Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Review: The Total Package!

Hello, what's up guys? This is mkbhd and this is the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, an absolute unit, uh, this is that Android phone again that starts at a thousand dollars this year and is making headlines again. It is a very expensive phone. I've been using it ever since. came out since that impressions video so for over a week and I must say I think it's worth it so last year I was talking about the five pillars of a great smartphone so if you remember some of my previous

review

s that I had. five pillars of a great smartphone those five and the one the

note

8 didn't have was a great battery but literally everything else was great and it's still a phone of the year this year the

note

9 updates literally everything about that phone and makes the biggest battery improvement, so it's getting a lot of criticism for being just an incremental upgrade to the Note 8, but I actually think it's one of the best compliments you can give a phone right now, what are they? those pillars?

Ask: They are a great screen, great build quality, great performance, great camera, and great battery life. I always say that if you check every box, you will get a great quality smartphone. If we look at the Galaxy Note 9, it now ticks every box and then some. the screen is amazing, some including me would even say it's literally the best screen on any phone. Last year's Note was already the best screen of any phone this year. It is 0.1 inch larger and is gorgeously bright. You can read it outdoors in direct sunlight. It's super vibrant. and with contrast and color accuracy this is a great screen, great for gaming, watching videos and also no notch in case you forgot, the only downside to a screen like this is how big it makes the phone he sits.

I just came from the oneplus 6. As you know, with a smaller screen and the older pixel and using an iPhone 10 a lot, moving on to this note it is one of the few phones that really makes me work hard to use it with one hand and I prefer to use it with frequency. with both hands and I don't say that about many phones, so you have to stretch a lot to get to the top of the screen and then go back down to the bottom and you will notice it, but again if you are receiving a note, already You know what you're getting into and sometimes that's something you have to calibrate, but overall, it's a great viewing, it certainly gets the nod and that brings me to the second part, which is Great quality of build with the infinity screen, the type of screen edge bleed on Samsung still does it, it's recognizable compared to other phones that don't do this and I like it, they don't have to reinvent the wheel here, they found something. that makes it feel really immersive and they keep doing it well, but I really think we keep forgetting about the build quality, the industrial design or in general the hardware of this phone is one of the most underrated things, it's really cool.

The premium build materials are just right, so you have metal in every way. This is the new blue. I actually really like narrow corners, like really square ones, like a phone, much more square than most, but I like that they still have a rounded edge. corners of the screen, but not by much and overall it just has this dense, chiseled look and feel and ticks a lot of boxes. It is IP68 waterproof. It has a headphone jack. It has great buttons to click. I'll talk more about that. Those at a time and one of the most underrated hardware upgrades are the speakers.

They are in the same place as before, but now sound much louder and fuller and simply better than before. I definitely appreciate that slight inconvenience. For the hardware there is the glossy back which will pick up 100 tonnes of fingerprints, as you can see, as good as the Samsung glass looks when it's clean, it can get quite dark, but obviously the easy fix is ​​to slap a dbrand case on it. I can recommend a black leather specifically for this one, so you can rock a super clean black and yellow look with that pen. Overall, this thing is built like a tank.

Build quality is not an issue on the Note 9. I would even say that it technically counts as a It's a small improvement because they move the fingerprint reader down a bit to make it more accessible. Minor details, but they make a difference when you use it every day, but the build quality is excellent, so the performance of the Galaxy Note 9 has been great. It's a fast, high-end flagship, so you'd expect that Snapdragon 845 and six gigs of ram here, etc. However, I am always worried about Samsung's appearance because it is not light, it is a lot, you worry about software updates, but from my point of view.

Usage so far has been smooth and snappy, it's what I expected and so far it has received a software update. This is the 128 gig version with six gigs of RAM. I haven't been able to test the 512 gigabyte version with eight gigabytes of RAM yet, but the first thing is that it is $250 more expensive than the basic version, so it's a lot, and I also don't see myself using 500 gigabytes of storage on such a phone. amazing how I love it. which is an option, we are in 2018, why not exceed that limit? But almost everything I use as far as media photos, music, photos, all of this is cloud-based anyway, if you're the type of person who has an insane amount of media and local movies and games, whatever Whatever you're doing, there can only be one phone that offers this half a terabyte of storage right now, I mean maybe two or three, but that's what Node is all about, giving you these power user features plus two extra gigs of RAM.

It doesn't hurt but I think almost everyone including me will be fine with the 128.6 and then there's also a new cooling system to mention so Zack Jerry fixed everything he broke on his Note 9 and showed off the heat pipe much larger copper inside this one. Samsung phone calls it carbon water cooling system. All I can tell you is that just from using it, this phone definitely still gets a little warm on the back, especially when you play games for a while or browse in a warm window on your dashboard or something. but it definitely never overheats, it's certainly a great gaming phone although it has the specs and more to keep up and the most amazing screen and some upgraded speakers so it's still a solid combination and then there's the camera(s) and uh this is This is a firmly third place camera as far as smartphones go right now, which is pretty impressive.

I mean, you have pixel 2 at the top, which is awesome. Then you have this and the iPhone 10 in second and third place. You can watch the blind test video. If you don't believe me, this is essentially the same camera setup as the Galaxy S9 Plus from a couple of months ago, making it an upgrade from the last note, so like the S9 Plus, you give it a lot of light and it's a great camera, you can get a really shallow depth of field if you get close enough to the subject as it's pretty classic Samsung vibrant colors and slight over processing in terms of sharpening and noise reduction.

You've heard all this from me before. The only new addition is the AI ​​in the settings, which they call scene optimizer which will automatically adjust certain colors when it recognizes the subject, so with flowers it could enhance the warmer colors or with landscapes it could enhance the blue of the sky, but I found this to me to be more inconsistent and annoying than useful so I turned it off after a while but what I do think was useful is what they called fault detection or basically if someone blinks or the photo is blurry or finds an eye red or something is wrong. it will somehow let you know right away so you can grab another one, that part is great, but overall, yeah, the Galaxy Note 8 had a great camera, then the Galaxy S9 and S9 plus had a great camera.

Now we have the Note 9 which is still a great camera, so that brings up what everyone was probably wondering all along, which is the battery. The Note 9 steps up to a 4,000 milliamp hour battery, which is a pretty big jump from last year. Last year they were a little conservative, you know, as a follow-up. After the problems they had, they had a 3300 milliamp hour battery in the Note 8. So that's a plus 20 battery capacity size that's not iterative. I know a lot of the things we've said about this phone have been iterative and they're not. That's a big jump, but it's only on paper, so as far as actual phone life goes, it's not the best battery life of any phone still available for phones with smaller screens, but the Note 9 now comfortably lasts all day with a little extra room to spare, which it didn't before, so I'm getting about 5 hours of screen on time and most days occasionally a little more, never less, which is nice.

With my intensive use it is quite good. Saying that a negative grade battery which I was quite happy with, obviously having a huge 6.4 inch super bright screen on all the time, will take its toll on a phone, so we feel that last year with the big screen I think four thousand milliamp hours. It's actually the appropriate battery size for the Galaxy Note and I don't think anyone who gets it will be disappointed. The battery life is excellent, so it looks like they did it. They like me. I said they literally updated everything that was on paper about this phone from last year. was already good so I mean you got a better, bigger and brighter screen, it's great, you got great performance, you got great build quality, you got great battery life and a great camera now all in one phone only and, as the note always does, it also has a ton. of extras just because Samsung has tons of features to offer to people who like that kind of stuff, those are people who are buying the Note, like all the different screen modes and advanced settings that Samsung offers in the settings for the people who want to score. the exact color balance and the look of your screens things like that is clearly not perfect uh a bixby button so perfectly placed that it can't be reassigned I can't ignore that it's a shame I just want to reassign the bixby button to start google or twitter or something else I want to do what you can't

samsung

I thought you were interested in that and the remote function of the s pen works and is great, but I don't see myself using it as much.

I do powerpoints from my phone or any presentations or things like that, so I still use the stylus to just pull it out, make a note, and put it away. You know that the extra features are welcome and there will be people who love and use them. many, but it turns out I'm just one of those people who uses the stylus like I always have, but at the end of the day I honestly wouldn't have a problem using this phone every day, check as many boxes as you can. I really can't find another phone that has an incredible high resolution display with no notch, IP68 water resistance, a headphone jack and then up to half a terabyte of snapdragon 845 flash storage, eight gigs of expandable ram storage plus dual cameras, both with ois and a 4000 milliamp hour battery, a thousand dollars is a lot to spend on a phone, but if you are going to spend a thousand dollars on one, this is without a doubt the one, you will get your money's worth and the people who are looking to buy one note they already know what they're getting into and they'll love this, but if you're on the other side of that camp if you're not a notes person if you are if you're already writing in the comments a thousand dollars is too much to spend on a phone , I would never do that, so a phone like the

galaxy

s9 or s9 plus, which costs several hundred dollars less, that will be the route to go, so Samsung is something like that.

Offering a wide variety of different budget options and you can choose and I think you will find something you like there. It's a good phone. Good job. Samsung until next time. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you later. Peace.