Good low-light photography, crisp and detailed screen, slick design
No improvement in battery life, Bixby is still not very useful, intelligent scan has high failure rate
There’s a lot about the Samsung Galaxy S9 that feels very familiar from last year’s S8. The phones have the same battery capacity, same screen size and resolution and are almost indistinguishable in terms of design.
Even where Samsung has made changes to the design, they are often barely perceptible. The S9 is a smidgen shorter and thicker than its predecessor, the fingerprint scanner has shifted half an inch to the left (thankfully) and tiny fractions of bezel have been shaved off, giving the phone a higher screen-to-body ratio than the iPhone X.
That’s not to say that the S9 is not a good phone. It’s great. In fact, if you want to get to grips with all the things that make the S9 a superlative phone, you should read our S8 review from a year ago. It’s all still true.
But for this review, we're going to stick to what’s new with the S9. Samsung’s whole shtick around this latest release is that it has reimagined the camera. It’ll be hoping that these changes are so significant that we’ll overlook the fact that the guts of the phone haven’t moved on much in the last year. As a result, we gave the S9 to photographer Leon Chew to see if the camera measured up to Samsung’s own marketing hype.
The S9 has a 12 megapixel dual pixel sensor, much like the S8, but this time Samsung has added a dual aperture feature that is supposed to boost the camera’s performance in low light conditions. When light is low, the camera automatically selects a wider aperture to let in loads of light, but automatically switches back to the narrower setting in normal light conditions. It also takes 12 shots for every photograph, and combines those images to reduce the noise that is often present in dark photos.
However, Chew wasn’t convinced that these low light boosts actually translated into better photographs. Photos taken in auto mode look good at first, but zoom in a little closer and the edges look soft and less detailed, possibly as a result of the post-processing the phone’s software automatically applies to every shot. Although Samsung says that its dual aperture system helps the S9 camera let in 28 per cent more light than the S8, Chew says that, to his eyes, it looks like the S9 is working overtime to post-process low-light shots to remove noise and smooth out colours.
The phone also has a setting that allows you to shoot in RAW mode, but those images, without the post-processing, contained a lot of digital noise in low light conditions.
Chew was also put off by the wide and narrow (or tall and thin) aspect ratio that results in very wide or very skinny photos. By default, photos taken in landscape with the S9 are more than twice as wide as they are tall, and the opposite is true in portrait mode.
“I don’t really understand why anyone would want such a tall shot,” Chew says. Although this allows the photos to fill the S9 screen beautifully, it doesn’t necessarily translate to shots that look great on other screens (or websites) without some judicious cropping. Switching to a more conventional 4:3 aspect ratio is easy enough, however, and also lets you squeeze maximum resolution out of every photograph.
Display: 5.8-inch Quad HD curved Super AMOLED (529 ppi)
Rear-facing camera: 12 megapixel, dual pixel sensor and aperture, f/1.5 and f/2.4
Front-facing camera: 8 megapixel, f/1.7
Storage: 64GB (plus 400GB expandable storage)
Dimensions: 147.7 x 68.7 x 8.5mm, 163 grams
Battery: 3,000mAh, faster wired and wireless charging
Operating system: Android 8 (Oreo)
UK release date: On sale from March 16
Price: £739
The S9 is also the first Samsung phone to have super slow-mo that records at 960 frames per second, stretching out 0.2 seconds in real time to six seconds on video. Although Samsung’s own demos showed slow-mo capturing every droplet of a bursting water-filled balloon, outside of the press briefing things are rather more disappointing.
In most light conditions super slow-mo is extremely grainy, to the extent of making it unusable, Chew says. “You would almost have to have it properly lit in a studio or a bright sunny day.” When it does work, super slow-mo looks phenomenal, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t allow the option to reduce the frame rate to make the function more workable in conditions that are anything but perfect.
In all, the S9 camera wasn’t good enough to make Chew seriously consider taking it along to a shoot. “I would trust this as a back-up camera,” he says. While it took some great shots in auto mode – Chew singled out its quick focusing for particular praise – the S9 might not be quite the revolution in smartphone photography that Samsung was gunning for.
On the biometric front, the S9 and S9+ introduce "intelligent scan" for the first time. This combines iris scanning with facial recognition to authenticate your identity and unlock your phone quickly and, supposedly, easily.
For me, however, that wasn’t the case. In around one out of every five unlock attempts, intelligent scan gave up trying to recognise me after a few seconds forcing unlocking the phone by entering a pattern.
This might be my fault, of course – frequently the S9 told me my eyes weren’t open enough (I wear glasses, so that might not help), or that I wasn’t holding my phone sufficiently upright.
Thankfully, Samsung hasn’t followed Apple’s lead and turned its back on its fingerprint scanner, which is lightning fast, unlocks the phone with a single touch and takes a matter of seconds to set up.
You can also set the S9 so that it automatically unlocks when you’re paired with a Bluetooth device that you’ve used in the past. This works well, and makes up for the frustrations of intelligent scan, but I can’t help but think that Samsung has included the ability to layer up these authentication options precisely because intelligent scan isn’t quite the full package.
Ah, Bixby. First unveiled with the release of the S8 last year, Bixby is Samsung’s own take on a voice and AI assistant. Through the camera app, Bixby can do things like analyse whatever you’re pointing your camera at and, using image recognition and search, find you similar items to buy online.
Pointing the camera at my computer mouse to try this out, Bixby thought it was looking at a boot, and so offered me a few pairs of women’s shoes and a Harley Davidson motorbike seat.
It was more successful, however, at identifying a banana, bringing up calorie information about the fruit and letting me transfer that data straight into the Samsung health app.
Outside of the camera app, Bixby is even less useful. The Bixby home page is a mess, its voice recognition is never quite spot on and it felt like Samsung was constantly pointing me towards its less-than-capable assistant while I was just trying to use the phone.
If Bixby was all the S9 had to offer, it might be worth persevering with, but in a phone that also has Google Assistant, I just can’t work out why you’d bother.
The Samsung S9 is an excellent smartphone – one of the best Android phones you can buy today. The screen, in particular, is superb. The colours are crisp and extremely detailed, and the ample screen real estate makes it well-suited to watching videos in horizontal mode. I’m not a fan of watching films on smartphones, but the S9 almost had me convinced.
The sound, too, is great. The S9’s speakers are 40 per cent louder that those in the S8, which gives it a surprising amount of sonic presence for a smartphone.
But is the S9 significantly better than the S8 before it? No. All the things that made the S8 a great phone are still here – it’s got a huge screen, top-notch camera and a sick design. Bixby and Samsung’s habit of filling the phone up with bloatware are also just as annoying as in previous versions.
All this adds up to a flagship phone that falls short of its own hype. The new camera is definitely an improvement on the S8, particularly when it comes to low light photography, but it’s not quite the reimagining that Samsung is billing it as. Really, the S9 is just another top-drawer Android phone in the era of incremental gains.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
