Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Review.
More and more users are opting for big phones with big, beautiful high-resolution displays like the Google Pixel, OnePlus 6 or Apple iPhone X, but Samsung’s flagship Note (now up to version 9) has been leading the big and beautiful ones since the Note 1 for several years. back.
Of course, it’s called the Note because of the built-in and well-implemented S Pen, which gets better with every new version of the Note smartphone or phablet. Among other things, the latest S Pen is really impressive, as is the Note 9 itself.
- Beautiful 6.4 ” Super AMOLED display with high resolution.
- Bluetooth remote control added to S Pen.
- Superior cameras with built-in AI
- Huge storage capacity.
- DeX mode without additional docking station (all you need is an HDMI cable and adapter).
- Big battery, long life
- Fast
- Impressive build quality
- Great stereo sound
Pros:
- Dear
- Bixby still sucks.
- The fingerprint scanner is too close to the camera.
Negatives:
Verdict:
Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Note 9 may cost as much as the iPhone X, but it’s worth it in many ways, including a great display, long battery life, the famous Note S Pen, a dual-aperture smart camera on the back, and more.
| Battery | 4000mAh |
| Battery Life (hours: min) | 12:36 |
| Colors | Lavender Purple, Ocean Blue, Cloudy Silver, Midnight Black |
| CPU | Snapdragon 845 |
| Opening price | list for $ 999 (128 GB), $ 1249 (512GB) list |
| D isplay | 6.4 inches Super AMOLED (2960 x 1440) |
| Front camera | 8MP (f / 1.7) |
| microSD | Up to 512GB |
| OS | Android 8.1 Oreo / upgradeable to Android Pie |
| RAM | 6 GB or 8 GB |
| Main camera | Two 12MP cameras (f / 1.5 and f / 2.4) |
| Size | 6.3 x 3 x 0.34 inches |
| Storage | 128GB or 512GB |
| Weight | 7.1 oz |
Galaxy Note 9 Specifications
Design
The look and feel of the Note 9 is not really new . At 6.3 by 3.0 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and weighing 7.1 ounces, apart from being slightly larger and heavier than the Note 8, the latest model is very similar to its predecessor.
It is also very similar to the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 +. In fact, if you don’t need a stylus, or don’t need one, the Galaxy S9 or S9 + are an attractive and less expensive alternative.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the Galaxy Note 9, starting with its very attractive, very high quality aluminum body. This is one nice looking and nice touch phone, with smooth, tight, slightly rounded edges and corners with almost invisible seams.
Depending on where you buy it, you can also opt for vibrant colors, including lavender purple and ocean blue. Ocean Blue comes with a yellow S Pen that writes yellow on the display in note mode when the screen is off, while the lavender model comes with a purple nib using purple digital ink – an interesting, understated touch.
Shortly after last year’s release, Samsung announced the availability of new versions of Cloud Silver and Midnight Black. Cloud Silver is sold exclusively through Best Buy and Samsung’s own website, while the Midnight Black model will be sold through all retailers and carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular.
On the right edge is only the power / sleep / wake button. On the right edge you’ll find a button to activate Samsung’s Voice Activation feature, Bixby, which is similar to Siri in the iPhone and Windows Cortona, and volume controls as shown in the image below. We’ll take a closer look at Bixby and this button later.
The bottom edge houses the headphone jack, mini-USB charging / data port, reset hole, stereo speaker grill and of course the S Pen compartment, as shown here …
This design demonstrates that Samsung has a lot of experience in making the stylus unobtrusive and out of the way (and the S Pen recharges there).
This approach is much more convenient than the Apple iPad Pencil – it has nowhere to hide. As you will see when I go into more detail on the S Pen, the Note stylus is probably the most advanced digital stylus available.
On the back of the Note 9 is the dual aperture camera and fingerprint scanner shown in the image below. The front panel, of course, has a camera. We’ll talk more about cameras later.
On the top edge is the tray storage compartment that holds both a SIM card and a microSD card to expand storage by 512GB, or if you prefer, you can use the tray to insert two SIM cards, which in turn , allows you to assign two phone numbers to your Note 9 – for example, work and personal.
If you buy the 512GB model and then add a 512GB microSD card, your Note 9 becomes a 1TB device, the first in smartphone technology. Samsung offers a 512GB SD card for around $ 200, which is roughly the current price.
However, between a 512GB Note 9 and a 512GB SD card, you can easily spend around $ 1,500 on your phone, which is undoubtedly a lot of money.
The good news is that as I wrote this, I found the 512GB model on Amazon and elsewhere for about $ 200 with a $ 1250 off (and the 128GB version that also supports a 512GB microSD card. about $ 150 less than the stated price).
Finally, the Note 9 is not only well built, but it also meets the IP68 waterproof and dustproof standard – with or without a built-in S Pen.
Samsung claims you can submerge it in water up to five feet deep, which is much deeper than a toilet. There are also many security features, including the aforementioned fingerprint reader, face and iris recognition, PIN, dot pattern and others.
Impressive display
From smartphones to Galaxy tablets, computer monitors and 90-inch UHD TVs, no one makes screens better than Samsung, and the Note 9’s Super AMOLED Infinity Display at 2960 by 1440 is the best in the industry.
It’s much brighter and has about a third more contrast than the Note 8, which isn’t bad in itself. And Samsung’s almost bezel-less curved edges are nothing short of … well, awesome.
Regardless, the screen resolution is the same as on the Note 8 and Galaxy S9 +. This is a great size not only for watching movies on the go, but also when viewed from the far right, left, top or bottom, or straight ahead, the image quality remains unchanged without noticeable degradation.
According to my tests, the Note 9’s screen reproduces 228% of the sRGB color gamut (range) compared to 209% on the Note 8, 217% on the S9 and 135% on the iPhone.
Beyond specs and benchmarks, however, after years of studying tablet, laptop and smartphone screens, the Note 9 is by far the best smartphone screen I’ve ever seen, including the impressive 2436 by 1125 Retina displays on the iPhone X. The S9 and S9 + are similar, not even as impressive as the Note 9.
S Pen: Stylus Plus
The S Pen keeps getting better. For a while, it was the best stylus for writing notes, drawing, highlighting text, and more, but with the Note 9, Samsung has added Bluetooth LE and a reassignable button for remote control of compatible apps.
By default, a long press of the button opens the camera app, and a short press or click takes pictures, allowing you to take selfies or group shots without the built-in camera app timer or waving your hand in front of the camera. lens to activate the awkward gesture timer of the camera.
You can also use the S Pen button to navigate through slides in PowerPoint presentations, scroll through images in the gallery, play, pause and skip to the next track in the music player, switch between front and rear cameras, and more.
So far, apart from the core Google and Samsung apps, there are not enough apps that support the S Pen, but Samsung is offering a software development kit (SDK) to help third-party developers create apps that are S Pen compatible, which should help increase the number of apps that support S Pen coming soon.
I could talk a little about what the S Pen can do, but one of the more impressive features is the ability to take notes from the screen. When you remove the stylus while the display is off, the Note 9 goes into a note-taking interface with a black background.
This allows you to take notes without unlocking your phone or launching a specific application, thus making notes quick and easy. Screen off notes are automatically saved.
As mentioned, the S Pen requires charging, which only takes about 40 seconds in the compartment. That 40 seconds should give you, according to my testing, about 40 minutes on standby, or about 220 presses of the remote button.
Professional Cameras
Smartphone cameras have made great strides over the past few years, with some taking photos and videos on par with cameras for lower-end professional photographers.
Like most smartphones today, the Note 9 has a front-facing camera primarily for taking selfies, but the rear camera is a dual-aperture camera with wide-angle telephoto lenses. Inherited from Galaxy S9 +, Note 9 cameras are supported by an advanced, high-performance camera app.
The Note 9’s 8MP (megapixel) front camera includes autofocus (a first for the Note brand), plus countless mode options: 960fps Super Slow Motion digital video at 720p resolution, AR stickers, wide group selfies, and more making it one of the most feature rich smartphone camera apps. Despite this, it is easy to use.
But it is the main camera that demonstrates the prowess of the camera application. The dual 12-megapixel lenses use variable aperture technology to automatically switch from f / 1.5 aperture for low-light conditions to f / 2.4 aperture for normal light shooting.
One of the camera app’s many gimmicks is built-in artificial intelligence (AI) that automatically adjusts settings based on your subject. The Note 9 recognizes 20 scenes, including beaches, backlit objects, food, snow and sunsets.
It then adjusts brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance, and a host of other parameters that would normally be manually adjusted in the app’s Pro mode with Scene Optimizer turned off. My experience with Scene Optimizer shows that it works well most of the time, especially when compared to the photos I took with the feature disabled.
However, the scene optimizer is not perfect; A few of my photos, especially a few of the food, came out a little oversaturated and lacking in detail, but switching to Pro mode fixed that.
One of the more impressive features is flaw detection, which tells you when a photo hasn’t been taken properly. Flaws such as blur, red eyes, blurry lenses, closed eyes are detected, and then the app alerts you and offers a second chance, as shown here …
In truth, I am probably one of the worst photographers in the world; I’m having trouble taking photos of IT equipment in perfect lighting and no background for these reviews.
I need all the help I can get to make the dual lenses, artificial intelligence and flaw detector in the Note 9 just right for me. Now that not all of my photographs suck, I take a lot more pictures than before. It’s also worth noting that it also shoots great 4K videos.
Bixby
I’m not going to talk a lot here about Bixby, Samsung’s voice activation app, primarily because it was always outperformed by its competitors and nobody liked it. The Oreo version that ships with the Note 9 hasn’t improved much. It still misinterprets a lot of words and phrases, unlike Siri, Cortana, and Amazon Alexa.
And yes, the Bixby button – for those of us who don’t want to use Bixby – is still in an awkward place and you can’t reassign it to another app or feature. However, when I was finishing this review, Android Pie (Android 9) became available for the Note 9 and I installed it.
Samsung claims Android 9 fixes Bixby and is now competing with its counterparts. To be honest, I didn’t have enough time to check it out before submitting this story, but I can tell you that yes, you can now remap the Bixby button to just about any other app or feature.
As for Android Pie itself, I didn’t spend much time on it. However, it damaged a third-party launcher I was using, as well as a couple of other apps that I regularly use, such as Samsung’s File Manager. It looks like it will take me an hour or two to re-configure the home screen and other areas to get it back to the desired state.
Excellent performance
While I’ve run a few benchmarks, including general benchmarks with Geekbench 4 and graphics prowess with 3DMark Slingshot Extreme, I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing the benchmark results in detail, except that the Note 9 lags behind the iPhone a bit. X and OnePlus 6, slightly ahead of the Galaxy S9 + and significantly ahead of the Note 8 and Google Pixel 2XL.
Suffice it to say that the Note 9 is not as fast as the iPhone and the super-fast OnePlus 6. In terms of my experience with the phone over the past few weeks, I haven’t waited for any app to open yet; switching between apps, no matter how many I have open, is as smooth as slicing warm butter.
I don’t play many games, but while I was playing a 3D Fortnite game that requires hardware taxation (not available for Android 9, except for the beta when I wrote this), I had no lag, the screen was beautiful, and, although the phone got a little hot, but not too much.
All of this, and I ran a recent Star Trek movie on a loop until the battery ran out for 12 hours 36 minutes. Why is it so fast, smooth and durable? Well, we’ve already talked about the Infinity Display, which explains the great graphics.
Below is a list of other performance Note 9 hardware and its features. My test unit was the 128GB version with 6GB of RAM. (Let’s assume the 8GB RAM model performs slightly better in some scenarios.)
- Snapdragon 835 processor: Although not as fast as Apple’s A11 Bionic or OnePlus 6 processor with 8GB RAM, processor The processor in the Note 9 is by no means stupid. But as I said, I have no complaints about the performance of this processor (and its integrated GPU). Please note that this is the same processor found in the S9 +. Also note that in the UK and some other regions outside the US, the Note 9 ships with the Samsung Exynos 9810, which is slightly faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.
- 6GB RAM: obviously within reason than the more memory the computing device has, the better. During my tests, 6 GB seemed more than enough, at least for the way I use a smartphone. And as mentioned, he launched Fortnite without hesitation.
- Water Cooled CPU: Note 9 is protected from overheating with a notebook-class CFRP system. Samsung claims this protects the phone from overheating and allows it to operate at maximum load for longer periods of time. All I can say is that it never got too hot for me, nor did I notice it slowing down to compensate for the overheating.
- 4000mAh Battery: 700mAh more than the Note 8 and 500mAh more than the S9 +, the Note 9’s 4,000mAh battery is by far the largest in the industry. Again, it lasted over 12.5 hours during battery discharge tests.
| SG Note 9 | SG S9 Plus | iPhone X | OnePlus 6 | |
| Screen size, resolution | 6.4-inch Super AMOLED; 2,960 × 1440 pixels | 6.2 inches; 2,960 × 1440 pixels | 5.8 inches; 2436 × 1125 pixels | 6.28-inch OLED; 2280 × 1080 pixels |
| Pixel density | 516ppi | 529ppi | 458 ppi | 402ppi |
| Dimensions (inches) | 6.4x3x0.35 inches | 6.2 × 2.9 × 0.33 inches | 5.7 X 2.8 x 0.30 inches | 6.1 x 0.3 x 0.31 inches |
| Weight | 7.1 oz | 6.7 ounces | 6.1 ounces | 6.2 ounces |
| Mobile Software | Android 8.1 Oreo, upgradeable to Android 9 Pie | Android 8.0 Oreo, upgradeable to Android 9 Pie | iOS 11 | Android 8.1 Oreo, upgradeable to Android 9 Pie |
| Camera < / td> | Dual 12MP (wide), 12MP (telephoto) | Double 12MP | Double 12MP | 16MPstandard, 20MPtelephoto |
| Front camera | 8MP | 8MP | 7MP | 16MP |
| Video capture | 4K | 4K | 4K | 4K |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 oct-core processor (2.8 GHz + 1.7 GHz) or Octa-core Samsung Exynos 9810 (2.7 GHz + 1.7 GHz) | Octa-cor e Processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (2.8 GHz + 1.7 GHz) or Octa-core Samsung Exynos 9810 (2.7 GHz + 1.7 GHz) | Apple A11 Bionic | Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 2.8GHz |
| Repository | 128GB, 512GB | 64GB, 128GB, 256GB | 64GB, 256GB | 64GB, 128GB, 256GB |
| RAM | 6GB, 8GB | 6 GB | 3GB | 6GB, 8GB |
| Expandable storage | 512GB | 400GB | No | No |
| Battery | 4,000 mAh | 3,500 mAh | 2716 mAh | 3 300 mAh |
| Fingerprint sensor | Back | Back | No | Back |
| Connector | USB-C | USB-C | Lightning | USB-C |
| Headphone jack | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Features | Waterproof (IP68); wireless charging; S Pen with Bluetooth; Iris and face scanning | Dual Aperture Camera, Waterproof (IP68); Wireless Charging; Iris Scan | Waterproof (IP67); wireless charging; Face ID 3D Unlock | Portrait mode, dual SIM, dashboard charging |
| MSRP (USD) | $ 1000 (128GB), $ 1250 (512GB) | Varies: $ 840-930 (64GB) | $ 999 (64GB), $ 1149 (256GB) | $ 529 (64GB), $ 579 (128GB), $ 629 (256GB) |
Galaxy Note 9 versus the competitors
More Than Just a Beautiful Face
In every Note 9 review, I’ve read the rant about the $ 1,000 purchase price, but if you look closely at it, you’ll find it much cheaper. In fact, eBay is offering several new unopened boxes for just $ 700.
It’s still a lot of money, of course, but if you use your smartphone as often as I do, it’s worth it. The screen is big enough for my aging eyes to do research, and the S Pen is perfect for highlighting passages in Microsoft OneNote or elsewhere. When I pair it with a keyboard, it doesn’t quite feel like using a PC, but more than enough for typing away from home.
Unless you’re tied to an iPhone X, or just don’t want the fastest Android available, I can’t think of a reason not to buy this phone unless you want to hang out with what you have now. The Galaxy Note 10 is due out later this year.
But I guess it will cost a little over 1KB …
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