The Samsung Note 9 Review: A Return to Form

I was able to get my hands on the Samsung Note 9, and I'm excited to share my thoughts on this powerhouse of a device. The first thing that struck me about the Note 9 is its impressive display. Even with default settings, the resolution is set to Full HD plus, which is quite impressive. I also really like how Samsung does their always-on display, it's a feature that was missing from the previous model, and I'm glad they brought it back.

As someone who has used previous Samsung phones, one thing that still bothers me is the default notification tone. It's not my favorite sound, so I had to change it right away. However, this is just a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent device. One of the things that really impressed me was how well the phone performs. The launch is seamless, and I didn't experience any slowdowns even with heavy usage.

I also used the S-Pen for testing purposes, which is one of the main reasons people buy the Note series - the stylus. While it didn't feel significantly improved from the previous model, it's still a fantastic tool for taking notes or creating art. The S Pen is, in my opinion, the best version of a stylus currently available on a phone.

One thing that did catch me off guard was how well the Note 9 held up in terms of durability. I had a few minor mishaps over the holiday weekend, including losing my wedding ring and having a minor heart attack, but the phone itself withstood everything without any issues. However, it is worth noting that the back of the phone does have some scratches, which may be a concern for some users.

In terms of battery life, the Note 9 really delivers. With a 4000mAh power battery, I saw about 10% improvement in battery life compared to my previous review, and it still charges incredibly fast. The intelligence can unlock feature is also quicker than before, which is a nice touch. Additionally, Samsung has included an LED notification light, which was missing from the previous model.

Another great feature of the Note 9 is its headphone jack. It's a small but welcome addition that makes the phone more versatile for users who prefer wired headphones. The IP 68 rating and large battery mean that this phone can withstand rough handling without issue.

One thing that I was happy to see was the performance of the device. With the introduction of One UI, I expected some slowdowns over time, but the Note 9 seems to be immune to such issues. It's a speedy little demon, even with heavy usage. Overall, I'm very impressed with the Samsung Note 9 and think it's one of the best phones currently available.

If you're in the market for a new phone and want something that checks all the right boxes - speed, camera quality, screen performance, battery life - the Note 9 is an excellent choice. With its huge discounts at this time, it's even more appealing than ever. Don't be surprised if you see me reviewing another Samsung device in the near future.

One thing I did want to mention is that my usual plan was to test the phone by taking it out with my family and putting it through its paces. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, I ended up spending most of my time indoors testing the phone instead. While this wasn't ideal, it did give me plenty of time to get to know the device and all its features.

If you're a fan of Yugi Muto from Yu-Gi-Oh! or just want to see some funny videos, be sure to check out our channel for more content like this. We also love hearing from our audience in the comments below, so don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover next time.

In conclusion, I'm really glad I got to spend more time with the Samsung Note 9 and explore all its features. It's a device that truly checks all the right boxes, and I'm excited to see how it will hold up over time. With One UI on board, I have no doubt that this phone will continue to deliver excellent performance and experiences for users.

If you're looking for a new phone or just want to upgrade from an older model, the Samsung Note 9 is definitely worth considering. Its impressive display, fast performance, and long battery life make it an ideal choice for anyone who wants a high-end smartphone experience. So what do you guys think? Have you picked up a Note 9, especially during the holiday sales? Let us know in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI want to give a big TechnoBuffalo sized hug to kaavo for sponsoring this video and generally making content like this happen what's going on everybody John retinue from TechnoBuffalo and it seems like every note video I do somehow morphs into like a family vlog going all the way back to the note 7 and I wanted to revisit the note 9 and somehow it turned out to be the same thing it's surprisingly been three months since the note 9 came out and there's been so many phones that have come out since and I want to say I kind of forgot about it and maybe you guys have too since the note 9 hit we've had pixels we've had iPhones we've got some of the best from hallway that have hit 1 plus 60 and all these phones are neck neck and neck and it can be tough to pick the right one so my initial plan was to take the phone home and use it over Thanksgiving break and revisit it turns out my entire family got sick and I was shut in for five days really only staring at the screen on the note 9 so fair warning there's excessive sweatpants pajamas and sick kids in this video since I blast from the phone on there's been about six iterative software updates and Sam slug notoriously is not the fastest for big OS updates like Oreo to pie but they do a nice job with sort of the smaller incremental type updates so what we've got now on the note 9 is a pretty mature and optimized version of Android 8.1 so the most recent update was claiming camera improvements and bug fixes so figure we'd give it a shot I fought the urge to put the leaked beta of Samsung's one UI and Android Pi on here but hear me out I want to use a phone as Samsung intend did not face my thoughts and opinions on some leaked beta issues so when that does hit I promise you we will do an entirely separate video on one UI and the note 9 so on the initial review I absolutely love the phone but I did in all fairness have a few issues so let's start with those issues the iris detection would not work with sunglasses on so I was outside wants unlock my phone I had to take them off it was annoying samsung fix it not only does it work now with sunglasses and polarized sunglasses actually works really quickly so nice work Samsung the other issue I had with signal strength so our review we did it on a 6 state road trip and I couldn't necessarily get a strong signal as we were driving across all of those states and I couldn't duplicate the road trips out of it but I do somehow managed to live in a complete cellular wasteland and I was able to pull down a consistent one of two bars ish on LTE and that doesn't mean much but it meant to me was that I could make phone calls and phone calls came in and that in itself was huge the other big knock was price I mean this phone goes as high as twelve hundred and fifty bucks and that seemed insane at the time and then the iPhone came out told Sam something to hold its beer and being the holiday season there are huge discounts now to be had on the note nine the price issue really isn't so much of an issue anymore I've seen discounts as much as five or six hundred bucks on some carriers also this is going back to our s9 review I mocked Samsung's internet browser and I was shocked with the passion and though I guess love that you guys had in the comments so while I was stuck at home taking care of sick kids I use internet browser exclusively and while I still maintain it's not quite the level of Chrome admittedly it's better than I expected so I'm gonna be a big person and I'm gonna I'm gonna admit that I was wrong is is not that bad it's actually actually pretty useful so while we're on the topic of things that I was wrong about but now miss IR blasters I didn't really care much about them when they were on Samsung phones but now that they're gone I got an IR shaped hole in my heart now I doubt it's ever gonna come back to Samsung flagships but there are some pretty awesome third-party products that can do the same thing plus a ton more QED the smooth transition to our sponsor cabo so weíll cover won't really help you on the go it will help you while your whole family is sick stuck at home Cabo's one family-friendly remote makes it really easy just push a button and say watch PJ masks and it'll pull up PJ masks for you for it's available on different apps it'll let you pick which app you want to use you no longer have to search and peck and hunts for different apps or change different inputs and also kind of cool you can never lose your remote it'll pair with Amazon Alexa or Google home and you could say Google home find my remote and your remote well buzz but all this awesomeness ái magic does cause a little bit of scrilla there's a free 45 day trial if you want to try it and then it's two dollars a month or $19.99 a year or if you just want to pay once and be done you could pay 60 bucks and you don't worry about ever paying again it sounding something that you want to try we'll link down below user code Buffalo and hit that link and you get 30% off I think it's worth it it's one that I've been following for years and you guys should give it a shot all right so on to those camera updates and there's been a ton of them here so for fun I took a bunch of pictures before the software update and then tried to duplicate them afterwards there was like about 30 minutes in between and there thought that the camera launched slow on the note 9 but it launches noticeably quicker pictures also still look incredible it does appear the default saturation it's kind of a samsung hallmark got toned down a bit to my eye they looked a little bit natural also the live focus so I guess samsung's portrait mode I thought does a really good job especially when you have multiple people so I had all my kids sitting on my lap did a really nice job with focus and the gradual background blur the HDR - which already looked awesome seemed to improve to my eyes but I don't know maybe it's psychosomatic you can you can tell me in the comments video quality on the note 9 still blows me away the speakers on this thing are a beast and I'm surprised that no one's talking about how good the built-in mics are they don't sound better they get initially but they still sound really good and after not using the phone for a while I personally forgot how good Samsung screens just look and I think it's a matter of fact to say that Samsung makes the best screens in mobile even the default resolution is set to Full HD plus I also really like how Samsung does they're always on display and since it had been about five weeks I also forgot how much Samsung's default notification tone bothers me that is the first thing I changed when I switched to a Samsung phone I'm still digging the launch or even though it's gonna be different when one UI comes I didn't install a third-party launcher I'm still ok with it the s-pen was nice to have I used it just for the sake of testing thinking I wanna take selfies was nice I don't draw that much on the screen I know it's a big reason people get the note phones is for the s-pen it didn't feel giant ly improve it for what I had before but before it was really good the S Pen is the best version of a stylus right now on a phone so like take notes in your phone the note is still gonna be good and obviously the size didn't change but it feels gigantic in the hand and the back is a little bit slippery and a warning it is not sweatpants friendly I was on an absolute tear over the holiday weekend losing stuff I had a minor heart attack and thought I lost my wedding ring and for a solid 10 minutes I was pretty sure that I also managed to lose the note 9 it slipped out of my pocket and I was just killing with sweatpants in between the couch cushions which also means it can slip out if you are out and about and perhaps go crashing on the floor fortunately I haven't dropped it yet but the back is somehow crazy scratched but in all fairness screen is not scratched at all so that's good battery are still awesome it's a 4000 million power battery and I saw about 10% ish improvement for what I saw when I first reviewed it so obviously software has gotten better it also still charges insanely fast other things that seem improved intelligence can unlock is also quicker I liked having LED notification back he was nice after coming from the 60 that got rid of it I also still love Samsung pay although I didn't get out to try it and hallelujah does a headphone jack on here that I didn't need to use over the weekend but it's here and it's got IP 68 and they put a big battery in there the note 9 kind of checks every single box that you would expect performance was still really good and if Samsung's got a bit of a rep for slowing down over time I don't get slowdown issues sixes are a missed Amtrak and a 45 is generally a recipe for speed and Samsung's got it down obviously with one UI hits it's gonna get faster but no speed decreases and it seemed like a speedy little demon at me I felt like bad for almost forgetting about the note 9 it is a phone that just came out and should be considered amongst the pantheon of the best phones in the market not just the best Android phones and now with huge discounts it's even more of sort of an appealing prospect if you want a phone that's gonna be fast if you want a phone that's going to have amongst the best cameras out there and hands down have the best screen view performance give you battery life and at least know that some point in the near future it is going to get Android Pi the note 9 is an awesome phone and I kind of don't want to forget about it again I'm gonna keep using it I'm gonna keep it on my desk so I can stare at it and remember this and 1ui it again we will do another video so generally I'm pretty harsh and reviews but again I want to give Sam some credit for fixing the problems that I had at the initial review did you guys pick up a note 9 especially during the holiday sales you pick one up when it came out back in August hook to your thoughts on it that was three months later with the note 9 my usual plan was to go out and about with my family and retest the phone instead I got shut in and got to use the phone much more than a human being should be on a phone you guys like Yugi visited videos let us know in the comments down below until next time I'm John render Zachary pretty much you know nobody's really gotten out of our jammas what kind of what game is are you laying here yeah monster Inca and daddy is just wearing clothes we should go outside should we know so we'll be playing with cars sick kid let's try to do our best sick impression okay ready you do it first I'll do mine you okay but it so how you guys feeling this weekend yeah we've pretty much been hanging out huh yeah you guys want to give give a wave yeah we spent a lot of time in the house sick and still smiling all right bye guysI want to give a big TechnoBuffalo sized hug to kaavo for sponsoring this video and generally making content like this happen what's going on everybody John retinue from TechnoBuffalo and it seems like every note video I do somehow morphs into like a family vlog going all the way back to the note 7 and I wanted to revisit the note 9 and somehow it turned out to be the same thing it's surprisingly been three months since the note 9 came out and there's been so many phones that have come out since and I want to say I kind of forgot about it and maybe you guys have too since the note 9 hit we've had pixels we've had iPhones we've got some of the best from hallway that have hit 1 plus 60 and all these phones are neck neck and neck and it can be tough to pick the right one so my initial plan was to take the phone home and use it over Thanksgiving break and revisit it turns out my entire family got sick and I was shut in for five days really only staring at the screen on the note 9 so fair warning there's excessive sweatpants pajamas and sick kids in this video since I blast from the phone on there's been about six iterative software updates and Sam slug notoriously is not the fastest for big OS updates like Oreo to pie but they do a nice job with sort of the smaller incremental type updates so what we've got now on the note 9 is a pretty mature and optimized version of Android 8.1 so the most recent update was claiming camera improvements and bug fixes so figure we'd give it a shot I fought the urge to put the leaked beta of Samsung's one UI and Android Pi on here but hear me out I want to use a phone as Samsung intend did not face my thoughts and opinions on some leaked beta issues so when that does hit I promise you we will do an entirely separate video on one UI and the note 9 so on the initial review I absolutely love the phone but I did in all fairness have a few issues so let's start with those issues the iris detection would not work with sunglasses on so I was outside wants unlock my phone I had to take them off it was annoying samsung fix it not only does it work now with sunglasses and polarized sunglasses actually works really quickly so nice work Samsung the other issue I had with signal strength so our review we did it on a 6 state road trip and I couldn't necessarily get a strong signal as we were driving across all of those states and I couldn't duplicate the road trips out of it but I do somehow managed to live in a complete cellular wasteland and I was able to pull down a consistent one of two bars ish on LTE and that doesn't mean much but it meant to me was that I could make phone calls and phone calls came in and that in itself was huge the other big knock was price I mean this phone goes as high as twelve hundred and fifty bucks and that seemed insane at the time and then the iPhone came out told Sam something to hold its beer and being the holiday season there are huge discounts now to be had on the note nine the price issue really isn't so much of an issue anymore I've seen discounts as much as five or six hundred bucks on some carriers also this is going back to our s9 review I mocked Samsung's internet browser and I was shocked with the passion and though I guess love that you guys had in the comments so while I was stuck at home taking care of sick kids I use internet browser exclusively and while I still maintain it's not quite the level of Chrome admittedly it's better than I expected so I'm gonna be a big person and I'm gonna I'm gonna admit that I was wrong is is not that bad it's actually actually pretty useful so while we're on the topic of things that I was wrong about but now miss IR blasters I didn't really care much about them when they were on Samsung phones but now that they're gone I got an IR shaped hole in my heart now I doubt it's ever gonna come back to Samsung flagships but there are some pretty awesome third-party products that can do the same thing plus a ton more QED the smooth transition to our sponsor cabo so weíll cover won't really help you on the go it will help you while your whole family is sick stuck at home Cabo's one family-friendly remote makes it really easy just push a button and say watch PJ masks and it'll pull up PJ masks for you for it's available on different apps it'll let you pick which app you want to use you no longer have to search and peck and hunts for different apps or change different inputs and also kind of cool you can never lose your remote it'll pair with Amazon Alexa or Google home and you could say Google home find my remote and your remote well buzz but all this awesomeness ái magic does cause a little bit of scrilla there's a free 45 day trial if you want to try it and then it's two dollars a month or $19.99 a year or if you just want to pay once and be done you could pay 60 bucks and you don't worry about ever paying again it sounding something that you want to try we'll link down below user code Buffalo and hit that link and you get 30% off I think it's worth it it's one that I've been following for years and you guys should give it a shot all right so on to those camera updates and there's been a ton of them here so for fun I took a bunch of pictures before the software update and then tried to duplicate them afterwards there was like about 30 minutes in between and there thought that the camera launched slow on the note 9 but it launches noticeably quicker pictures also still look incredible it does appear the default saturation it's kind of a samsung hallmark got toned down a bit to my eye they looked a little bit natural also the live focus so I guess samsung's portrait mode I thought does a really good job especially when you have multiple people so I had all my kids sitting on my lap did a really nice job with focus and the gradual background blur the HDR - which already looked awesome seemed to improve to my eyes but I don't know maybe it's psychosomatic you can you can tell me in the comments video quality on the note 9 still blows me away the speakers on this thing are a beast and I'm surprised that no one's talking about how good the built-in mics are they don't sound better they get initially but they still sound really good and after not using the phone for a while I personally forgot how good Samsung screens just look and I think it's a matter of fact to say that Samsung makes the best screens in mobile even the default resolution is set to Full HD plus I also really like how Samsung does they're always on display and since it had been about five weeks I also forgot how much Samsung's default notification tone bothers me that is the first thing I changed when I switched to a Samsung phone I'm still digging the launch or even though it's gonna be different when one UI comes I didn't install a third-party launcher I'm still ok with it the s-pen was nice to have I used it just for the sake of testing thinking I wanna take selfies was nice I don't draw that much on the screen I know it's a big reason people get the note phones is for the s-pen it didn't feel giant ly improve it for what I had before but before it was really good the S Pen is the best version of a stylus right now on a phone so like take notes in your phone the note is still gonna be good and obviously the size didn't change but it feels gigantic in the hand and the back is a little bit slippery and a warning it is not sweatpants friendly I was on an absolute tear over the holiday weekend losing stuff I had a minor heart attack and thought I lost my wedding ring and for a solid 10 minutes I was pretty sure that I also managed to lose the note 9 it slipped out of my pocket and I was just killing with sweatpants in between the couch cushions which also means it can slip out if you are out and about and perhaps go crashing on the floor fortunately I haven't dropped it yet but the back is somehow crazy scratched but in all fairness screen is not scratched at all so that's good battery are still awesome it's a 4000 million power battery and I saw about 10% ish improvement for what I saw when I first reviewed it so obviously software has gotten better it also still charges insanely fast other things that seem improved intelligence can unlock is also quicker I liked having LED notification back he was nice after coming from the 60 that got rid of it I also still love Samsung pay although I didn't get out to try it and hallelujah does a headphone jack on here that I didn't need to use over the weekend but it's here and it's got IP 68 and they put a big battery in there the note 9 kind of checks every single box that you would expect performance was still really good and if Samsung's got a bit of a rep for slowing down over time I don't get slowdown issues sixes are a missed Amtrak and a 45 is generally a recipe for speed and Samsung's got it down obviously with one UI hits it's gonna get faster but no speed decreases and it seemed like a speedy little demon at me I felt like bad for almost forgetting about the note 9 it is a phone that just came out and should be considered amongst the pantheon of the best phones in the market not just the best Android phones and now with huge discounts it's even more of sort of an appealing prospect if you want a phone that's gonna be fast if you want a phone that's going to have amongst the best cameras out there and hands down have the best screen view performance give you battery life and at least know that some point in the near future it is going to get Android Pi the note 9 is an awesome phone and I kind of don't want to forget about it again I'm gonna keep using it I'm gonna keep it on my desk so I can stare at it and remember this and 1ui it again we will do another video so generally I'm pretty harsh and reviews but again I want to give Sam some credit for fixing the problems that I had at the initial review did you guys pick up a note 9 especially during the holiday sales you pick one up when it came out back in August hook to your thoughts on it that was three months later with the note 9 my usual plan was to go out and about with my family and retest the phone instead I got shut in and got to use the phone much more than a human being should be on a phone you guys like Yugi visited videos let us know in the comments down below until next time I'm John render Zachary pretty much you know nobody's really gotten out of our jammas what kind of what game is are you laying here yeah monster Inca and daddy is just wearing clothes we should go outside should we know so we'll be playing with cars sick kid let's try to do our best sick impression okay ready you do it first I'll do mine you okay but it so how you guys feeling this weekend yeah we've pretty much been hanging out huh yeah you guys want to give give a wave yeah we spent a lot of time in the house sick and still smiling all right bye guys\n"