Samsung’s recently released Galaxy S9 is one of the best Android phone on the market at the moment. It’s major competitors are Apple’s iPhone X and Google’s Pixel 2, however, this will be the case just for few months as both Apple and Google will be releasing their flagships for the year in the fall.
Galaxy S9 is an incremental upgrade over the S8 in terms of hardware. The design is completely unchanged, the only difference users will see between S8 and S9 is the placement of the fingerprint reader. A welcome change, as the S8 was criticized for the placement of the fingerprint reader, that is, beside the camera, an extremely tough spot to reach.
The company has also installed new display panels with improved colours (something that we missed to mention in a previous article). Of course, the phone packs the latest and the greatest internals on the market at the moment (leaving Apple’s chips, lol), that is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chip, faster LTE bands, 4GB of RAM (more for the plus model).
One major change would be the inclusion of dual cameras on the Plus model like the Note 8. Also, the company introduced variable aperture for the Plus model; one of the camera will set the aperture to f/1.5 when shooting in low-light conditions and to f/2.5 when shooting in well-lit conditions.
The company is also taking on Apple’s Animoji with its own creation named AR Emoji. Similar to the iPhone X, the Galaxy S9 can create emojis unique to the user by using the front camera. However, AR Emoji is not as sophisticated as Apple’s because it doesn’t feature extra sensors that can track user’s movements (facial expressions).
The Galaxy S9 also features facial and iris scanning for unlocking the phone. Just like AR Emoji, these biometric features are not as good as Apple’s, as the S9 lacks the extra sensors.
The Galaxy S9 is not a major improvement over the S8. If you are already using a Galaxy S8, then there’s no need to upgrade unless you’d like to play with the S9’s improved low-light imaging features. For non-S8 users, the Galaxy S9 is a solid smartphone but its not perfect, and if you think you’ll be okay with few of its quirks, don’t think twice. But if you think that these quirks are quite major then you should look elsewhere, maybe Google.