Business Standard

Click away, even in lowlight

Though not a revolution­ary upgrade, Samsung’s latest offering ticks all the boxes for a flagship phone,

- writes Abhik Sen

Iam a foodie and while I don’ t look like Bibendum, the Michelin Man, I’m getting there. But I’ ve been eating healthy for the past five years( or so I thought ), but I was sure I had to cut down on calories. And here I have a contraptio­n that could give me approximat­e calorific values of the food I was about to eat, just by looking at it. I am, of course, talking about the Samsung Galaxy S 9+(~64,900 for 64 GB ), the Korean giant’ s latest flag ship.

Using Bixby Vision, I was able to find out the calorific values even before I had a morsel; thus I could calculate the calorific value of my food intake and, in fact, plan for it. Ofcourse, it might have strange names for Indian dishes( such as dal) but it gets the job done. Nice! And this delightful snap per had a food mode, which my wife loved to use to click pictures of her culinary creations. Nirvana in a phone?

Not quite. The new phone looked a dead ringer for last year’ s flag ship. I flipped it over to find the 12- MP dual camera vertical setup, with the finger print scanner just below it. But the phone itself isa finger print magnet.

The phone started up pretty fast, and after the customary sign-ins, I was good togo. The familiar Samsung interface seems to have a little less bloat ware as default, but Bixby, in the limited time I used the phone, seemed to beam ore polished version than before. After setting up Intelligen­t Scan (which includes both iris scan and face scan ), I tried it out indoors as well as in direct sunlight. It seemed more accurate than last year’ s. The brilliant 18.5:9 screen looks bright and punchy and, if one doesn’ t like it, one can change the screen mode. After downloadin­g games such as

Asphalt 8: Airborne, I started playing in Sam sung’ s game mode, with many apps running in the background, without any lag. While not extremely loud, the sound was rich, and despite playing in landscape mode, the sound didn’ t come out muffled.

I tried clicking a few pictures in low light— the wide-angle camer a comes with mechanical apertures off /1.5 and f /2.4 The camera lived up to Sam sung’ s reputation as the king of low-light photograph­y.

The secret sauce in the primary camera is slow motion: Set it up and it automatica­lly captures the movement in slow motion— fore xamplea water balloon splatterin­g on the wall; and it can be played back multiple ways and set as a wallpaper. A cave at: Youneed steady hands to shoot this.

The 8 MPs elfie camera seems dated but once you invoke ARE moj is, you’ll be laughing your head off. There area lot of effects to play with, though, truth be told, I wasn’ t very happy with my Xbox-ishavatar— the one ont he iPhoneX was more accurate. But for those who love staring into their phone, this gimmick will work. For the 24 hours that I used the phone, I could get through the day without charging, with regular usage.

The Samsung Galaxy S 9+ ticks all the boxes for a flag ship, and it excels as a camera phone, but if you’ re already using the S8, you won’t find it a revolution­ary upgrade.

 ??  ?? Samsung GalaxyS9+
Samsung GalaxyS9+

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from India