’s Samsung’s top-tier smartphone of 2018 with Samsung’s greatest offering. Its SoC is made from their latest 10nm process technology and packed with speedy UFS 2.1 flash chips. It’s also the first smartphone to have a variable aperture. It changes between the two aperture sizes so quickly that even the 960fps slow-motion can’t capture how it happened.
With that said, the battery life on the Galaxy S9 is… just like before – mediocre. I do wish that Samsung can sacrifice its thinness by just a little and equip it with a large battery. Perhaps a 4,000mAh battery, please?
On the question of “should I get the Galaxy S9 or Galaxy S9+?”, it truly depends on you. The major differences between both these phones are the camera, battery, and obviously the screen size. The Galaxy S9+ has a larger battery, and that also compensates for its larger screen size. That leaves us with the camera. The Galaxy S9+ has dual-cameras, whereas the Galaxy S9 has a single one. The Galaxy S9+’s second camera – the one with a zoom lens – offers much more flexibility, and we hope to do a separate review on the differences for these two phones in the near future.
Until then, the Samsung Galaxy S9 is priced at RM3,299 and it’s available in Midnight Black, Coral Blue (the one we have here), and the all new, beautiful Lilac Purple. Honestly, I’m surprised by the price as Samsung retained its previous pricing throughout the entire Galaxy S9 family.
Where to buy?
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
