The new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 + were presented yesterday during an event organized on the occasion of the Mobile World Congress, the world's most important mobile phone fair held every year in Barcelona, Spain. The two new smartphones will have the not easy task of competing directly with the iPhones, but above all of repeating the successes achieved in 2017 by their predecessors: the Galaxy S8 and S8 +, which helped relaunch the Samsung brand and make people forget the disaster of the Galaxy Note 7, with their explosive defective batteries. The Galaxy S9 and S9 + are clear heirs of last year's models: Samsung has worked to refine and improve them, keeping more or less the same formats.
Design
Especially the Galaxy S9 is aesthetically just like the Galaxy S8, almost indistinguishable at first glance. Samsung says it has worked to make the screen better, which almost completely covers the front of the phone except for two thin black bands at the top and bottom. The screen is of the Super AMOLED type with a resolution of 2960 x 1440 pixels, the same also available on the larger S9 +, but the features are a little different from those of the previous models: they offer more brightness and some improvements to the color range. The Galaxy S9's screen is 5.8-inch, while that of the S9 + is 6.2-inch. The sizes of the phones are also slightly different than the S8 and S8 +, so accessories such as the covers are not compatible with the new models.
Camera
The most interesting novelty, and on which Samsung focused more during the presentation, is the rear camera (the main one) from 12 megapixels, completely redesigned. For the first time, it has a variable, non-fixed aperture, which allows it to better manage the amount of light hitting the sensor, and therefore to more accurately adjust the exposure of photographs. The aperture can be f / 1.5 or f / 2.4 depending on the lighting conditions. There are no intermediate values, and the transition from one aperture to another is handled automatically by the camera application, or manually at the user's discretion.
Samsung has also revised the camera sensor to make image processing faster and more accurate. Other measures concern the use of a renewed “dual-pixel” system, to focus objects faster. On the Galaxy S9 and S9 +, a new function for slow motion shooting has also been added, with the possibility of shooting at 960 frames per second.
On the Galaxy S9 + the camera is instead double, as has been the case for some time now on smartphones of that size (Apple does the same thing with some of its iPhones and Google with the Pixel XL). The dual lens allows you to shoot with a minimum of zoom and to obtain various effects, such as close-ups in which the background is clearly blurred. However, the aperture on the S9 + is fixed at f / 2.4.
AR Emoji
The front camera of both new Galaxy is 8 megapixel, with similar characteristics to those of last year. In addition to taking selfies, it is used to produce the “AR Emoji”, Samsung's answer to Apple's Animoji. In practice, you take a photograph and then a facial recognition software transforms your image into a sort of avatar-emoji, which can be customized in various ways. AR Emoji can then be animated and shared within your messages. The system for making these sorts of caricatures works quite well, but is not as accurate and precise on the reconstruction of movements as it is on the iPhone X with Animoji.
What's inside
As far as power and resources are concerned, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 + are a more powerful version of the smartphones that preceded them. They work thanks to various types of processors, depending on the markets in which they are sold: Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 or Exynos, processors made directly by Samsung. The S9 has 4GB of RAM, while the S9 + has 6. They both have 64GB of memory, which can be extended using a microSD card. The battery is 3,000 mAh for the S9 and 3,500 for the S9 +. Samsung says that with the various energy saving systems, a single charge can be enough for more than a day, but as usual a lot depends on the use made of it.
Android and more
The new Galaxy S9 and S9 + use Android 8.0 (Oreo), but with a strong customization by Samsung, which has added features and other applications. Their presence can sometimes be confusing, because in fact it proposes features already available with the standard Android apps. Despite the criticisms received so far for poor performance and reliability, the Bixby personal assistant continues to exist on new phones and promises new integrations with other Samsung gadgets and applications. Bixby does few things and is not comparable to the quality achieved by the Google Assistant, but Samsung believes it can improve and for now appears to be determined to give its assistant new opportunities.
Pricing and availability
In the coming months the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 + will compete directly with the latest iPhone models, presented in the fall by Apple and which have received extremely high reviews positive. The prices place the two new smartphones in the same category. The Galaxy S9 costs € 899, while the Galaxy S9 + is priced at € 990, for models with 64GB of memory. The 256 GB version exists only for the Galaxy S9 + and costs 999 euros. The new smartphones will be available in stores from mid-March, while on the Samsung website they can be booked and purchased in advance.
