Galaxy S9+: A flagship done the Samsung way
The Galaxy S9 series stresses majorly on cameras, and the S9+ features two this time. It retails at ` 64,990 and goes up to ` 72,900 for top- end variant. The combination of glass and metal make for a premium smartphone — this has been Samsung’s Holy Grail since the S6 Edge rollout. The S9+ continues that philosophy with an awesome all- glass and metal sandwiched.
However, it’s pretty reminiscent of last year’s S8+, despite the new rear dual camera assembly and the repositioned fingerprint sensor. The 3.5mm headphone jack also stays. Samsung has also retained the 2K 6.2inch curved Infinity Display with Gorilla Glass 5. The display is without doubt one of the best ( if not ‘ the’ best) in the business — the colours are lively and accompanied by vivid contrasts.
Underneath, a 10nm octa- core Exynos 9810 chipset accompanied by 6GB of RAM drives the handset. It runs on Android 8.0 Oreo, albeit underneath a thick Samsung Experience 9.0 custom UI. Out- of- thebox, the Galaxy S9+ is fast — blazingly fast. Whether you scroll through menus or switch between multiple apps, the S9+ doesn’t exhaust itself. The slick ‘ infinity effects’ are an eye candy and so is the Always- On Display. Resource- intensive games run in full glory. With the S9+, Bixby 2.0 can now translate text. Bixby can recognise voices better than before, even in loud environments. Samsung’s new Intelligent Scan uses both the software- based facial recognition system as well as the iris scanner to unlock the phone. The S9+ absolutely nails it with a new stereo speaker setup — one of the best and loud audio we have heard from any smartphone till date. The S9+ features a 12MP dual camera setup with a variable aperture lens ( f/ 1.5 and f/ 2.4) — one of the first in the industry. In daylight conditions, photos are simply spectacular — natural colours and contrasts along with ample details all around. Low light conditions take a toll on the quality, but the photos can definitely be framed as ‘ Instagramworthy’. The bokeh portraits are soft and the distinction between the foreground and the background isn’t very refined.
As for videos, shaky footage is almost nonexistent — thanks to OIS on both the rear cameras. As for the hyped 960fps super slow motion, you get just 2 seconds of slomo footage in 720p resolution, which is insufficient. Newly implemented AR Emojis are fairly gimmicks — the tracking system is two dimensional and isn’t as refined as the iPhone counterpart.
The S9+ still retains a 3500mAh battery which churns out an average run time of around 6- 8 hours on a full tank.
To sum it all up, the Galaxy S9+ is a true gem of an Android smartphone. It checks all the boxes that an Android flagship needs to fulfil in 2018 — beautiful avatar, breathtaking performance, superb camera sensors and certain miscellaneous flagship- class conveniences.