Samsung has just put the wraps on their MWC 2018 conference where they showed off the new S9 and S9 Plus phones which comes with some upgrades and some features that we have seen before in some of the other flagship phones out there. Let’s take a look at the highlighted features that they have pointed out and if that is a good enough reason to get the new S9 phones.
AR Emoji
This is not a new technology, we have seen the Animoji feature in the iPhone X which was really fun but eventually, the hype died out. Now, it might feel like a gimmick, but Apple has managed to perfect the feature to the point where it performs and looks really good. It uses a whole bunch of sensors and a camera to map out your face and turn it into an emoji, which has great tracking even when making weird faces.
Looking at what Samsung has shown us, it really feels like a lot more work needs to be done, as the tracking did not look great and there was a lot of clipping with the facial animations even when the presentators were just talking. I guess that’s the difference when it comes to having advance sensors and just using the front-facing camera.
Audio
Finally, stereo speakers, positioned on the top and bottom of the phone and with the addition of Dolby Atmos to provide a three-dimensional soundscape. I think that this addition to the phone really gives it a great value especially to those of you that watch TV series and movies on your phone.
They even added a 3.5mm jack which will work with the three dimensional sound when plugged in, great for those of you that are always on-the-go and still want to catch up with your movies and series or want to kill time by playing games.
AR Applications
The Samsung Galaxy S9 phones use Bixby to translate texts from a foreign language to a language of your choice which is nice, but this is something we have seen in the Mate 10 and View10 phones, so there is nothing new here.
Another was using AR to apply makeup to your face before buying the product, and its great that Samsung has teamed up with Sephora to bring the products to the phone, allowing you to test it and easily buy it straight from your phone. With Google releasing the AR Core, we will be seeing new applications and games when developers jump into AR development using the framework.
Camera
We come to the biggest feature of the S9 phone, the camera. With a dual aperture of f/1.5 and f/2.4 in a single lens, this opens up a huge possibility for amazing low-light photography. The phone will detect the lighting of the environment and intelligently decide the size of the aperture which in theory, produces an image with nice clarity and sharpness.
The second feature is the SlowMo mode which allows video taking at 960 frames per second at 720p which offers beautiful slow-mo videos which you can use as a GIF or set as your lock screen. A great alternative for those of you that in the market for a high frame rate camera. However, it is very disappointing that Samsung is only giving the dual-camera option to those of you that get the S9 Plus and seem like a blunt push to force people into getting the Plus variant.
There are some new features and some familiar features we have seen, but the question remains, should you get the Galaxy S9 phones? It really falls down to the features you are interested in. If you want to get this phone mainly for the photography, then this is probably one of the most advanced cameras you can get on a smartphone now. If you want it for its AR features, then get it at a later time when Samsung decides to patch and make the AR Emoji more smoother and provide more AR features and apps. If you own the previous S8 phones, then I recommend that you stick to it until new features are added to the S9 or wait for a price drop.
