Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Hands-On By Engadget

From, the very beginning, Samsung has looked at its line of Galaxy Note smartphones as a place to push some boundaries, big screens curved LED panels, styluses that are actually worth a damn. They all started with the Galaxy Note and barring one shall we say explosive exception. They've all been phenomenal smartphones for people who wanted the best Samsung had to offer this year's new Galaxy Note 9 keeps that tradition going with a lot of updated hardware, but for the first time in what feels like ages, Samsung has made some serious improvements to the Galaxy Notes signature feature the s-pen we'll get to that a little later. For now, let's start with the basics. The Galaxy Note 9 looks a lot like last year's excellent Note 8, with a few notable exceptions. The rear mounted fingerprint sensor sits beneath the phone's dual camera instead of off to the side.

So it's a lot easier to blindly reach for, and this year's model comes in a subdued, lavender and a deep ocean blue. No matter what color speaks to you: you'll get the same gorgeous six point: four inch: Super AMOLED screen running at quad, HD, a set of AKG tune speakers and a four thousand William battery. That's not the biggest we've seen in a smartphone this year, but it is the biggest Samsung has ever squeezed into a Galaxy Note. All versions of the Galaxy Note 9 also use Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, but Samsung has done plenty of work here to crank up the phone's performance even more for one. The company worked a little algorithmic fine-tuning into the GPU for more power in games like fortnight, which surprise will be available first for Samsung Galaxy owners and since phones throttle their performance when they get too warm Samsung created the note 9 with a larger heat spreader and what they call a water carbon cooling system.

It pushes minute amounts of water around inside the phone to help manage heat levels. In fairness, we really didn't have much time to stress test the note 9, but it does run tremendously fast, and we're honestly really looking forward to seeing how well it handles all the games and the weirdo scenarios we'll throw at it during our full review process. With all that said, not all Galaxy Note nines are created equal. The basic model comes with 6 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage, which is by the way double the storage. We got in the baseline note 8 lat year and then there's what I like to call the Galaxy Note 9 overkill edition, with 8 gigs of ram and a whopping 512 gigs of storage right out of the box.

Since 512 gig micros cards are a thing you can easily push this note line up to a full terabyte of storage. Do you need that? No, you don't, but I know. Some of you are already thinking about it. Meanwhile, the Note nines dual camera is basically a carbon copy of the one we got in a galaxy s, 9 plus, if you haven't used one before. Let me just be frank: that's a good thing.

There's a 12 megapixel wide-angle sensor and a 12 megapixel telephoto sensor, squeezed into the phone's back both have optical image. Stabilization ND, wide-angle camera that you're, probably going to use most often has Samsung's clever, dual aperture. It switches between F, 1.5 and F 2.4. Depending on how much light there is around you and, as usual, you can switch between the two manually in Pro Mode. This time the biggest improvements to the camera are purely in software, just like Huawei and LG before it Samsung tricked out the note 9 with an AI based scene, optimizers, let's say: you're shooting a photo of some flowers or a tray of food within mere moments of 21:09.

At your subject, it'll recognize what it's looking at and tweak the contrast and saturation of the resulting photo you'll get a handy preview of what that idealized image looks like under camera display before you even take that shot. Also, new here is a new flaw. Detection feature that quickly warns you when the phone thinks the photo was less than ideal like if a person in front of the camera is blinking or if the lens is smudgy or gross. Let's be honest, though, for all the new stuff Samsung crammed into the note 9, the updates to its trusty s-pen just might be the most valuable see all the Handy writing features. We've grown used to are still here.

You can use the pen to doodle on the screen or translate text or create weird old, live messages to span you're friends with now, though, the s-pen isn't just a pen, it's a Bluetooth remote that works from up to 30 feet away. Yeah, I know we were skeptical too, but here is the thing. It is remarkably helpful by default a long press on the S pen's button launches the camera app and from there a double click switches between the front and rear cameras and a single click snaps a photo since Min gadgets, raining lies selfie champion the ability to frame up my most heinous angles and snap a photo with the pen, in my other hand, is just fantastic, even better. The S pen's button does different things inside different apps, so you can thumb through photos in your gallery and even toggle voice recordings just by clicking those buttons. The improved S Pen might not sound fascinating to everyone, but I am a huge fan.

Now the S Pen isn't just a tool for writing on a screen which I probably was never going to do anyway. Its remote that ties into other apps with surprising elegance and with any luck after Vela Birds, will run with Samsung's SDK and make their own software playing nice with it. With all that said, the S Pen really does feel like the star of the show. Here it elevates an experience that already seemed to really solid to start with, we'll have to test the Galaxy Note 9 more before we deliver our final verdict, but all of a sudden, it seems like the Galaxy Note just might be ready to break out of its niche.

Source : Engadget