Setting New Standards

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And that’s precisely what Samsung did for the Galaxy S9+ – retained everything that was loved about the S8+, fixed a few design oddities and added new features to push the tech envelope a wee bit further. Does Samsung’s latest dual-camera-dual-aperture-toting iteration, which also is 2018’s first legitimate flagship device, do enough to entice people to upgrade?

At first glance, you will be hard pressed to tell this year’s flagship apart from last year’s iconic design. It’s marginally shorter, a tad wider and thicker, with slightly slimmer top bezel — all of which make for a phone which sits well in the hand despite the massive 6.2-inch screen; without going down the route of the many iPhoneX-me-too ‘top-notch’ designs that dominated MWC this year. The screen remains the best in the business, only now it is brighter than the S8/Note8’s display, and boy, is it addictive! Use the S9+ over a prolong period of time and you are spoiled for every other Android out there.  Design wise, the fingerprint reader has been moved to a much easier-to-reach spot on the back of the phone and the single speaker has been upgraded to a very respectable-sounding stereo pair.

On the inside, the S9+ sports Samsung’s latest Exynos 9810 silicon which, coupled with the 6GB of memory, is as capable and snappy as you would expect any flagship-class device running Android 8.0 Oreo to be. For biometric authentication, Samsung’s taken the face unlock and iris recognition tech from last year and combined it into a single system called Intelligent Scan, which first tries face unlock and if that doesn’t work, the S9+ then gives your irises a go to let you into your phone.

Yet, it was Samsung’s ‘camera reimagined’ that was the big draw for me — this is the first time anyone has put an adjustable aperture camera on a smartphone. What it does is let the camera switch between a super wide-open f/1.5 aperture for when you really need every last bit of available light, and a f/2.4, which controls how much light is hitting the camera sensor in bright daytime shots. This feature truly comes into its own only if you are the sort who fiddles around with manual camera settings in pro-mode.

Which is not to say Samsung hasn’t improved the camera — the f/1.5 aperture allows you to capture usable images in near-pitch dark situations, where most other cameras would just have hung up their boots and gone home. Samsung’s camera is the new low-light champion, and it goes shoulder to shoulder with the Pixel 2’s camera in well-lit situations, with the Pixel 2 edging ahead only on portrait mode shots and gauging the correct exposure slightly better in tricky lighting situations. The secondary 2x zoom camera comes in handy when you need more reach, but it is not a must have. The S9+’s other two marquee features — super slow-motion video and AR Emojis — are fun to use, but the implementation is a bit of a hit-and-miss, one that could do with a software update or two.

The S9+ then remains the best big-screen phone by a mile, and with its class-leading display and low-light photography, Samsung is back out in front, even if much of the stuff feels incremental.