Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Review: Lives up to the Hype By Engadget

The biggest B's Lea's phone of the year is here and the Galaxy Note nine lives up to lofty expectations, and I'm, not normally a fan of such huge phones. But the note 9 is starting to win me over. You might be thinking you don't need an S Pen, because you're, not an artist or a note taker, but Samsung taught thee, has been a few new tricks this year. That makes it a lot more useful for the rest of us now. You also may be thinking that you don't need such a high spec phone, but no one's going to be able to argue with a faster phone and a longer-lasting battery. The note and I might still have a few crooks here and there, but overall this is shaping up to be one of my favorite phones this year.

Many of the note 9s improvements are performance related and can be hard to demonstrate, but the s-pen updates are so compelling I kept showing them off to people. Yes, Samsung stylus has long been a hallmark of the note series, but this year the company made it so much more useful by adding a Bluetooth, low-energy module to the s-pen and a super capacitor to provide power. Samsung turns the pen into a full-fledged remote control by the faults, long pressing, the S Pen button launches the camera app. Although you can change this to any other app, you want in the settings double-clicking. It changes between the front and rear cameras and then click once to snap a photo.

It's incredibly handy and honestly is such a joy to be able to set the phone down somewhere or hold it up at otherwise more awkward, further off more extreme angles and still be able to trigger the shutter button without having to fumble for the volume button or otherwise. Introducing blur people have argued that this is redundant, that you can easily set a timer or use the open palm gesture to trigger the selfie camera, but with the s-pen remote control, you can do so much more think, higher-quality selfies, with the rear, camera and switching cameras from afar. You can use the s-pen from up to 30 feet away, giving you plenty of room to work with I could go for days about the benefits here. Let's be real, though any feature that makes taking selfies easier is going to have me sold, but the new remote controls can do so much more like skip through slides in a presentation or tracks in a Spotify playlist in Chrome. You can press once to go back a page and twice to go forward.

When actions are available, a pen badge starts to alert you and hovering over it with the pen tells you what they are. Some of these integrations are less useful than others. Going back in chrome is easier with the on-screen button, for example, in addition to Samsung and Google and Microsoft's apps, only two of my third-party apps offer S Pen remote controls right now, hopefully, with time more developers will use Samsung's as decay to integrate this feature new remote controls aside. The then is still super useful for taking notes and sketching on the go drawing with it. On the note, 9s beautiful 6.4-inch screen is fluid and responsive and all the useful screen off memo and Air Command features are still here. The stylus now comes any color that matches its handset.

As you can see, my lavender note, 9 has a purple S Pen and the blue model has a neon, yellow stylus that pops like a highlighter. Although the S Pen has a super capacitor to power that Bluetooth low-energy module, you can still use it to draw even without a charge. After about 40 minutes, I start getting low battery notifications from the S Pen, but that just means the remote controls. Would it work? I could still draw and use air command without a problem. Samsung's done a good job of adding a new feature without messing up existing tools.

Here, the same can be said of the note: knives cameras, Hardware wise. You will find the setup here similar to the s 9, plus it has two 12 megapixel sensors, one with a telephoto lens and the other a wide-angle. The telephoto camera has the dual aperture feature from the s 9 plus, which opens up to F 1.5 to let in more light, but Samsung added something it calls scene optimizer, which is basically its version of Huawei's and LG's AI photography feature when you point the note 9 at something it will recognize what it's looking at and tweak the camera settings accordingly point it at food, for instance, and it bumps up saturation, look at flowers, and it sharpens the details on the bud. The note and I will identify about 20 scenes and a badge appears on the viewfinder to tell you what it thinks it sees. The changes the AI applied were generally subtle, especially in comparison with Huawei's, which overdoes it on saturation.

Sometimes it's nice that the AI isn't very obtrusive, but it's hardly a game-changer. The note 9 already takes pretty great pictures without its help. It delivers rich colors and crisp details, although it still lags the pixel to on color accuracy. I prefer the pictures from the hallway p20 pro for things like food or portraits, because the larger aperture here makes focusing on close-up subjects easier. I was more impressed with Samsung's flaw detection feature, which tells you when it thinks someone in your picture has blamed or if your image is blurry and suggest you take another shot.

Furthermore, I deliberately closed my eyes and a few of these pictures and the note night never failed to recommend another shot. Furthermore, I do as the alerts are more precise. Instead of specifically pointing out your subject, it's backlit or your lens may have been smeared. The notification simply says your photo may have been blurry. Fans of slo-mo will be happy to find.

The note and I can still record clips at 960 frames per second, although Samsung hasn't made it easier to use them before I missed an opportunity to capture sparklers on a birthday cake, because I thought I was done after hitting the record button, but actually had to make sure there was movement in a demarcated box for slo-mo to kick in, oh well for a regular video. You can record it up to 4k resolution at 60fps and not an HDR despite the phone's Snapdragon, a 45 chip which supports that speaking of the Snapdragon 845, together with the six gigs of ram on board, makes the note 9 an absolute multitasking Beast. It's fast, it's responsive, my Instagram feed was ready. Basically, the second I opened the app and YouTube videos loaded almost instantly. The bottleneck here is going to be your provider, not the phone on the left.

Here is the OnePlus six, with the same Snapdragon, a forty-five and six weeks of RAM, and you notice that when they're downloading the same game on here at the same time, the note 9 is just significantly faster, just take a look: they both had the same Snapdragon, a 45 chipset, the same six gigs of ram, and they're using the same Wi-Fi network, I disabled, the mobile data on the note 9 and the OnePlus 6th doesn't have a SIM card. So really it all boils down to somehow Samsung was tuned. This Wi-Fi radio, to just be so much faster graphics, were smooth as I blindly stumbled around looking for opponents to destroy and fortnight, but the phone definitely felt significantly warmer after just a few minutes. It wasn't uncomfortable, but I noticed it. Meanwhile, the note nines four thousand William hour battery lived up to expectations.

Not only did the phone last about two whole days on average use, but it also hit more than fifteen hours on our video rundown test slightly longer than the note eight, an iPhone 8 plus then there's the stuff I've already come to expect and love about. The note. Phones like a big bright screen, a slim elegant design and impressive water resistance, but there are a number of things: I'm, not impressed with the note.9 was shipped with Android Oreo, which is about a year-old Andrew PI has already started rolling out to the public, and it's not yet clear when Samsung intends to push the update out for the note 9. Another feature borrowed from the s9 is intelligent skin, which blends face recognition and iris detection for convenient, hands-free logins. Unfortunately, it's still proved to be an unreliable way to unlock the phone.

It often didn't recognize my eyes or my face. Thankfully, the fingerprint sensor on the weir serves as a handy. Alternative. I am NOT a fan of decks mode, but I appreciate that Samsung has made it easier to access instead of having to buy or carry around a dock. You can just plug the note 9 into an external display, via a separate HDMI, to USB-C converter, to use the phone like a PC.

Finally, Bigamy is still kind of mess. The features Samsung showed off at its keynote, like integrating third-party app results without first having to install the apps didn't work at every step. Bigamy had to ask me for permission to use the app. It would also randomly pull up completely unrelated apps like flight stats, when they asked for directions to the office. Hi Bixby show me the best Chinese restaurants in the area.

Waffle number one fast-food well done- also good job. Tell me a joke. Just tell me a joke which of these three search terms, never mind compose a tweet as Samsung stress. This is pre-release software. For Bixby, hopefully, it'll be a lot better by the time the phones arrive on August 24th, but we're not holding our breaths still.

None of these things are deal-breakers they're, mostly optional features that you can avoid on a daily basis. What's harder to swallow? Is the price at $1,000? So note, 9 is one of the most expensive phones around buy compared to the iPhone 10. The no 9 gives you much more for the money you get: a bigger, better screen, more storage, a longer-lasting battery, a stylus and theoretically, better LTE speeds, and when carriers fully deploy their gigabit LTE networks. The note 9 is a satisfying update that will please power users and with this new S Pen features it even has the potential to appeal to a more mainstream audience. Samsung only needs to iron out a few quirks, looking at your big feet and push out its Android Pi update for this to be the best phone I've seen all year.

Source : Engadget