Spending a week with the Samsung Galaxy S9+

This time Samsung’s flagship smartphones come with a tricky problem — not a lot is new and even less is “reimagined”. And yet everything is quite excellent.

What it boils down to is that there aren’t many dramatic reasons for users of the S8 series to go rushing to buy the S9 or S9+ and certainly not users of the Note 8. Anyone with earlier Samsung phones or anyone trying to decide between one expensive flagship and another has several strong reasons to consider one of these new devices.

Classic design

One of these is surely the design. I have the S9+ and it’s a design I’m familiar with: very classy, and I don’t find myself hankering for another look yet. It’s taken a lot of fine-tuning to get to this point, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s good to go for another year.

Two new colours, Lilac Purple and Coral BIue bring a breath of fresh air to our world of black, gold and silver slabs. In real life these are much better looking than their photographs. I’m delighted to be turning heads, including my own, with a beautiful lilac unit and freely admit to having done more than my fair share of showing off.

The ergonomics of the S9+ are pretty good considering its 6.2-inch screen. It’s perfectly easy to hold but explore the type of case you need carefully. I’m using the transparent soft back skin supplied, but opt for a textured case for greater safety though it will cover up the beauty of the phone.

Blazing performance

In India, the S9+ doesn’t come with the new Snapdragon 845, which is what you’ll see on other high end phones this year, but has Samsung’s own equivalent, the Exynos 9810. The phone feels very fast and fluid and snappy. In comparing everyday tasks with the extremely fast iPhone X, I find them neck-to-neck. I don’t expect this device to suffer from lag and sluggishness as time goes on if recent Samsung flagships are anything to go by. I have been using the Note 8 rather heavily and despite being topped up with over 300 apps, the device hasn’t slowed at all.

In terms of day-to-day use, the S9+ is as Samsung as ever, if you’re familiar with their phones. I found no glitches in using apps and it performed blazingly fast at all times. It doesn’t, however, run on the very latest Android Oreo, coming in at 8.0 and not 8.1. If you know Samsung phones, you’ll know that they’re slow with updates and that this is a trade-off for the features you get with their own software. However, when Google moves up to Android P, there’s no telling when it would come to this device.

I don’t quite hold with Samsung’s tagline that the camera has been ‘reimagined’. It’s certainly a fantastic camera with tonnes of features to play with. It needs very good light for some of these, but for low light and indoor photos, you can totally rely on it giving you well lit and noise-free images. This is because it switches to an f/1.5 aperture in low light and captures more detail. In brighter light, the aperture changes to f/2.4 else the f/1.5 setting would lead to things whiting out. This is the new capability that Samsung is referring to when it talks of reimagining. In good light, the camera is as good as ever and comes up with crisp vivid photos, sometimes with colours a little too strong. If you’re a photo enthusiast, you have a Pro mode with which to tweak settings and play around with shooting in different conditions. The camera’s fun features are not be forgotten either.

AR emojis, yay or nay

Everyone’s favourite description of the AR Emojis, the cartoonish versions of your selfies that are supposed to be endless fun, is ‘creepy’. I’ll be a little more charitable and say they’re amusing for all of five minutes before you likely move on to never using them again. Very few people’s emojis look like them, as mine didn’t. I would be happy to forgive that were it not for a certain grotesqueness they seem to have. On top of that, they’re not very responsive to movements and look stiff. All that goes towards making the AR Emojis a little difficult to like, even if there are some 18 variations and a bunch of customisations to play with.

Luckily there’s something else to play with and that’s Super Slow Mo. Let’s give Sony its proper due for having come up with that. It can really be fun provided you shoot in good light — good daylight as the camera doesn’t like artificial lighting in this mode. You also have to be careful with positioning and hold very steady. Using super slow mo needs a bit of practice and I struggled a bit with it, finding myself missing a regular slow motion mode. There are two options for shooting slow: one is to let the camera detect movement and go into slow mode, and the other is to select manually. I found the latter more reliable. You’ll be the best judge of how often you’re likely to use this feature and decide if it’s worth the upgrade or purchase. It’s great for what Samsung calls the moment within the moment. Something like a water-filled balloon landing, a cat jumping gracefully to land on all fours, or a baby bouncing up and down in sheer joy.

Samsung hasn’t done much to change its front camera, unfortunately. It always did and still does take very softened ‘botoxed’ selfies that are just quite removed from reality. Everyone likes to look good in photographs, but perhaps not as good as a piece of sponge cake.

Bixby, report

Bixby, Samsung’s virtual assistant has a button of its own on the top left of the phone. I sometimes touch that instead of the volume if I’m not looking. You can set the Bixby button to avoid triggering the assistant, whch responds to a voice command and can also be accessed by swiping right on the home screen, but disabling the button makes it do nothing at all since you can’t programme it to do anything else. That’s a waste of a whole button on devices that have so little space for hardware additions. Samsung should have allowed users to at least turn it into a camera trigger.

You can also take an underwater selfie, because the phone is water resistant . I’ve put it into a fish bowl several times (without the fish) and given it a bit of a wash (without soap) now and then. The 3,500 mAh battery finishes off a little earlier than I expected it to. By the time I’m ready for bed, I definitely have to plug it in. And that’s with moderate usage that doesn’t include much video watching or gaming. Of course, it does charge at high speed but I expected to have about 40 per cent leftover by the night. The Infinity Display is a pleasure to look at and now there’s finally much better sound via the stereo speakers.

I would’t hesitate to recomend either of the two Galaxy S9 phones for anyone looking for the top of the line Android smartphone, but I would advise that users of the S8 and Note 8 skip this one unless the new colours or the extra few features on the camera are decision makers.

COMMENT NOW