Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Preview – Improvements especially for the enthusiast

Since it is still quite a task to get a good overview of the specifications of the predecessors of the Note 9 and the dead-painted alternative, the S9+, we will first list the most important specifications in an overview.

S Pen

Let’s start with the points where the Note 9 is still distinctive. The most obvious point is, of course, the S Pen. This is now equipped with bluetooth, so that there is actually technology in the baton. However, Bluetooth does not work on air, so some energy must be stored in the pin. However, there is no regular battery in the S Pen, but a low energy supercapacitor, or capacitor. Enough energy can be stored in it to make the pen work for half an hour, according to Samsung. You could also completely top it off in forty seconds if you put it in the housing, but we were not able to test that.

What we have been able to experience is what the pen can now do thanks to the Bluetooth connection. For example, you start the camera app by default by pressing the button on the S Pen. With a second press of the button you take a photo and by pressing twice you switch to selfie mode. For us that worked pretty smoothly during the hands-on and it should work up to ten meters away. In addition, you can now also click through presentations with the pen. With a second press of the button you go back one slide . We can imagine that this is useful for many Note users in combination with DeX, more about that later.

The S Pen also has useful functions in other apps. For example, you can browse through photos in the gallery app and if you press the button twice, go to the previous photo. With YouTube, for example, it works to pause a video or skip to the next video . Of course, you are still dependent on the app makers, who have to build the functionality of the S Pen into their app. In any case, Samsung has issued an SDK that app makers can use.

Other options in the software still allow you to copy and paste notes you’ve taken with the S Pen. That works a lot better than copying and pasting with your finger. The option to take notes with the stylus when the screen is off is of course still present and you can pin the notes to the always-on screen. You can also still write Live Messages and combine them with the AR Emoji, which look more detailed on the Note 9 than on the S9 series.

Other upgrades

Besides the S Pen, there is probably another advantage of the Note 9 over the S9+ and Note 8. In our review, we were disappointed that the battery life of the S9 series turned out to be less than that of the S8 series, which are both have 3500mAh battery capacity. With the Note 8, Samsung kept it on the cautious side, after the problems with the exploding Note 7 series, by putting a battery with only 3300mAh in the device. This time, however, Samsung has chosen to put a larger battery in this smartphone than ever before, with a 4000mAh battery capacity. It can of course not be tested during a preview session, but we suspect that it scores a lot better than the Note 8 in our battery tests, but also than the S9 +. After all, the software is globally the same, the soc is the same as that of the S9+,

Another striking difference between the Note 8, the S9+ and the Note 9 is the maximum storage capacity. The Note 8 was only available,  a version with 64GB and the S9+ has versions with 64 and 256GB. However, you can also purchase the Note 9 with 512GB of storage memory, which you can also expand with a micro SD card of up to 512GB. So if you really want to have your whole life on your smartphone, then that might be possible with the Note 9. With that version you also get 8GB of RAM, but it costs no less than 1249 euros and is only available in black. The other variant has 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. This is also not cheap at 999 euros and available in blue, black and lilac. Still, it hasn’t gone up in price compared to the Note 8.

Although the Note 9 still has an ip68 waterproof rating, there is water in the device according to Samsung. Underneath the processor is a water-based cooling system. Although we still have little technical information about this, this should result in a much more constant temperature of the soc. Such a system has been used before, including by Microsoft in a Lumia and by Xiaomi in a ‘gaming phone’.

According to Samsung, this water cooling has two advantages. The first is that you get a much more constant frame rate when gaming, because it prevents throttling. With the announcement that Fortnite will be exclusively playable on Note 9 and Galaxy Tab S4, as it won’t be on the Google Play Store, gaming is clearly a focus of Samsung for the Note 9.

A second advantage of the water cooling is that with the Note 9 you don’t need a DeX dock to run the desktop interface. The dock has a fan to cool the phone, but it has become obsolete. As a result, you can simply connect an HDMI-to-USB-C dongle from Samsung or another party between your Note 9 and your monitor, and you’re done. You can then use the Note as a trackpad and, for example, while watching a video on the monitor, simply use your Note 9 next to it. We tried it and it worked very smoothly, but in the time we had we didn’t stress the system out too much.

The iris scanner is still present on the Note 9 and, in our opinion, did not work better or faster than the one on the S9+. The fingerprint scanner is a lot nicer. Not that it is faster or more accurate, but it is a lot more accessible. It is now directly below the camera, while it was next to the camera with the Note 8. Because it is in the middle and a little further down, you can easily find it.

In the appearance of the Note 9 you can see one striking difference when you hold it next to the Note 8. Between the rounded metal sides and the glass, a plane has been ground around the device, both at the front and at the back.

Same same, but different

Furthermore, many things have remained the same with the Note 9. The housing is not very different from the Note 8, for example. The device is a fraction wider and thicker, and also a fraction shorter. The bezels above and below the beautiful OLED screen are therefore slightly smaller and the side bezels slightly larger. That’s fine, because the height of the device is potentially more annoying in practice, for example in your pocket, than the width or thickness. The Note 9 is also marginally heavier. Yet these are minimal changes that you hardly notice in practice. The screen is also almost the same, although it is officially 0.1″ larger, and Samsung stands firm: no notch. We held the Note 8 next to the Note 9 and the difference is almost imperceptible. The speakers are also exactly the same as the one in the S9+.

The Note 9’s cameras are physically the same as the S9+. There are two cameras on the back. The primary has a variable aperture, and the other is for portrait mode and zooming relative to the other camera, due to having a lens that is more ‘tele’. We did find a difference in the camera app. The Note 9 has scene recognition, which we have seen with more devices lately. He recognizes twenty different scenes, such as mountains, flowers and water. We could only test this in the hands-on room on paintings that were hung in the room for that purpose, but Samsung has of course tested these extensively in advance. As a result, we can only say at the review how well it works.