Want a bigger, powerful, feature rich and most productive smartphone? Well, Samsung has officially unveiled the latest entry to its Note series, the Galaxy Note9. The phablet got everything packed to be called the super premium android smartphone of 2018. It got a premium build, top-notch hardware, intelligent camera, new feature-rich S Pen and a bigger battery that could churn out enough power for the big beast.
With bumping of specifications, the price has also touched the premium roof-top. The Samsung Galaxy Note9 starts at around $1,000 (approximately Rs 68,900). Well, you can possibly justify the price to an extent counting its features. The company has yet to reveal the launch plans for India.
Design, Display, Performance
Samsung Galaxy Note9 is sort of an increment upgrade over its hugely successful predecessor Galaxy Note8, with improved hardware and feature lists. The mobile embraces the Infinity Display with its bezel-less design, full-frontal and the edge-to-edge screen. It closely resembles Galaxy S9 or the Galaxy S9+ but with a slightly enlarged body. The whole body is so secure that, it got an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance. For colour choices, you could choose from Ocean Blue, Midnight Black, Lavender Purple and Metallic Copper. It all houses a matching colourful S Pen.
The Samsung Galaxy Note9 flaunts a 6.4-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED (2960 by 1440) display with a pixel density of 516 ppi. Luckily, we don’t have any cut-out or notch on the display.
Under the hood, the Samsung Galaxy Note9 is powered by a 64-bit Snapdragon 845 octa-core (2.8 GHz Quad + 1.7 GHz Quad) processor paired with up to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Do note that, international versions and probably Indian version of Galaxy Note9 will probably be powered by Samsung’s in-house Exynos chip. Our guess would be the Samsung Exynos 9810 octa-core SoC.
For gamers, the Galaxy Note9 offers a smooth, sluggish free and cool mobile gaming experience. You get an optimized processor that cuts down on lag, a water-carbon cooling system that helps prevent overheating and an AI-based Smart performance adjuster that can automatically adjust gaming performance for an optimal experience.
For internal storage, you get a minimum of 128GB and can go alway up to 512GB. If you feel the storage is not quite enough, you could further expand it up to 512GB using microSD card. The Indian version of mobile will probably come with Hybrid SIM slot. So you could either have dual SIM or choose to have a one Nano SIM and one MicroSD card. The phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo out-of-the-box with Samsung’s custom UI over-the-top.
Bluetooth enabled S Pen
The main attraction of Samsung Galaxy Note9 is its always accompanying S Pen. This time around the company has added a truckload of features in it. The new S Pen is now powered by Bluetooth technology. Thus you could do various tasks with S Pen other than just drawing. For example, you could use the S Pen to click the camera, switch slides during a presentation, play, pause, or switch on a variety of apps like YouTube or Gallery. The best part, you could create your custom S Pen functions directly from the Settings.
Back to its main functionality, the S Pen can offer more precise strokes with a fine 0.7mm tip and 4096 pressure levels. Thus, during sketching, designing, drawing or taking notes, you would feel intuitive and natural as pen and paper.
Intelligent Camera
Th Samsung Galaxy Note9 boasts almost the same camera module from the Galaxy S9+. You get the Dual Aperture lens that’s built right into the dual rear camera module. The primary lens is a Wide-angle SuperSpeed Dual Pixel 12-megapixel lens with an option to choose between two f-stop modes. The adjustable aperture allows you to quickly transition from fixed f/1.5 and f/2.4 apertures resulting is improved low-light and clear photos. The secondary lens is a telephoto 12-megapixel lens featuring f/2.4 aperture. Both this lens support OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) and could offer 2x optical zoom along with up to 10X digital zoom.
Samsung is branding its camera as “Intelligent Camera”, as it can recognize what you’re looking at, thus can automatically optimize colour settings like contrast, white balance, exposure, and more. The Scene Optimizer feature can intelligently detect the subject in frame and can automatically choose from twenty different modes like flowers, food, and more. With Flaw Detection mode, the camera can intelligently detect blinks, blurs, smudged lenses, and backlighting. You also get the Super Slow-mo which can record slow-motion video at 960 frames per second and AR Emoji feature.
Coming to the front, for selfies, the Galaxy Note9 boasts an 8-megapixel autofocus camera with f/1.7 aperture.
Connectivity and Battery
As for connectivity, the Samsung Galaxy Note9 support high-speed 4G LTE Cat 18 network that works with every 4G bands in India. In addition, the phone supports VoLTE for HD voice calling. Other connectivity option includes 3G and 2G network support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5GHz), Bluetooth 5.0, ANT+, NFC and USB Type-C. For audiophiles out there, the mobile comes with stereo speakers that are tuned by AKG and offers immersive surround sound with Dolby Atmos technology. You also get a premium Pure sound earphone by AKG with both these devices.
Samsung Galaxy Note9 got three biometric authentication methods – iris scanner, fingerprint scanner and face recognition. In addition to all this, it’s protected by Samsung’s latest defence-grade security platform Knox 3.1. Finally, fueling the mobile is a 4000mAh battery which supports fast charging with QC 2.0 in wired and wireless mode.
Adding a convenient mobile payment solution, the Samsung Galaxy Note9 will come with full support for Samsung Pay. It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to make payments. Samsung Pay supports credit card, debit card, Paytm digital wallet and even UPI payments. The phone can also deliver a PC-like experience with Samsung DeX.