this is a look at my morning with the samsung galaxy s9
i wake up very good time am i always on OLED
display and hit the snooze button
just like i did with my s8
i eat breakfast and read the news silently appreciating the tall 18 and a
half by nine aspect ratio just left by good with my ass right
i grabbed my keys and jacket and asked bixby what my schedule for the
day oh man no no i'm just kidding about that
last one but but but seriously as someone who legitimately loves the
galaxy s8 what exactly do the s9 and the s9 plus
apparent carbon copies of the last gen
really change and does any of it matter
let's find out after i tell you today's video is
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okay so
here are the improvements to the s9 family on paper
you get a faster octocore processor of the snapdragon or exynos variety
depending on your region some more memory but only on the plus a brighter
screen a bump to maximum cellular data rates and a camera with two yes two
aperture sizes and then all of this other stuff is
basically the same with some of it like thickness appearing to get worse
so this means by my calculations here the days of
big generational improvements to cell phones
these are officially over however
unlike a lot of the tech press i am not going to crucify samsung over
this the s8 and the s8 plus are a year
old now and still competitive with much newer devices like
the 5t from no longer that budget brand oneplus even
if the pixel 2 and the iphone 10 have edged them out in dxomark and besides
while the improvements are small a lot of them are pretty meaningful
so in order of importance to me personally one the audio setup is great
and i'm sure there are discerning audiophiles out there who take exception
to samsung's choice of dac but as far as
i'm concerned the retention of the headphone jack at all and the inclusion
of an amplified earphone speaker that gives me stereo sound on the better than
ever OLED super wide display make the s9
and especially the plus variant the ideal movie watching phones period
second and this is a close second is the camera even if
in practical terms the difference between f 1.5 and f 2.4 physical
apertures is less than it sounds like
with how wide the main shooter's lens is you're not gonna suddenly see like a
huge difference in true boca past you
know six inches away like you would on a real dslr you're still relying on
software selective focus on the s9 and
dual capture with processing on the s9 plus which is better than this one but
still has issues with that said it is
still more than a full stop meaning that at
1.5 a lot more light hits the sensor
physically while at 2.4 the image should
be sharper letting samsung in theory have their cake and eat it too
now subjectively the pixel 2 xl's color processing looks more true to life to me
here here here here and
well in most situations but
this is a characteristic of the samsung camera experience that i've mostly come
to accept especially if i get something worthwhile back in exchange and i do
this challenging high contrast shot in direct sunlight reveals that one
modern phone cameras are getting really good across the board and two that when
we do pixel peep the s9 whether you love
or hate their more aggressive sharpening filter captures more detail
and in this shot of my cat sleeping next to me in bed the iphone 10 holds up
reasonably well but the pixel 2 gets curb stomped i mean for some of you this
is probably a meaningless edge case but i'm not a wannabe photographer i just
like capturing cute pictures when i'm spending time with my kids and because i
live in raincover six months out of the year that takes place inside my house a
perpetually dim environment thanks to my dark floors so it makes a really big
difference to me moving on to the fingerprint sensor location this never
really bothered me on the s8 however on the s8 plus and on the note 8
next to the camera up there is basically unusable with my small hands so the s9
plus is an enormous improvement
then the last big one for me is the structural changes that samsung has made
under the hood the new phones are made of more durable aluminum with thicker
glass giving them spectacular rigidity
other than a dbrand skin i prefer no
protection and so it's comforting to know that my chances of surviving a drop
are better but some trade-offs were made here the
increase in weight won't be noticeable to any but the
daintiest users but in spite of a
thickness jump the battery capacity of
both models is unchanged from last year now samsung
has been quoted as saying that their eight-point battery check will give the
s9 family 95 of their day one battery
life after two years and if that holds true then that's swell
or not as it were but as a heavy user the
s8 had middling battery life from the get-go once all my stuff was installed
so i'm on the pixel 2 xl my galaxy s8
something i have installed on it is making the battery drain really fast i
haven't had the time to deal with it as much as i loved the form factor i just
couldn't keep using it so
my new daily driver is going to have to be the s9 plus then
and that's about it pretty much every other complaint that i
have about this phone is either in software or has a simple solution like
the bixby button nothing personal against bixby she can actually do some
really cool stuff that it baffles me that google assistant and siri can't do
you can actually do much more advanced things like this go to the home screen
boom but the placement of this button
directly opposite the lock button was and still is an ergonomic disaster
however samsung supports disabling it outright
and you can use third-party software to remap it now intelligent scan where the
phone chooses iris or facial recognition
depending on the scenario isn't as consistent as face id
but it doesn't have to be because they
didn't pull off the fingerprint reader
you can just use whatever you want which
honestly for me is like okay look here
did you know that the s9 has nine yes
nine different ways to take a selfie
now most of them are weird gimmicks that i never used and neither will you
but i guess that's the samsung experience in a nutshell
packed full of features some of which are seemingly random like
do you guys remember that thing they were doing where the screen would scroll
with your eyes and then this year's half-baked
inclusion is a crude rip-off of animojis but but with lots of things that are
great panorama selfies so that i can fit all
of my friends in the frame awesome faster fingerprint registration
with a swipe well it doesn't come up very often but heck yeah landscape mode
on the home screen like a tablet why did that take so long
launching two apps and split screen from a single button sure why not
well okay actually i can think of one reason why not so that you could have
your software team spending more time maintaining the latest software on your
existing devices instead of creating fluff that no one
asked for the s7 is still in the testing
phase for Android 8.0 oreo just one year ago that was samsung's
flagship phone think about that
so the s9 looks solid especially at the
unlocked price and the s9 plus gets a straight up recommendation to buy i
would take it over the more expensive no date for sure
but with the caveat that until samsung makes
a real commitment to support at the very
least its flagship devices the way that apple does
i can only unequivocally recommend them to people
who upgrade every couple of years and they're never going to truly stand
out from other Android manufacturers until they address this which
given the way that they're catching up in key areas like camera image quality
means that samsung you guys got to be paying attention because the window is
closing on finding a new way to differentiate
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kind of messed up my outro there that's okay
i don't think anyone cares does anyone still watching at this point
okay feel good
so we still have the green screen and