- [Mr. Mobile] Can we be real for a second?
In a world where companies are adding keyboards,
rumble packs, even lasers to their smartphones,
the Samsung Galaxy S9 seems a little dull.
And it's not just looks, for a lot less money
you can get 90% of the experience
by buying last year's Galaxy S8 instead.
So whether you should splurge on the new one
is gonna depend mostly on how old
your current phone is and how much you care
about a camera that doubles as a time machine.
I'm Mr. Mobile, and let's figure it out
in the Galaxy S9 review brought to you by Tech21.
(upbeat music)
If you've ever said "don't fix what ain't broken"
and meant it, well the Galaxy S9 is the phone for you.
Glass and metal, water resistant design,
a bright, color-accurate display
with curved sides and narrow bezels,
convenient features like dual-mode
wireless charging and a headphone jack.
Inconvenient features like a Bixby assistant
button right next to the volume rocker.
And yes, top-shelf specs befitting a top-tier phone.
Look, it's not just jaded tech reviewers
tired of the same old, same old,
this really is a minor step up from the S8.
Before we hit the big stuff, though,
I do wanna call out my favorite minor fix.
The fingerprint sensor isn't just better positioned
than last year, it learns your fingerprint
faster than anything else out there.
It's quick to unlock, too, and it's
a great shortcut to the notification tray.
The alternative login option, iris scanning
with a fallback to face unlock, is speedy for now,
I like it, but I worry it'll slow down over time
as it did on the S8 and Note 8.
Speaking of slowing down, every year
Samsung gets a little bit better
at keeping its software sprightly.
The S9 comes the closest yet to something
like Google's Pixel, but that also serves to highlight
these annoyances that have persisted for years.
The occasional hiccup when you swipe over
to the leftmost home screen, the slightly manic
animation of the app switcher, plus there's the
duplication of features that comes any time
a manufacturer pushes its own ecosystem on top of Android.
You get two app stores on Samsung phones,
two sets of user data between
your Google and Samsung accounts.
Anyone coming from a more streamlined experience
like the Pixel 2 or, yeah, the iPhone, will probably
find this more complex than what they're used to.
Of course sometimes complexity leads
to a commendable leap in quality.
Take the camera here, I only had access to the S9 Plus
for this review, but the primary cameras
between the two sizes are the same.
The only thing the Plus adds is
this secondary shooter with a telephoto lens.
A word on that, it's supposed to give you
higher quality zoom, but it only works in favorable lighting
because its sensor still isn't as good as the main cameras,
so the upshot is that when you press the zoom button,
the phone often does not use the telephoto camera
at all because it can get a better shot
by cropping the main sensor's image instead.
This is the same way the iPhone handles things.
So if you really want the smaller S9,
you should worry more about the battery life
you're sacrificing then losing that second lens.
I'll come back to that in a second,
first how 'bout that primary camera?
You've gotta give Samsung's engineers credit here,
it's the only modern smartphone
shooter with a variable aperture.
Aperture is like your camera's pupil, okay?
It's the opening that allows light to hit the sensor,
and Samsung gave this camera
the widest aperture you can find on a phone,
that means at night the S9 can pull in more light
than most of the competition, and once it puts
the captured image through some processing,
it can put out some very nice low-light photos.
Now here's the clever part, because you don't
always want an aperture that big,
the S9 uses mechanical shutter blades
to physically obscure the outer portion
of the lens in brighter settings,
stopping it down from f1.5 to f2.4.
The result is a camera suitable for day or night,
and I've taken a few shots I'm quite happy with.
So will the S9 be replacing the
Google Pixel 2 I keep in my other pocket?
No.
See what Google's camera lacks in fancy hardware,
it makes up for with incredible processing,
and shooting side-by-side with the S9,
most of the time I preferred the Pixel 2's pics.
Yes it oversaturates a bit in daylight shots,
but in low-light or situations with weird lighting,
like in a bar or my studio, it was Google's phone
that kept things sharper, the colors closer to authentic,
while the Galaxy S9 was more likely
to produce a soft shot that ran way warm.
And that's true on the selfie side too.
Samsung seems to have spent more effort on AR Emoji
and other cutesy cruft than on making
any meaningful improvements to the front-facing camera,
and side note if you've ever wondered how
raggedy you can look after a week in Barcelona
and eight hours scripting a review, here you go.
But the S9 punches back against the Pixel
with raw hardware power that you
just can't find on last year's phones.
That lets the S9 do two really cool things,
first, you can shoot video in 4K HDR,
which is predictably beautiful and also quite steady
thanks to the very good optical image stabilization,
and secondly, if you really want your brain blown,
swipe on over to super slow-mo,
hit that toggle, and welcome to warp zone.
The framerate jumps from 30 up to 960 FPS
to stretch 0.2 seconds into six,
giving you a glimpse into moments that otherwise
pass too quickly to notice, and also
some moments that maybe you'd prefer to forget.
Now there's caveats galore with this,
you need an awful lot of light for it to work,
the focus is finicky and you're limited to 720p resolution.
That leaves room for Sony to catch up later in the year,
but Samsung's is so far, the only one
with a motion-activated trigger mode.
So for now, it's both easier and more fun to use.
For all the special features the S9 brings to the camera,
when it comes to the battery, it's sadly quite average.
Even with the larger capacity on the Plus model,
I found myself hitting the 20% mark before bedtime
on several nights, and because my day
won't be quite like yours, here's all
the apps and services that were burning
through that battery on a typical day.
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a lot of voice calls
in here, and the S9 is great at them.
With excellent noise-canceling, even in windy weather
and very clear calls over T-Mobile's VoLTE.
It's a shame the phone doesn't put its new
dual-speaker array to use for those, though.
While media will play through both
the earpiece and the bottom port,
speakerphone calls only make use of the latter.
Anyway, let's bring it home by coming back
to the battery, it's not bad, but it's not great,
especially since endurance degrades over time.
And if you go for the smaller S9
with its smaller power pack, you'll want to think
about installing a dark theme and maybe turning off
always on display to penny-pinch your milliamps.
If the Galaxy S9 were a Radiohead song,
it would be No Surprises.
It packs the upgrades you expect
and a camera that pushes boundaries, yes, but overall,
it's emblematic of the kind of safe iteration
that has people holding onto phones for longer.
In a world where year over year, smartphone shipments
just fell for the first time in history.
Still, if you love your Samsung, and have an S7 or older,
it's absolutely a worthy step up,
and it's available for pre-order now,
with prices ranging from $720 to $915,
depending on model and your carrier.
If you want something more affordable,
there's no shortage of fantastic options out there,
and I've covered a lot of them
on the Mr. Mobile YouTube channel,
but if you want a smartphone that checks
as many boxes as an Android can,
the Galaxy S9 is the Samsung for you.
And don't act like you didn't see
the smudges and scratches on mine after just a week.
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Let me know what else you wanna know
about the Galaxy S9 down in the comments, folks,
hit up Android Central's review for more detail,
and please do subscribe to The Mr. Mobile
here on the Tube so you don't
miss more S9 videos coming soon.
Until next time, thanks for watching
and stay mobile, my friends.