The Samsung Galaxy Note 9: A Beastly Phone with Iterative Upgrades

As I held the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 in my hands, I couldn't help but feel a sense of familiarity. The device's design, while sleek and modern, was not drastically different from its predecessor, the Note 8. However, as I began to explore the phone's features and performance, it became clear that Samsung had made some significant improvements.

One of the first things I noticed was the phone's screen. While it was still a large 6.3-inch display, I couldn't help but feel that it was slightly too small compared to other flagships on the market. The side borders, in particular, were larger than I had expected, and the screen-to-body ratio was lower than even last year's Galaxy S8. Coming from my daily use of the Vivo Nex, a device with an almost bezel-less design, it was tough not to feel like something was missing.

That being said, the Note 9 is still a massive package overall, and I would argue that its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. The battery life, in particular, is impressive. With a capacity of 4000mAh, it easily outperforms most of its competition, and Samsung's claims of an "all-day" battery are not far off the mark. While other manufacturers may be conservative with their battery life estimates, I've seen firsthand that the Note 9 can easily kill the majority of its rivals.

Another feature that caught my attention was the charging speed. Unfortunately, it's still no faster than last year's Galaxy S7, which is a shame given the device's larger battery. However, this is not a deal-breaker for me, and I believe that the massive endurance of the battery more than makes up for it.

Fast wireless charging is another feature that I don't find myself reaching for often, but it's nice to have on hand when you need it. The speaker setup on the Note 9 is also noteworthy, with a rich and deep soundstage that provides excellent separation between different layers in music or TV shows. While not everyone will be able to appreciate the nuances of Dolby Atmos, I can confidently say that the audio experience on this device is one of its strongest features.

In terms of performance, the Note 9 flies through Samsung's increasingly heavy software skin with ease. The phone's specs are impressive, with up to six or eight gigabytes of RAM and a powerful processor that handles demanding tasks without breaking a sweat. Iris unlocking has never felt snappier, and the potential LTE speeds on this device are beyond impressive.

One feature that I'm particularly excited about is the water carbon cooling system, which Samsung claims dissipates heat three times better than previous generations. While it may not make a noticeable difference in day-to-day use, it's an important step forward for the company's thermal management.

However, there is one area where the Note 9 falls short: software. With Android Oreo on board, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of disappointment. Given that the final version of Android Pie has finally arrived, I expect to see Samsung prioritize updates and support for this latest iteration soon.

Despite this, the software on the Note 9 is still incredibly feature-rich. Fingerprint scanner, gestures, and unlocking via S-Pen are all present and accounted for, as well as an updated version of Bixby that has actually been working quite well in my tests – although, I must admit, the speech recognition leaves a lot to be desired.

In conclusion, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a beastly phone that will easily hold up as one of the best devices of 2018. While it may not have broken any new ground in terms of design or innovation, its iterative upgrades and improvements more than make up for it. If you're looking for a note-taking experience within the next three to four months, I would say that Samsung has hit a home run with this device.

But before you get too excited, keep in mind that at its core, the Note 9 is still an iterative upgrade – and a much larger one expected from Samsung as early as January next year. If you're new to the channel, thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this video, be sure to smash that subscribe button down below that would really mean a lot to me – my name is Erin, and I'll catch you guys next time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eniteration is not a crime and when done correctly can actually be more powerful than innovation Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 is a shining example of this let's find out why welcome to the real review the note 9 is not as immediately impressive as a lot of 2018 flagship phones the near bezel a screen of the vivo NEX a triple camera of the Huawei P 20 probe the transparent back of the xiaomi me 8 but even without this after having used every aspect of the galaxy note 9 this is a phone that I would pick over them the note 9 doesn't really have a headline-grabbing feature to the same extent but does represent consolidation like we haven't seen in a long time from Samsung the company talked a fair bit about the camera and it has been bolstered from the already solid galaxy s 9 plus a larger secondary sensor combined with new AI scene detection create an improvement that most people won't be able to notice the hardware upgrade and the AI is extremely subtle but compared to Hawaii p20 pros over embellishment of photos the AI here actually helps more than it hinders and this photo here shows how the phone can detect certain kinds of light and better adjust the settings to compensate in most cases though photos look pretty much the same as with the s9 plus the colors are a tiny bit more saturated when a scene is detected but this doesn't come close to the image enhancement going on with Google's pixel 2 compared to that phone I'd say landscapes and objects come out better on Google's device I mean just look at the sky here but portraits and people are handled better by Samsung portrait shots are softer on the note 9 + S 9 + but in a way that makes them flattering and almost cinematic not inaccurate you might notice if you look at the bricks here that the two lenses on this phone versus Google's single allow for more natural-looking depth effect you can also record super slow motion video for twice as long as with the s 9 most likely thanks to the new cooling system built into this phone and the AI also allows detection when someone suddenly moves or blinks and this is not just a cool feature this is a smart sensible and subtle way to integrate AI that doesn't make you want to throw your phone at a wall they are emoji is back with more options than ever before but honestly to me it feels not just half-hearted but also just stuck in this weird halfway house between cartoon and realism and it's just a little creepy one thing though while the phone is luxurious and of course solid from every angle and also comes packing ip68 certification in terms of the overall exterior I'm not blown away it's a thick bulky bit of kit and while the chamfered edges make it look better they interrupt the seamlessness and jut into your hands a little this lower down separate fingerprint scanner is functional but it just looks odd and I wish they'd stuck to the vertical setup that was seen on the s-line Plus don't get me wrong this is still easier than the Galaxy Note 8 to reach but it's still not easy to reach widly on the unit that I've got the camera is not actually centered within the cutout which just shouldn't happen and for the ocean blue collar variant that I have aver I'm just not a fan of the color of the s-pen it's a polarizing one with some people loving the two-tone idea but a lot of the people I've showed it to saying it just looks tacky in person and my personal opinion is that it kind of looks like a refurbished spare part having the same colored ink as the color of your pen is a nice touch but then trying to read yellow writing off a white background isn't as fun as it sounds having said that it is very easy to forgive this new s-pen it writes beautifully and even though I've never historically used an S Pen for more than a couple of weeks this time round I can genuinely say about switching songs remotely and being able to play and pause YouTube videos from across the room are features I can see myself using in the long run having this first party remote that works seamlessly and charges by itself is a luxury that I didn't realize I wanted the only kind of annoying thing for me is that the button doesn't have much travel so it can become tiring to just keep double pressing 128 gigabytes of storage with microSD card is what you get on the base model of this phone that is a real blessing and I would say alone justifies the slightly higher price tag of this phone versus last year's there is also that headline-grabbing 512 gigabyte version but with the increasing use of cloud services and improving data plans and bandwidth an average user won't even know what to do with that much space so for most people it's tough to recommend that version over this one okay over this last week I've been getting a lot of questions about the display on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and to answer them all in one go it is both delightful but also disappointing it is the largest yet on a note tone and as bright and vibrant as you've come to expect from Samsung flagship not to mention it goes up to a qhd+ resolution personally I keep it on the default 1080p option just to save that a little bit more battery but you can never complain about having the option to scale it up so it's not the panel itself that's a letdown but more what's around it the side borders are actually larger than the note aides and the screen to body ratio lower than even that of the galaxy s 8 last year and so coming from a device like the vivo NEX which is what I've been using on a day to day basis it's tough not to feel like something's missing but that isn't to say that the note 9 isn't a better package overall it is a bit of a shame that the charging speed is still no faster than the aging galaxy s7 with a full charge taking just under two hours it's not a deal-breaker for me and is easily outweighed by the massive endurance that the battery has when it is charged we're talking 4000 million powers of capacity and if you've watched the battery test you can probably tell it kills the majority of the competition now Samsung only claimed an all-day battery but really they're being conservative on a bit of a side note if you do want to see more on note 9 coverage it would really mean a lot to me if you could smash our subscribe button down below fast wireless charging is something I don't find myself reaching for but is a nice feature to have up your arsenal not to mention the speaker setup on the no 9 is both rich and deep held dolby atmos gives whatever music or TV or listening to a wider soundstage providing separation to different layers in the track oh yeah the Galaxy Note 9 is fast with the latest in mobile computing power and six or eight gigabytes of RAM it flies through Samsung's increasingly heavy software skin but while that is to be expected it is great to see that Samsung is improving the speed in other areas too iris unlocking has never felt snappier and the potential LTE speeds on this phone are beyond impressive also while the phone obviously powers through gaming to a combination of its power display audio and battery life make it one of the most suitable phones for this and then you've got what Samsung calls the water carbon cooling system what's that about it is a combination of measures that Samsung has added to the phone - apparently dissipate heat three times better than with past generations and while day-to-day when you're doing a bit of application use here a bit of gaming there you're not really going to be able to tell the difference the fact that we can now use Samsung decks with just a single adapter as opposed to the dedicated pad with built-in cooling is example of it in action unfortunately the software is a little behind the note 9 is packing Android Oreo which given that the final version of Android Pi has finally come out has left some people with a bad taste in the mouth having said that getting this software onto their latest flagship is going to be one of Samsung's top priorities right now so it's only a matter of months not to mention something experience has never been so full of genuinely useful options from fingerprint scanner gestures to unlocking a phone via s-pen remote you've got an updated version of Bixby which I have actually been using successfully to translate this bunch of Japanese snacks I got on holiday having said that the translation itself is actually still being handled by Google and let's just say the speech recognition on bixby leaves a lot to be desired in fact the first time I asked to make a restaurant reservation it opened the Samsung health app and recommended I use a cross trainer okay so the verdict should ybody Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 let's quickly loop back to what I said right at the beginning iteration is not a crime and when done correctly can be as powerful as innovation Samsung hasn't done anything crazy here but after having seen and used every aspect of this phone I can safely say it's paid off they could have gone further sure they could have done more but I would take the improvements seen here over a borderless screen and for now at least it is goodbye to the V phone X as my daily phone and hello to the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 as predicted it is a beastly phone that will easily hold up as one of 20 18 s finest but it is worth bearing in mind that at its core it is not just expensive but also an iterative upgrade with a much larger one expected from Samsung as early as January next year at the same time you can't always keep waiting for the next thing so if a note phone is what you're looking for within the next three to four months then Samsung has hit a homerun with the note 9 thanks a lot for watching guys I really hope you enjoyed the video and if you did if you're new to the channel if you could smash that subscribe button down below that would really mean a lot to me my name is Erin this is mister who's the boss and I'll catch you guys next timeiteration is not a crime and when done correctly can actually be more powerful than innovation Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 is a shining example of this let's find out why welcome to the real review the note 9 is not as immediately impressive as a lot of 2018 flagship phones the near bezel a screen of the vivo NEX a triple camera of the Huawei P 20 probe the transparent back of the xiaomi me 8 but even without this after having used every aspect of the galaxy note 9 this is a phone that I would pick over them the note 9 doesn't really have a headline-grabbing feature to the same extent but does represent consolidation like we haven't seen in a long time from Samsung the company talked a fair bit about the camera and it has been bolstered from the already solid galaxy s 9 plus a larger secondary sensor combined with new AI scene detection create an improvement that most people won't be able to notice the hardware upgrade and the AI is extremely subtle but compared to Hawaii p20 pros over embellishment of photos the AI here actually helps more than it hinders and this photo here shows how the phone can detect certain kinds of light and better adjust the settings to compensate in most cases though photos look pretty much the same as with the s9 plus the colors are a tiny bit more saturated when a scene is detected but this doesn't come close to the image enhancement going on with Google's pixel 2 compared to that phone I'd say landscapes and objects come out better on Google's device I mean just look at the sky here but portraits and people are handled better by Samsung portrait shots are softer on the note 9 + S 9 + but in a way that makes them flattering and almost cinematic not inaccurate you might notice if you look at the bricks here that the two lenses on this phone versus Google's single allow for more natural-looking depth effect you can also record super slow motion video for twice as long as with the s 9 most likely thanks to the new cooling system built into this phone and the AI also allows detection when someone suddenly moves or blinks and this is not just a cool feature this is a smart sensible and subtle way to integrate AI that doesn't make you want to throw your phone at a wall they are emoji is back with more options than ever before but honestly to me it feels not just half-hearted but also just stuck in this weird halfway house between cartoon and realism and it's just a little creepy one thing though while the phone is luxurious and of course solid from every angle and also comes packing ip68 certification in terms of the overall exterior I'm not blown away it's a thick bulky bit of kit and while the chamfered edges make it look better they interrupt the seamlessness and jut into your hands a little this lower down separate fingerprint scanner is functional but it just looks odd and I wish they'd stuck to the vertical setup that was seen on the s-line Plus don't get me wrong this is still easier than the Galaxy Note 8 to reach but it's still not easy to reach widly on the unit that I've got the camera is not actually centered within the cutout which just shouldn't happen and for the ocean blue collar variant that I have aver I'm just not a fan of the color of the s-pen it's a polarizing one with some people loving the two-tone idea but a lot of the people I've showed it to saying it just looks tacky in person and my personal opinion is that it kind of looks like a refurbished spare part having the same colored ink as the color of your pen is a nice touch but then trying to read yellow writing off a white background isn't as fun as it sounds having said that it is very easy to forgive this new s-pen it writes beautifully and even though I've never historically used an S Pen for more than a couple of weeks this time round I can genuinely say about switching songs remotely and being able to play and pause YouTube videos from across the room are features I can see myself using in the long run having this first party remote that works seamlessly and charges by itself is a luxury that I didn't realize I wanted the only kind of annoying thing for me is that the button doesn't have much travel so it can become tiring to just keep double pressing 128 gigabytes of storage with microSD card is what you get on the base model of this phone that is a real blessing and I would say alone justifies the slightly higher price tag of this phone versus last year's there is also that headline-grabbing 512 gigabyte version but with the increasing use of cloud services and improving data plans and bandwidth an average user won't even know what to do with that much space so for most people it's tough to recommend that version over this one okay over this last week I've been getting a lot of questions about the display on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and to answer them all in one go it is both delightful but also disappointing it is the largest yet on a note tone and as bright and vibrant as you've come to expect from Samsung flagship not to mention it goes up to a qhd+ resolution personally I keep it on the default 1080p option just to save that a little bit more battery but you can never complain about having the option to scale it up so it's not the panel itself that's a letdown but more what's around it the side borders are actually larger than the note aides and the screen to body ratio lower than even that of the galaxy s 8 last year and so coming from a device like the vivo NEX which is what I've been using on a day to day basis it's tough not to feel like something's missing but that isn't to say that the note 9 isn't a better package overall it is a bit of a shame that the charging speed is still no faster than the aging galaxy s7 with a full charge taking just under two hours it's not a deal-breaker for me and is easily outweighed by the massive endurance that the battery has when it is charged we're talking 4000 million powers of capacity and if you've watched the battery test you can probably tell it kills the majority of the competition now Samsung only claimed an all-day battery but really they're being conservative on a bit of a side note if you do want to see more on note 9 coverage it would really mean a lot to me if you could smash our subscribe button down below fast wireless charging is something I don't find myself reaching for but is a nice feature to have up your arsenal not to mention the speaker setup on the no 9 is both rich and deep held dolby atmos gives whatever music or TV or listening to a wider soundstage providing separation to different layers in the track oh yeah the Galaxy Note 9 is fast with the latest in mobile computing power and six or eight gigabytes of RAM it flies through Samsung's increasingly heavy software skin but while that is to be expected it is great to see that Samsung is improving the speed in other areas too iris unlocking has never felt snappier and the potential LTE speeds on this phone are beyond impressive also while the phone obviously powers through gaming to a combination of its power display audio and battery life make it one of the most suitable phones for this and then you've got what Samsung calls the water carbon cooling system what's that about it is a combination of measures that Samsung has added to the phone - apparently dissipate heat three times better than with past generations and while day-to-day when you're doing a bit of application use here a bit of gaming there you're not really going to be able to tell the difference the fact that we can now use Samsung decks with just a single adapter as opposed to the dedicated pad with built-in cooling is example of it in action unfortunately the software is a little behind the note 9 is packing Android Oreo which given that the final version of Android Pi has finally come out has left some people with a bad taste in the mouth having said that getting this software onto their latest flagship is going to be one of Samsung's top priorities right now so it's only a matter of months not to mention something experience has never been so full of genuinely useful options from fingerprint scanner gestures to unlocking a phone via s-pen remote you've got an updated version of Bixby which I have actually been using successfully to translate this bunch of Japanese snacks I got on holiday having said that the translation itself is actually still being handled by Google and let's just say the speech recognition on bixby leaves a lot to be desired in fact the first time I asked to make a restaurant reservation it opened the Samsung health app and recommended I use a cross trainer okay so the verdict should ybody Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 let's quickly loop back to what I said right at the beginning iteration is not a crime and when done correctly can be as powerful as innovation Samsung hasn't done anything crazy here but after having seen and used every aspect of this phone I can safely say it's paid off they could have gone further sure they could have done more but I would take the improvements seen here over a borderless screen and for now at least it is goodbye to the V phone X as my daily phone and hello to the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 as predicted it is a beastly phone that will easily hold up as one of 20 18 s finest but it is worth bearing in mind that at its core it is not just expensive but also an iterative upgrade with a much larger one expected from Samsung as early as January next year at the same time you can't always keep waiting for the next thing so if a note phone is what you're looking for within the next three to four months then Samsung has hit a homerun with the note 9 thanks a lot for watching guys I really hope you enjoyed the video and if you did if you're new to the channel if you could smash that subscribe button down below that would really mean a lot to me my name is Erin this is mister who's the boss and I'll catch you guys next time\n"