The impressive C9 Pro

> The Samsung Galaxy phablet sports a 6in Super Amoled screen and has some awesome high-end features as well

WITH a 6in full highdefinition display, the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro walks the tightrope between smartphone and tablet, and like a circus act, it is also juggling several highend features at the same time.

Unwieldiness is often part of the experience with a largedisplay phone like this.

The C9 Pro tries to alleviate this problem with thin bezels, but this also makes the phone tricky to use. There is so much screen space that accidental taps, while my thumb is doing stretches across the screen, are common.

It also does not help that the thumbprint reader is in the front. I much prefer the thumbprint reader to be at the back for a phone of this size.

What would help is to have a grippy back cover and a screen protector, standard accessories often bundled with Chinese and Taiwanese smartphones.

On the flipside, the 6in Super Amoled screen – a size favoured by ebook readers – is perfect for reading long form articles and ebooks.

I prefer reading articles on Pocket, and ebooks on Kobo on this phone, rather than on a PC or tablet.

Samsung also took full advantage of the phone’s larger size to pack in some impressive features.

Starting with the basics, the brains of the C9 Pro is the Qualcomm MSM8976 Snapdragon 653, an eightcore processor that is made up of four 1.95GHz Cortex-A72 and four 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 processors.

This is coupled with an Adreno 510 graphics processing unit, 6GB of memory, and 64GB of expandable storage.

For the technical buffs, the phone is also Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac compatible.

For the rest of us, this means that using the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro is a smooth experience and it can handle multitasking, games, and media editing along with the best of them.

The battery life is also impressive. When I use it as my daily driver, I often end my day with at least 50% charge left on the phone.

Driven hard, the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro did not dip under 30% after a full day. Pair the 4,000mAh battery with fast battery charging, and you get a phone that keeps on going. Its 16MP f1.9 front and rear cameras translate to reasonably good photos which are exceptional for social network. Nevertheless, I still find that its performance is rather slow when taking pictures in typical fluorescent lamp-lit indoor conditions. Disappointingly, the phone still runs on Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow), which is not the latest version of the world’s number one mobile operating system. What is amazing is that this is another Samsung phone that supports Dual SIM, and has a dedicated expandable memory slot. This is unlike other phones that make you choose between having either expandable memory or a secondary SIM. It also has above average signal reception, thanks to its antenna design. I noticed that the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro could still find a usable signal in places where most phones cannot. In the end, the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro has a lot going for it, but only if you can get over the large screen size and a price tag that is higher than its water- and dust-resistant, and arguably newer, Galaxy brethren. The Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro comes in gold, pink, and black, and retails for RM2,299. It is available at all Samsung mobile retail outlets, and at Samsung’s official online store on Lazada.