Shedding light on Samsung Galaxy S9+
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. 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 chargingfriendly USB-C connection. 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-byside comparison with the Google Pixel 2 smartphone, was particularly impressive capturing a darkened room. 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.
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.
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 is even more useful and personal than Apple’s iPhone X effort. If its high price doesn’t put you off, the S9+ could be a solid investment.