Samsung announced the Galaxy S9 on Sunday at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona. Whether you’re a Galaxy S8 owner or you’ve been keeping up with the S9 rumors, little about Samsung’s new smartphone is new.
The biggest advancement in the Galaxy S9 is the camera. Samsung said the new camera could outperform its own Galaxy S8, which was one of the best smartphone cameras you could buy. With some improved camera tech, the Galaxy S9’s camera has the potential to take on the Google Pixel 2 as the best smartphone camera.
Design:
Much like the Galaxy S9 has a 5.8-inch quad-HD AMOLED display with a tall 18:9 aspect ratio, which is now pretty standard among the top flagship smartphones. The Galaxy S9 has a 6.2-inch quad-HD AMOLED display, also with an 18:9 aspect ratio.
The Galaxy S9 will be hard to beat in low-light photography:
Samsung boasts that the Galaxy S9 will have a dual-aperture camera that will help with low-light camera performance. It’ll also perform better in well-lit settings. Both new devices have a wide f/1.5 unaware of a smartphone with a wider aperture.
If the Galaxy S9 only had a wide f/1.5 aperture, it could potentially allow too much light for brighter settings, and photos could come out overexposed and void of detail. As part of the dual-aperture system, the Galaxy S9 camera aperture can narrow down to f/2.4 for brighter settings. You can adjust the aperture width in the Galaxy S9’s camera app in pro mode, too.
The Galaxy S9 has the potential to take even better photos than any previous Galaxy S8 smartphone:
Samsung’s dual-pixel sensor introduced in the Galaxy S7 is one of the best in the business for taking fast, sharp, clear photos. Samsung built upon the existing dual-pixel sensor and gave the Galaxy S9’s camera its own memory, which could lead to even sharper and clearer photos.
With the existing dual-pixel system, previous Galaxy devices used the phone’s main memory to take three photos in quick succession and combine them to make a crisp focused photo. With the Galaxy succession to combine into a single photo.
The Galaxy S9 models can also record super slow-motion video at insane 960 frames per second:
That means you can slow down your action shots to an incredible extent. But slow-motion at 960 frames per second only works with 720p HD resolution.
For 1080p resolution, Samsung has bumped up the slow-motion up to 240 frames per second to match the iPhone 8 and iPhone X’s slow-motion camera.
Samsung also introduced its new AR Emoji that can turn your face into an emoji:
Using the front or rear camera, the Galaxy S9 can map 100 different facial features and turn your face into an animated emoji. It can track your expressions, and you can record up to 18 different animations to use in your messages. This seems to be Samsung’s answer to the Animoji feature on the iPhone X.
It runs on the Snapdragon 845 chip from mobile chipmaker Qualcomm:
The new Snapdragon 845 chip from Qualcomm should bring snappy and seamless performance to the Galaxy S9 phones.
The phone will have stereo sound:
Samsung added an extra speaker in the Galaxy S9’s earpiece for stereo sound, both speakers are tuned by audio company AKG. It should make for louder and clearer loudspeaker phone calls and audio from music and videos.
The Galaxy S9 will also come with wired AKG earphones that plug into a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. As more high-end smartphones follow Apple’s lead by eliminating the standard headphone jack, Samsung continues to keep the port. Samsung also added Dolby Atmos to the Galaxy S9 for any content that-mostly movies-supports Dolby Atmos.
New Features:
- It features improved cameras, an artificial intelligence-powered voice tool, and social media functions that are easier to deploy than previous offerings.
- New features include an automatic super-slow motion camera setting that looks primed to show up on Instagram feed soon and software that turns selfies into instant emojis.
- Analyst Ben Wood from CCS Insight said the S9 and larger-screened S9 Plus were all about incremental gain over the S8.
- The S9 underlines the dilemma all leading smartphone makers are facing. Innovation in smartphones has plateaued and now it is all about marginal gains be that screen technology, camera features, and processing power.
- This is potentially a tough sell for Samsung but the real goal of the S9 is making an already good product even better as Samsung takes the fight to Apple.
- But he expected Huawei to launch highly competitive new smartphone differentiated by the use of more advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies and more aggressive pricing.