Samsung Galaxy Note 9 review: Bigger, better, longer lasting. This is the most sophisticated Android phone ever made
The latest phone in Samsung’s Note series is all about marginal gains. The screen has grown from 6.3 inches to 6.4 inches, the battery has been boosted to 4,000mAh, and the storage options to one whole terabyte, a record-breaking memory capacity that, for phones, was pure hyperbole only a few years ago. Like saying you could do a bajillion pushups.
It hardly needs stating that the Note 9 is the best Note ever made – Samsung would be in real trouble if it decided to start rolling things back now – but as cranked up to the nines as the specs may be, the pinnacle of Samsung’s offerings doesn’t offer much to get truly excited about.
It has the biggest screen, the fastest processor, the best camera, the most storage, and a cool little stylus pen with a fidget-clicker that slides in and out real nice. To call it a workhorse is giving horses too much credit. Horses are hoofy-slackers by comparison. Horses are lazy.
The Note 9 is the kitchen-sink powerhouse for the person who needs their phone to do everything that it’s possible for an Android phone to do. But with the best will in the world, there’s very little new to say about the glossy sequel to the Note 8 and S9 Plus. It doesn’t light my fire, (Samsung has made very sure it won’t light any fires), it’s just supposed to be extremely good.
The improved camera has drafted in all of the changes introduced for this year’s Galaxy S9 Plus. So it’s a dual-camera setup, with wide-angle and telephoto lenses working in tandem to allow for sharp optical zooming and some really quite remarkable low-light and night-time shots. Clever software recognises blurry shots, or closed eyes, and tunes the image to suit the subject.
If you’ve never been convinced to use a stylus with a phone then jog along, this isn’t the phone to convert you, but stylus fans will appreciate the S Pen’s new functions, allowed by its low-power Bluetooth capabilities. The button on the side of the S Pen can be used to trigger actions, such as advancing a slide on a presentation, or launching whichever app you assign to it.
DeX, which allows you to turn the phone into a desktop computer by plugging it into a screen, no longer requires a bulky adapter. Instead it works with a regular USB Type-C to HDMI cable, providing an Android desktop experience that’s kind of useful in a set of specific situations, if not quite fully featured enough to entirely replace your laptop. That the phone’s screen turns into a trackpad is a nice touch, but for real productivity you’ll need a keyboard, and at that point you may as well bring your laptop with you.
Though it’s slowly improving, software is often a sticking point for Samsung phones. The Note 9 runs Android 8.1 Oreo, and there’s no word yet on when it will upgrade to the latest version of the operating system, Android 9 Pie. And out of the box, the phone is littered with the usual redundant or unwanted apps, the detritus of third-party commercial deals or just Samsung’s reluctance to rely too heavily on Google’s ecosystem.
The latter is a reasonable enough concern, but who in their right mind is using ‘Samsung Internet’ over Google Chrome? And nobody, having spent at least £900 on a phone, should be seeing unsolicited notifications to sign-in to a pre-installed LinkedIn app.
The first time you fire up any new Samsung phone is a cacophony of notifications, a landslide of alerts as every feature and app attempts to introduce itself to you at the same time, and here it’s no different. It’s not a premium experience.
But wrangle with the software long enough – and uninstall the stuff you don’t need – and you’ll get the Note 9 into some kind of shape that you’re happy with. And that shape will be the shape of the most sophisticated Android phone you can buy. It is slightly bigger, slightly faster, slightly better in every regard, and greatly more expensive than the next best thing.
It’s a phone for those who refuse to compromise on specs, and have the payslips to back it up.