The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a little bigger, a little more colorful, and a little more powerful than all prior Note phones, but be warned: it’s a little more expensive, too.It’s the biggest Android phone that will grab your attention in 2018, with a sizeable 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display, a huge 4,000mAh battery for all-day performance, and up to 512GB of internal storage and 8GB of RAM.
Slot in a 512GB microSD card (which Samsung will gladly sell you), and you can have the first mainstream 1TB phone in your hands. That's bigger than a lot of laptops.Good news – the Note 9 doesn’t actually feel any bigger than last year’s 6.3-inch Note 8, and it inherits a bunch of this year’s 5.8-inch Galaxy S9 and 6.2-inch Galaxy S9 Plus features, including camera specs. It takes the best photos on a Samsung phone, only outpaced by the newer Google Pixel 3 and Google Pixel 3 XL in our tests.
Exclusive to the Note 9 camera are automatic scene optimizer and flaw detection features that enhance photos (though, Samsung has a habit of rolling these features out to older phones later on, so hang tight if you have an S9 or S9 Plus).
The camera here is noticeably better than the Note 8, with a dual 12MP rear setup that has dual-aperture technology, and can record Super Slow Mo videos. There are stereo speakers, and the less-than-impressive AR Emoji mode is back with some finer avatar customizations. Rest assured, AR Emoji will still look nothing like you.
The S Pen is still a handy tool for jotting down notes, but it now has Bluetooth for remote-controlled shortcuts that are customizable (unlike the annoying Bixby button that you can't even turn off anymore). Want to pose for a photo 30 feet away? This S Pen can help you do that and more. It works great, but you may have trouble finding a spot to rest your precious and expensive Note 9 for full-body snapshots. We ended up with a lot of shots at bad camera angles, so it's a good idea on paper, but doesn't always work out like we first envisioned.
Bad news – the price feels much bigger. Get ready to pay iPhone XS-level prices for the entry-level 128GB and 6GB model. Ouch. It's meant for power users, according to Samsung – the physical size, storage size, price, and battery capacity all tell us that. It sees Note 9 buyers as people who spend a lot of time on their phone and want the best of the best – they buy the best AV receiver, the best TV, and so forth.
Talking of Samsung's chief competition, the Note 9 price mpw rivals that of Apple’s flagship handsets, rather than undercutting it as we'd hoped from an Android phone.
The Note 9 price is $1,000 (£899 / AU$1,499 / AED 3,699) with 128GB of internal storage and 6GB of RAM, and $1,250 (£1,099 / $AU1,799 / AED 4,599) for 512GB and 8GB of RAM.
Yes, that entry-level 128GB configuration does double the iPhone X's 64GB of storage for the same price, and is therefore a better value. But it's also a hike of $70 (£30) over the Note 8 launch price and $150 (£30, AU$150) more than the launch price of the Galaxy S9 Plus, a very similar smartphone. So it depends on how you look at it, and where you live.
In the US, Samsung will sell the phone unlocked and also through carriers like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. Pre-orders in the US opened on August 10 with Note 9 bundle deals. You'll either get a free Fortnite Galaxy Skin and 15,000 V-bucks or AKG N60 Noise Cancelling Headphones (or both for $99).
Note 9 colors in the US are Ocean Blue with a yellow S Pen (it also writes in yellow for the ultimate color contrast) and Lavender Purple with a purple pen (which writes in purple digital ink). In the UK it's available in those two colors plus Midnight Black, while the colors for Australia have been confirmed as Ocean Blue and Midnight Black. Other regions may get a Copper color, we were told by Samsung – colors are region-dependent.
New S Pen magic tricks
The new S Pen is this year's big gimmick for the Note, and it's capable of performing Bluetooth-connected magic tricks from up to 30 feet away. Samsung's engineers managed to squeeze a small supercapacitor and tiny Bluetooth Low-Energy antenna into the otherwise unchanged stylus so that it can perform various remote functions. It’s the type of gimmick we ended up liking – sometimes.
What can you do exactly? The best feature is being able to remotely launch the camera app with a long press of the S Pen button, flip the camera to selfie mode with a single short press, and snap a group photo with two presses. It’s much easier than setting the camera timer, which Samsung hid in the camera settings menu last year, and less awkward than waving your hand in front of the lens to trigger the gesture-initiated camera timer.
Samsung is making S Pen shortcuts customizable. Here are the ideas mentioned:
- Camera: Flip the camera / take a photo
- Camera: Flip the camera / record a video
- Music Player: Play and pause music / skip to the next track
- Photo Gallery: Advance to the next photo / cycle back to a previous photo
- PowerPoint: back and forth through presentation slides
There's also a helpful S Pen battery indicator in the notification shade at the top of the display, so you won't be kept guessing as to how much power you have left. And we found that keeping the S Pen topped up was much easier than charging the iPad's Apple Pencil.
The Ocean Blue Note 9 has the more dynamic yellow S Pen for a nice contrast. It writes in yellow digital ink, while the Lavender Purple phone has a purple pen and purple digital ink.All colors support the same Air Command functionality. You can draw, jot down notes, annotate screenshots, translate foreign text, and send Live Messages (last year's S Pen gimmick), and you can do these actions whether or not the S Pen is charged. Shortcuts like snapping selfies remotely can ‘unlock a whole different level of photography’, according to Samsung, and while that sounds useful for dramatic selfies (the example given is laying tired on the couch and taking a hands-free photo), the business-class Note 9 may not be the right audience for that.
Everyone can benefit from the Galaxy Note 9 screen-off memo feature. It's not a Bluetooth functionality or even new (it appeared on the ill-fated Note 7), but it deserves a mention. Pop the S Pen out of the Note 9 when the screen is off and it'll automatically launch a note-taking interface against a black background
We're thankful that all screen-off memos save automatically, but we found a bug (or at least an oversight) with the yellow ink exclusive to the Blue Ocean phone: our notes look fine against the black lock screen background, but save to S Notes, which uses a white background when you open up the app and retrieve your notes, and the text is hard to make out – black would be a lot clearer here
Post a Comment