Samsung Galaxy S9
The spectacular Lilac Purple finish and improved camera are the stars of the redesign, but battery life disappoints
SCORE PRICE £616 (£739 inc VAT) from samsung.com
For the Galaxy S9 to stand out in an ocean of equally competent Android smartphones in 2018, Samsung knew that its camera had to be the best. To make that happen, it’s pulled out all the stops. First, by fitting it with an f/1.5 aperture camera – the brightest aperture ever seen on a smartphone – and second, by implementing dual aperture, so the camera can adapt to different light conditions. By combining this with a new 12-shot multi-frame noise reduction, Samsung hoped to maintain its position as the manufacturer of the world’s best smartphone for yet another year.
On paper, it’s a winner. That aperture is a huge 28% brighter than the primary camera on last year’s already impressive Galaxy S8. At the launch, Samsung demonstrated this by pointing the phone at a box full of flowers lit at a lower light intensity than 1 lux (0.87 to be precise) and comparing the results with those achieved by a Google Pixel 2 XL. Unsurprisingly, given that this was set up to make the S9 look good, the results were superb, with the flowers looking dark in the Pixel image but clearly distinguishable on the S9. The noise levels and colour retention were good, too.
How well does it work in the real world? In some ways, brilliantly. It continued to perform superbly in all conditions and particularly in low light, capturing colours with uncanny vibrancy and managing to keep noise at bay. Meanwhile, in good light, the camera captured sharp details across the board with automatic exposures, in general, judged to perfection.
But this doesn’t appear to be due to the larger f/1.5 aperture. In fact, in some circumstances I found that in Auto mode using the f/1.5 setting the camera would trigger the use of a higher ISO level than the same scene captured in Pro mode with f/2.4 selected.
The dual aperture appears to be more effective. With larger apertures, you typically see a fall-off in sharpness towards the edges of the frame and that’s very much in evidence here. You have to look closely but once zoomed in it’s clear that, in f/1.5 mode, shots are far softer at the top, bottom, left and right edges of the frame than they are in f/2.4.
The narrower aperture also stops the phone from overexposing images in strong light. But note that it isn’t about adding creative options such as changing the depth of field; the difference between f/1.5 and f/2.4 on a camera with a sensor this small is minimal when it comes to depth of field.
Overall, despite the slightly bizarre and inconsistent implementation of the bigger f/1.5 aperture, the Samsung Galaxy S9 has an excellent camera and, once you take into account the quality of the video, I’d say it was better than the Google Pixel 2.
Video star
The Galaxy S9 can, of course, record in 4K resolution at 60fps, but it can’t record this fully stabilised like the iPhone X can. The footage looks great, though. It’s crisp and highly detailed, and there’s little of the focus hunting that so badly afflicts other rivals, such as the Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
There’s also the new ultra-slowmotion mode, capable of capturing 720p resolution at a frankly silly 960fps. This is fun, but if that’s your bag, check out Sony’s latest Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact phones, which have trumped Samsung Galaxy S9 phones by doing the same but at Full HD resolution.
To be fair, Samsung does implement ultra-slow-mo slightly better than Sony. Acknowledging the difficulty of capturing precisely the right moment in the limited 0.2 seconds you get to record your slow-motion footage, Samsung places a yellow motion-detection box on-screen that you can move wherever you want in the frame. The camera only goes into slow-motion
“There are new colours to accompany traditional black – Coral Blue and Lilac Purple, which catches the light beautifully”
mode when movement is detected in the box, making it far easier to set up shots.
Finally, Samsung has added extra software to allow the 8-megapixel f/1.7 front-facing camera to capture your expressions and create animated, personalised emoji – dubbed AR Emoji by Samsung. This is a bit like Apple’s Animoji, the difference being that Samsung creates its emoji in the form of animated GIFs so you can more easily view them on other platforms. The places you can use them is still limited, though. I was able to get them to work in the phone’s standard messaging app, in Facebook and Twitter, but not WhatsApp or Slack.
Tweak city
Aside from the headline-grabbing camera, there are no major overhauls here, but the incremental improvements are all welcome. The bezels above and below the screen are slightly slimmer than before so the screen fills even more of the front. There are new colours to accompany traditional black – Coral Blue and the lovely Lilac Purple, which catches the light beautifully. It’s much nicer than any pink or rose gold phone I’ve seen.
The Galaxy S9 is slightly heavier than the S8, but only by 8g. It’s also a millimetre shorter, 0.6mm wider and 0.5mm thicker. None of these numbers will make any difference to the way the phone feels in your pocket.
What is likely to make a difference to the way you use the phone is the location of the fingerprint reader: Samsung has repositioned its fingerprint reader module from beside the camera lens to below it. But, and call me pernickety if you like, I prefer fingerprint readers to be larger and inset more than this one is.
Otherwise, the phone retains all the features of the previous Samsung flagship. It’s IP68 dust- and waterresistant, it still has the Bixby button on the left (Bixby has a couple of minor improvements here, including live language translation), the SIM tray has space for a microSD card so you can expand the internal storage by up to 400GB, and there’s still a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Speed demon
Inevitably, the Samsung Galaxy S9 is quicker than the S8 and this is courtesy of its faster Exynos 9810
processor. This is an octa-core chip, built on a 10nm process in the same forge as the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (only in the US does the Galaxy S9 run an 845). The Exynos 9810 comprises two quad-core CPUs, one running at 2.9GHz, the other “low-power” core running at 1.9GHz. This is backed up by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.
Just like the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, this results in significantly quicker performance than last year ( see the graphs, right). The Apple iPhone X still has a substantial lead, but Samsung has put clear space between it and its nearest Android competitors.
While performance is certainly nippy, battery life is disappointing. The Galaxy S9’s capacity remains at the same as the S8 at 3,000mAh. It comfortably lasts a day, and a little bit into the next, but it falls a long way short of phones such as the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which I found lasted almost two days at a time.
In our video-rundown test, the S9 kept going for a reasonably respectable 14hrs 23mins, but this is two-and-a-half hours short of the S8’s performance from last year, and well short of the 20hrs 52mins returned by the far cheaper OnePlus 5T.
Display of power
The display is just as good as ever. As with the S8, the S9 includes a 1,440 x 2,960 18.5:9 aspect ratio screen with an AMOLED panel, with multiple resolutions and colour profiles to choose from in the phone’s display software settings.
The default is FHD+ (1,080 x 2,220) and Adaptive but you can drop the resolution to 720 x 1,440 and change the colour profile to Basic (sRGB), AMOLED Cinema (DCI-P3) or AMOLED Photo (Adobe RGB). In each of these modes the screen returned coverage percentages of 99.3% and 98.8%. That’s as good as it gets.
Colour accuracy is decent, contrast is effectively perfect and maximum brightness is stupendous. I recorded 992cd/m2 with a 10% white patch displayed on a black background and with a full white screen the brightness peaked at 465cd/m2. Note that, as usual with Samsung devices, you’ll only see maximum brightness if you leave the phone in auto-brightness mode. In manual mode, the screen peaked at a far lower 302cd/m2.
Minor upgrades
There are more minor upgrades compared to the S8. The speakers are louder, for instance, and now support Dolby Atmos. They sound great, with more body and volume than before. There are a couple of minor improvements to Samsung’s DeX system, too. First introduced on the Galaxy S8, DeX allows the phone to be plugged into a dock and display a desktop operating system on a connected monitor.
Here, there’s a new dock, called the DeX Pad, that holds the phone flat, exposing the headphone jack and allowing the screen to double as a touchpad. It’s due out in June but Samsung hasn’t announced the price yet. IT managers can now also apply policies that display their logo on the desktop wallpaper and lock out certain apps in the desktop environment.
Elsewhere, Samsung has improved the Samsung Galaxy S9’s iris and facial recognition systems. On their own, these two aren’t all that exciting. The Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus introduced these biometric login techniques last year, but in the Samsung Galaxy S9 they’ve been combined and given a name change.
With this “Intelligent Scan” mode enabled, the phone tries to unlock using both methods at once, the idea being to reduce the frequency of failed recognition attempts. And it works. It’s about as quick as the Apple iPhone X’s face unlock feature, but since it unlocks directly to the last screen you were using when the phone locked itself, it’s effectively quicker. It isn’t quite as slick as the OnePlus 5T’s face unlocker, though, which works almost instantaneously.
The final change of note is another software tweak. The S9 can now be used in landscape 100% of the time, with UI elements adapting on the homescreen, the app drawer and settings menus. That’s great news for those who prefer to mount their phones in landscape when they use it as a satnav in the car. Previously, you’d have to tilt your head or remove the phone from the dock if you wanted to use the menus or homescreen.
Price and verdict
Taken as a whole, the Samsung Galaxy S9 is a fabulous phone. It’s better overall than the S8, despite slightly weaker battery life and a rather odd implementation of its low-light camera algorithms. It’s faster, the screen is just as good, it has better speakers, better facial recognition and ultra-slow motion video.
In fact, along with its larger sibling, the S9 is the best phone on the market today. However, these differences are small, and £739 is a lot to pay for a phone that’s only slightly different to last year’s offering, especially given how much cheaper you can pick up a Samsung Galaxy S8 today. It was about £500 on Amazon at the time of publication. Eventually, that picture will change. The Samsung Galaxy S9 will fall in price over time to a similar level to the the S8 today and then it will be an absolute bargain. For now, though, Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone isn’t one I’d recommend you buy: its upgrades simply aren’t worth the £300 premium. SPECIFICATIONS Octa-core 2.7GHz/1.8GHz Exynos 9810 Octa processor 4GB RAM Mali-G72 MP18 graphics 5.8in AMOLED screen, 1,440 x 2,960 resolution 64GB storage microSDXC slot (up to 400GB) 12MP rear camera 8MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 3,000mAh battery Android 8 68.7 x 8.5 x 148mm (WDH) 163g 1yr warranty