3D MARK SLING SHOT EXTREME
Bixby can also do translation without needing to snap a picture or clumsily highlight specific words. When it recognized the words, it worked fast and accurately (thanks to an assist from Google Translate), but like Bixby of old, it struggled with long strings of text.
Elsewhere, Bixby is essentially the same. The voice recognition works pretty much as it does on the S8 (which is to say, surprisingly well), and its best use is still as a “do things” assistant rather than as a “know things” assistant. Bixby is definitely improving and Samsung clearly has a vision for it, but we’ll have to wait until version 2.0 of Bixby Voice to see where the roadmap leads.
EXPECTED PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY GAINS
A Galaxy S phone is once again the launching pad for Qualcomm’s latest processor—this time, the Snapdragon 845—and it’s mostly an incremental improvement over the 835. Here are some benchmark scores (higher numbers are better): Galaxy S8: 3378 Galaxy S9: 4551
While we see across-the-board improvements, the 845’s biggest gains are in graphics and power consumption. But even there, they’re not huge increases over the previous generation. Regardless, the S9 married to the Samsung Experience OS provides excellent battery life, with benchmark results consistently at or around 8 hours. That’s not as high as the nine-plus I got with the S8, but realworld use showed the S9 besting most recently released phones with bigger batter-