Samsung: back without a bang

Impressive cameras define the latest crop of top-end smartphones

If you haven’t heard the word “bokeh” before, you’ll certainly hear it a lot this year. It’s the Japanese word for that artistic blur in photographs where the subject is in focus and the background isn’t. Until recently, you needed a fast lens with a wide aperture to achieve the shallow depth of field that creates the background blur. But few of us carry digital SLR cameras any more, or have the requisite lenses. However, we all have smartphones — and the camera is once again the stand-out feature in this year’s crop of top-end handsets.

This week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung launched its Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, with a particular focus on their impressive cameras.

The S9 (with a 5.8-inch screen) has a camera that can adjust its aperture to f/1.5, for low light, or f/2.4, for bright conditions. The S9 Plus (6.2inch screen) has two cameras on the back; the secondary lens is a telephoto or zoom lens. The difference in focal lengths between the lenses allows the phone’s software to mimic the bokeh effect and lend an air of instant professionalism to any portrait.

Samsung has retained the beautiful curvature of the previous models’ screens but repositioned the fingerprint reader on the back to under the camera, so you don’t put your finger on the lens when trying to unlock it.

I am a big fan of this reader on the back of the phone (which Huawei and Xiaomi also do) because it is a natural position to place your finger and the easiest way to unlock the phone.

Samsung’s S9 launch is part of the continuing success story for the world’s largest smartphone maker, which seemed to have irretrievably damaged its brand with the disaster that was 2016’s exploding Note 7 battery. Last year’s Galaxy S8 constituted arguably the greatest reversal of fortune in the cellular industry.

Samsung appears not only to have turned things around, but it continues to build on last year’s success with a raft of impressive features, not least of which is the DEX Station add-on that turns the S9 into a desktop computer with a screen and keyboard.

This week Barcelona played host to an extravaganza of phone launches and announcements that set the tone for the rest of the year.

Huawei, which dominated the conference last year with a huge pavilion and an equally huge flagship P10 phone launch, announced its very small, very slim Matebook X Pro. Clearly designed to compete against Apple’s Macbook, it’s an impressive device that marks an interesting entry for the world’s third-biggest phone maker into a competitive market.

Probably the most nostalgic launch this week was from Nokia, which last year reintroduced a new version of the legendary 3310 that defined the early days of cellphones. This year the Finnish company relaunched its iconic 8810 “banana” phone, with its characteristic sliding cover.

The more things change, the more they stay the same . . . but with better cameras.

Samsung’s S9 launch is part of its continuing success story after the disaster that was the exploding Note 7 battery