**The Samsung Galaxy Note 9: A High-End Smartphone with Key Upgrades**

A wireless charger duo is available to charge two devices at once, which can be paired with the new Galaxy Note 9. The phone features a similar design to the Galaxy S8, with an OLED display made of Ola Glass 5 on the front and back. The biggest change in design is the placement of the fingerprint sensor, which has been moved from its previous location on the top right side of the phone to the lower left side.

The camera setup on the Note 9 is similar to that of the Galaxy S9+, with two 12-megapixel cameras that feature optical image stabilization. One camera has a variable aperture that can switch between F1.5 and F2.4, while the other camera has an F2.4 aperture. The camera app opens quickly and takes pictures relatively quickly. The phone also features Live Focus, which adds blur to the subject in photos, as well as Super Slow-Mo, which allows for slow-motion video recording at up to 960 frames per second.

The Note 9's camera has been improved with the addition of AI-powered Scene Optimizer, which can identify up to 20 scenes and adjust contrast, exposure, brightness, and color temperature accordingly. While this feature may not have a noticeable impact on all photos, it does seem to enhance the overall image quality. However, some users have reported that Scene Optimizer can over-saturate food images.

The phone's performance is largely unchanged from the S9+, with the same processor, memory, and storage configurations available in both phones. The Note 9 also features a large 3,000mAh battery and supports fast charging and wireless charging. The phone is water-resistant with an IP68 rating and has a headphone jack, USB-C port, and microSD card slot.

**Design and Build**

The phone's design is largely unchanged from the S8, with slim bezels at the top and bottom. The edges are made of aluminum and are flat, making them comfortable to hold. The power button is located on the right side of the phone, above the volume rocker, which is also located on that side. However, unlike previous Galaxy Note models, there is no dedicated button for taking out the SIM card.

The camera setup on the back of the phone features a dual-camera design with two 12-megapixel cameras that feature optical image stabilization. The cameras are mounted on a slight angle, which may make it easier to use them in certain situations. The phone's front-facing camera is also capable of taking high-quality selfies and features a large sensor that can capture more detail.

**Additional Features**

The Note 9 supports various connectivity options, including Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, and NFC. It also features a USB-C port with support for fast charging and wireless charging. The phone has a headphone jack on the bottom side, which is always a welcome feature for those who prefer wired audio.

In terms of storage, the Note 9 comes in two models: one with 128GB of internal storage and another with 512GB of internal storage. Both models also support expandable storage via microSD cards up to 1TB. The phone's software is based on Android Oreo (8.0), which provides a clean and intuitive interface for the user.

**Conclusion**

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a high-end smartphone that offers many of the same features as its predecessor, but with some key upgrades. While it may not be the most exciting upgrade for those already using a Galaxy S9 or S9+, the phone's large screen display and support for the S-Pen make it an attractive option for those seeking a premium smartphone experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe galaxy note 9 has everything you could ask for in a big screen smartphone it's got a great display powerful performance a versatile camera and a long battery life as well as an S Pen that's a little more usable but it costs $1000 so is it really worth that high price tag let's find out the Galaxy Note 9 has a snapdragon 845 processor inside with 6 gigs of RAM that's for the hundred and twenty eight gigabyte version there's a 512 gigabyte version that gives you eight gigs of RAM and of course there's also a micro SD card slot so you can expand that storage up to a terabyte if you really want apps open incredibly quickly and moving throughout the operating system feels incredibly quick the only exception is opening Bixby home which often is a little slow just because this phone has the same Snapdragon processor as several other Android flagship smartphones doesn't mean performance is going to be the same actually it should be a little better Samsung has outfitted a water carbon cooling system on this phone that should help keep that processor cool during intensive tasks like gaming so instead of the processor throttling performance because it's getting too hot the water carbon cooling system should keep it cool which means you'll be able to play games like fortnight for a longer period of time speaking of fortnight the beta version is exclusively available the Samsung phones galaxy s7 and up so you're able to play fortnight beta on this phone as soon as you can get it and fortnight runs incredibly well we've played the PC version and this version of course doesn't look as good but it still looks great for a mobile game and performance is credibly smooth there's a little stutters now on then but it's not really something that causes or effects gameplay we've been in high intense shooting environments and have been able to play the game perfectly fine as you can see the world is really well detailed and everything just feels much smoother and more our easy-to-use sort of similar to the PC version the game is actually available for s7 devices and later and it'll be coming out to Android except it won't be available on the Google Play Store except you'll have to buy it through Epic Games website or Samsung's game launcher if you have a Samsung phone perhaps most disappointing part of the galaxy note 9 is the fact that it runs Android 8.1 Oreo rather than Android 9.0 Pi which came out very recently now Android 8.0 Oreo and repent 1 Oreo isn't bad at all it's just that we would really like to have seen the latest version of the operating system on this phone still this is the exact same version of Samsung's experience launcher that you'll find on the galaxy s 9 you have apps edge where you can customize these apps at this corner as well as contacts and things like the clipboard the app drawer looks like this and has looked like this for samsung phone scored some time and of course you have things like bixby on the left hand side which we will get to you soon well one of the key features of the note series has been the S Pen and Samsung has made some pretty big improvements that make it a little more useful first off it's now in this yellow color when you get the ocean blue Edition which is pretty nice and you can do things like things we've seen before for example screen off memo lets you write quick notes on the screen and you can keep going forever and these get saved into the Samsung Notes app which is pretty handy when you need to quickly write down some information or you can do things like translate text on when you're reading an article for example you can highlight over a word and you can see that it's translating through Google Translate there's also things like live message to be seen before but one of the cool key new features of the S Pen is Bluetooth basically this s-pen light right here has Bluetooth Low Energy fitted inside so what it can do is control the note phone up to 30 feet away to do sort of a variety of things for example one of the key things that we've set right now is to launch the camera and that's actually the default feature so if I press and hold this you can see that it opens the camera app I can double tap to take a selfie double tap again to go to the main camera and then I can press at once to sort of take a photo and this is actually really helpful if you want to say to a selfie video or a selfie and you want to sort of get this arms wide approach and get your face in the shot or maybe it's a group photo you're taking even more lets you be more creative when you're trying to take photos for example you can place the note 9on against a tree right here for example and try and take a photo of you the backdrop further away because this thing can go up to 30 feet which is pretty nice some of the things that you can actually customize in the S Pen settings are basically you can change the default app that you want to open so right now you can see it's set to opening the camera but you can change that if you want if you're in the gallery app you can use this to sort of slide through pictures back and forth you can do that with Chrome as well you can go forward and back and especially with music if you're say playing a song if you've connected your phone to a Bluetooth speaker instead of carrying your phone around you can sort of just carry this around your house and use it to play pause and to skip tracks or go previous tracks so there's going to be more coming soon because Samsung has made this software developer kit available so developers with third-party apps will be able to create all sorts of unique things with the S Pen and we're excited to see what other functions that the S Pen a remote which acts as a remote basically will allow bixby Samsung's AI assistant in the note 9 is getting a version 2.0 upgrade that gives it a little more features so you can do things now like order an uber make a table reservation through Yelp find concerts that are nearby and all that works and of course the base layer functions of bixby voice that you can do things like open apps lawn post something to Instagram decrease the brightness settings increase it turn off Wi-Fi Bluetooth things like that all of that still works pick speed though just still does feel as useful as things like Google assistant which is also available on this phone because it still has trouble with context at that being said that you can still use Bixby to do all those normal phone functions we just still don't think that it's worth using it over Google assistant for example Bixby still struggles with context something that Google assistant excels it for example how old is former President Barack Obama well it didn't seem to even work then how old is Barack Obama what about his wife okay let's try Google assistant how old is Barack Obama what about his wife so it seems to have easily managed it but Bixby seems to have failed now that's just an example and not everyone is going to be asking contextual questions to Bixby but and of course some would say why don't you just use Google assistant for the rest of that but it still just feels weird having two assistants on the phone especially when one has a dedicated button for it and often times we actually accidentally keep pressing that Bixby button still and there's no real way to disable it or remap it to something else which is still frustrating Bixby home is still a complete waste of space it just seems to be a little slow and doesn't really have anything or offer anything useful originally was supposed to offer up contextual cards based on time and your habits but it just largely seems to be an amalgamation of random things that you sort of let it access and we really have not found any proper use for it thankfully it's very easy to turn it off just press that button on the home screen and now it's not there anymore there's also Bixby vision which is actually a little more useful because it has a couple of neat features like makeup if you want to test makeup before you buy it or searching for objects and seeing if you can purchase it on things like Amazon one of the new features is Adobe scan where you can scan a piece piece of paper and turn it into a PDF but overall these are features we don't think most people will generally use it's kind of neat that they're there but as you can see it's not also the fastest interface even considering the performance of the note 9 it supports Qualcomm's quick charge 2.0 phones like the 1 plus 6 can definitely charge faster than this we managed to top it up from 17% to 95% in about 85 minutes which isn't again the fastest we've seen but there is wireless charging it supports fast wireless charging and Samsung also has a wireless charger duo new wireless charging pad that you can get to charge a smartphone and another device say like a wearable or just not a lot has changed on the design of the phone from the note 8 there's Ola glass 5 on the front in the back and really the biggest difference is here Samsung has sort of kept the same length for this camera module the middle camera is a little bigger than the one here on the left but it has moved the fingerprint sensor from its old placement up here down to this lower place in which honestly is a little more sensible because it's now easier to reach at the same time we think Samsung could have pushed it a little lower for more optimal placement that being said if you don't want to use the fingerprint sensor if it's too high for you you can use the iris scanner and the front-facing camera to use intelligent scan which will quickly unlock the phone just like that by registering your eyes and your face over on the front not much has changed with bezels at the top or bottom are still slim the resolution is 29 60 by 1440 but when you first start the phone it'll be at 2200 by 1080 Full HD plus resolution the edges have aluminum and they're sort of nice to hold because they're flat even though the edges do slope in the power button is on the bright side and the volume rocker is on the left right above the infamous Bigsby button this button is tied to Bigsby you can't really do anything else with it and there you go big speed tries to activate itself but essentially we we don't really like it too much because we've accidentally pressed this button way too many times and that has disrupted what we've been doing say for doing sending an email and accidentally pressed it then it just interrupts the experience and that's a bit frustrating over on the bottom is the headphone jack which is always nice to see USB seat charging port bottom firing speaker that works actually in tandem with the top speaker for stereo sound and the s-pen which you can press to take out the phone is water-resistant ip68 and microSD card is at the top here where you can also put in your SIM card the camera setup is actually quite similar to the galaxy s 9 plus it's dual cameras 12 megapixels both with optical image stabilization one of them is a variable aperture so it can swap between F 1.5 and F 2.4 depending on lighting and the other one is an F 2.4 for sure the camera app opens quickly and it takes pictures relatively quickly you have the same features as the s9 such as Live Focus which adds the blur around the subject and of course super slo-mo lets you shoot slow-motion video at up to 960 frames per second you won't have any issues with daylight photos on this phone they look great well detailed and sharp and even the two times optical zoom looks pretty great thanks to that variable aperture low-light photos also look really good there's a lot of detail that Samson can capture that other phones can't and it does an okay job with managing color temperature as well so what exactly is new with the note 9s camera then well Sam's again has added AI in there so basically like you might have just noticed over there camera can identify up to 20 scenes ranging from things like sunsets to trees or plants and flowers and what it does it then adjusts contrast exposure brightness color things like that to sort of give you a better photo based on what the AI thinks it should look like so we haven't really noticed that much of a difference when comparing these photos with the say galaxy s 9 but basically we like what scene optimizer does for the most part it does seem to over saturate food but everything else seems to look pretty good so for example this is the Galaxy Note 9 photo and it looks pretty good right and now when you compare it to the galaxy s 9 photo you can see what seeing optimizer did it essentially boosted the colors ever so slightly and it made the contrast a little better darken some of the parts s9 photo just looks a little too bright for our liking this actually does look like a photo ID to share over this one that's the galaxy note 9 it costs $1,000 for the case model and the 512 gigabyte model will cost you a thousand two hundred fifty and sales start on August 24 so should you buy it if you're coming from a galaxy s 9s 9 plus or Galaxy Note 8 probably not the upgrades won't seem that much to you especially for such a high cost however if anyone's seeking just a large screen phone that has sort of everything in it that you would and you really like the idea of the s-pen then you can't go wrong with the note 9the galaxy note 9 has everything you could ask for in a big screen smartphone it's got a great display powerful performance a versatile camera and a long battery life as well as an S Pen that's a little more usable but it costs $1000 so is it really worth that high price tag let's find out the Galaxy Note 9 has a snapdragon 845 processor inside with 6 gigs of RAM that's for the hundred and twenty eight gigabyte version there's a 512 gigabyte version that gives you eight gigs of RAM and of course there's also a micro SD card slot so you can expand that storage up to a terabyte if you really want apps open incredibly quickly and moving throughout the operating system feels incredibly quick the only exception is opening Bixby home which often is a little slow just because this phone has the same Snapdragon processor as several other Android flagship smartphones doesn't mean performance is going to be the same actually it should be a little better Samsung has outfitted a water carbon cooling system on this phone that should help keep that processor cool during intensive tasks like gaming so instead of the processor throttling performance because it's getting too hot the water carbon cooling system should keep it cool which means you'll be able to play games like fortnight for a longer period of time speaking of fortnight the beta version is exclusively available the Samsung phones galaxy s7 and up so you're able to play fortnight beta on this phone as soon as you can get it and fortnight runs incredibly well we've played the PC version and this version of course doesn't look as good but it still looks great for a mobile game and performance is credibly smooth there's a little stutters now on then but it's not really something that causes or effects gameplay we've been in high intense shooting environments and have been able to play the game perfectly fine as you can see the world is really well detailed and everything just feels much smoother and more our easy-to-use sort of similar to the PC version the game is actually available for s7 devices and later and it'll be coming out to Android except it won't be available on the Google Play Store except you'll have to buy it through Epic Games website or Samsung's game launcher if you have a Samsung phone perhaps most disappointing part of the galaxy note 9 is the fact that it runs Android 8.1 Oreo rather than Android 9.0 Pi which came out very recently now Android 8.0 Oreo and repent 1 Oreo isn't bad at all it's just that we would really like to have seen the latest version of the operating system on this phone still this is the exact same version of Samsung's experience launcher that you'll find on the galaxy s 9 you have apps edge where you can customize these apps at this corner as well as contacts and things like the clipboard the app drawer looks like this and has looked like this for samsung phone scored some time and of course you have things like bixby on the left hand side which we will get to you soon well one of the key features of the note series has been the S Pen and Samsung has made some pretty big improvements that make it a little more useful first off it's now in this yellow color when you get the ocean blue Edition which is pretty nice and you can do things like things we've seen before for example screen off memo lets you write quick notes on the screen and you can keep going forever and these get saved into the Samsung Notes app which is pretty handy when you need to quickly write down some information or you can do things like translate text on when you're reading an article for example you can highlight over a word and you can see that it's translating through Google Translate there's also things like live message to be seen before but one of the cool key new features of the S Pen is Bluetooth basically this s-pen light right here has Bluetooth Low Energy fitted inside so what it can do is control the note phone up to 30 feet away to do sort of a variety of things for example one of the key things that we've set right now is to launch the camera and that's actually the default feature so if I press and hold this you can see that it opens the camera app I can double tap to take a selfie double tap again to go to the main camera and then I can press at once to sort of take a photo and this is actually really helpful if you want to say to a selfie video or a selfie and you want to sort of get this arms wide approach and get your face in the shot or maybe it's a group photo you're taking even more lets you be more creative when you're trying to take photos for example you can place the note 9on against a tree right here for example and try and take a photo of you the backdrop further away because this thing can go up to 30 feet which is pretty nice some of the things that you can actually customize in the S Pen settings are basically you can change the default app that you want to open so right now you can see it's set to opening the camera but you can change that if you want if you're in the gallery app you can use this to sort of slide through pictures back and forth you can do that with Chrome as well you can go forward and back and especially with music if you're say playing a song if you've connected your phone to a Bluetooth speaker instead of carrying your phone around you can sort of just carry this around your house and use it to play pause and to skip tracks or go previous tracks so there's going to be more coming soon because Samsung has made this software developer kit available so developers with third-party apps will be able to create all sorts of unique things with the S Pen and we're excited to see what other functions that the S Pen a remote which acts as a remote basically will allow bixby Samsung's AI assistant in the note 9 is getting a version 2.0 upgrade that gives it a little more features so you can do things now like order an uber make a table reservation through Yelp find concerts that are nearby and all that works and of course the base layer functions of bixby voice that you can do things like open apps lawn post something to Instagram decrease the brightness settings increase it turn off Wi-Fi Bluetooth things like that all of that still works pick speed though just still does feel as useful as things like Google assistant which is also available on this phone because it still has trouble with context at that being said that you can still use Bixby to do all those normal phone functions we just still don't think that it's worth using it over Google assistant for example Bixby still struggles with context something that Google assistant excels it for example how old is former President Barack Obama well it didn't seem to even work then how old is Barack Obama what about his wife okay let's try Google assistant how old is Barack Obama what about his wife so it seems to have easily managed it but Bixby seems to have failed now that's just an example and not everyone is going to be asking contextual questions to Bixby but and of course some would say why don't you just use Google assistant for the rest of that but it still just feels weird having two assistants on the phone especially when one has a dedicated button for it and often times we actually accidentally keep pressing that Bixby button still and there's no real way to disable it or remap it to something else which is still frustrating Bixby home is still a complete waste of space it just seems to be a little slow and doesn't really have anything or offer anything useful originally was supposed to offer up contextual cards based on time and your habits but it just largely seems to be an amalgamation of random things that you sort of let it access and we really have not found any proper use for it thankfully it's very easy to turn it off just press that button on the home screen and now it's not there anymore there's also Bixby vision which is actually a little more useful because it has a couple of neat features like makeup if you want to test makeup before you buy it or searching for objects and seeing if you can purchase it on things like Amazon one of the new features is Adobe scan where you can scan a piece piece of paper and turn it into a PDF but overall these are features we don't think most people will generally use it's kind of neat that they're there but as you can see it's not also the fastest interface even considering the performance of the note 9 it supports Qualcomm's quick charge 2.0 phones like the 1 plus 6 can definitely charge faster than this we managed to top it up from 17% to 95% in about 85 minutes which isn't again the fastest we've seen but there is wireless charging it supports fast wireless charging and Samsung also has a wireless charger duo new wireless charging pad that you can get to charge a smartphone and another device say like a wearable or just not a lot has changed on the design of the phone from the note 8 there's Ola glass 5 on the front in the back and really the biggest difference is here Samsung has sort of kept the same length for this camera module the middle camera is a little bigger than the one here on the left but it has moved the fingerprint sensor from its old placement up here down to this lower place in which honestly is a little more sensible because it's now easier to reach at the same time we think Samsung could have pushed it a little lower for more optimal placement that being said if you don't want to use the fingerprint sensor if it's too high for you you can use the iris scanner and the front-facing camera to use intelligent scan which will quickly unlock the phone just like that by registering your eyes and your face over on the front not much has changed with bezels at the top or bottom are still slim the resolution is 29 60 by 1440 but when you first start the phone it'll be at 2200 by 1080 Full HD plus resolution the edges have aluminum and they're sort of nice to hold because they're flat even though the edges do slope in the power button is on the bright side and the volume rocker is on the left right above the infamous Bigsby button this button is tied to Bigsby you can't really do anything else with it and there you go big speed tries to activate itself but essentially we we don't really like it too much because we've accidentally pressed this button way too many times and that has disrupted what we've been doing say for doing sending an email and accidentally pressed it then it just interrupts the experience and that's a bit frustrating over on the bottom is the headphone jack which is always nice to see USB seat charging port bottom firing speaker that works actually in tandem with the top speaker for stereo sound and the s-pen which you can press to take out the phone is water-resistant ip68 and microSD card is at the top here where you can also put in your SIM card the camera setup is actually quite similar to the galaxy s 9 plus it's dual cameras 12 megapixels both with optical image stabilization one of them is a variable aperture so it can swap between F 1.5 and F 2.4 depending on lighting and the other one is an F 2.4 for sure the camera app opens quickly and it takes pictures relatively quickly you have the same features as the s9 such as Live Focus which adds the blur around the subject and of course super slo-mo lets you shoot slow-motion video at up to 960 frames per second you won't have any issues with daylight photos on this phone they look great well detailed and sharp and even the two times optical zoom looks pretty great thanks to that variable aperture low-light photos also look really good there's a lot of detail that Samson can capture that other phones can't and it does an okay job with managing color temperature as well so what exactly is new with the note 9s camera then well Sam's again has added AI in there so basically like you might have just noticed over there camera can identify up to 20 scenes ranging from things like sunsets to trees or plants and flowers and what it does it then adjusts contrast exposure brightness color things like that to sort of give you a better photo based on what the AI thinks it should look like so we haven't really noticed that much of a difference when comparing these photos with the say galaxy s 9 but basically we like what scene optimizer does for the most part it does seem to over saturate food but everything else seems to look pretty good so for example this is the Galaxy Note 9 photo and it looks pretty good right and now when you compare it to the galaxy s 9 photo you can see what seeing optimizer did it essentially boosted the colors ever so slightly and it made the contrast a little better darken some of the parts s9 photo just looks a little too bright for our liking this actually does look like a photo ID to share over this one that's the galaxy note 9 it costs $1,000 for the case model and the 512 gigabyte model will cost you a thousand two hundred fifty and sales start on August 24 so should you buy it if you're coming from a galaxy s 9s 9 plus or Galaxy Note 8 probably not the upgrades won't seem that much to you especially for such a high cost however if anyone's seeking just a large screen phone that has sort of everything in it that you would and you really like the idea of the s-pen then you can't go wrong with the note 9\n"