South Korean tech giant Samsung officially unveiled the Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone during the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain.

It has a similar design as last year’s Galaxy S8 but with a faster processor, new camera technologies, fun software tricks and improved biometric security features.

 

Design and Display

The Samsung Galaxy S9 has a 5.8 inch Super AMOLED display. It uses a taller than usual 18.5:9 aspect ratio with curved edges, rounded corners and topped with a scratch resistant layer of Gorilla Glass 5.

It’s almost bezel-less with an 84.2% screen to body ratio. Both the front and back of the device are made up of glass while the frame is Aluminum.

Thankfully, the phone’s fingerprint sensor is now located under the rear camera instead of beside it. This reduces the chances of accidentally smudging the camera lens when unlocking the phone.

 

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy S9 comes with a 12 Megapixel rear camera with a variable aperture. That means it can adapt to both low light and bright light situations.

It also has a 1.4 µm pixel size, dual pixel phase detection autofocus and optical image stabilization. All these technologies allow the device to capture photos and videos with great quality whether in good or bad lighting situations. There’s even slow motion mode for video with an incredible 960 frames per second!

Meanwhile, an 8 Megapixel selfie camera resides on the front of the phone. It has autofocus and the ability to record 4K videos.

 

Performance and Software

A Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset powers the Samsung Galaxy S9 – at least in the US and China. The rest of the world including the Philippines will have units rocking a Samsung Exynos 9810 chipset.

The latter has an octa core CPU running at a maximum clock speed of 2.9GHz with a Mali-G72MP18 graphics processor and 4GB of RAM. It comes with Samsung’s customized user interface running on top of Android 8.0 Oreo.

Animated emojis are now supported and look much like the user. Bixby is also better now.

 

Storage and Connectivity

The Samsung Galaxy S9 has 64GB of built-in storage and a microSD card slot for up to 256GB memory cards. However, it uses a hybrid slot that occupies the position of the second SIM card.

It can connect to 4G LTE and dual band Wi-Fi networks. Bluetooth 5.0, NFC and various positioning systems aside from GPS are all supported too.

When connected to the new DeX platform and onto an external display, the device can function like a desktop PC. Like the Huawei Mate 10, it can now be used as a touchpad while in desktop mode.

Thankfully, the 3.5mm audio jack is still present!

 

Sensors and Security

As usual, the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a lot of sensors. There’s the fingerprint scanner at the back, hear rate monitor, SpO2 sensor, gyroscope and barometer.

It even combines facial recognition and iris scanning for a more secure biometric unlocking.

 

Battery

The Samsung Galaxy S9 is powered by a 3000mAh battery. That’s not much for a flagship smartphone but the company has learned its lesson.

It does support fast charging as well as wireless charging.

 

Price and Availability

The official price of the Samsung Galaxy S9 in the Philippines is ₱45,990.00.

Its release date is on March 16, 2018 and Pre-orders will be accepted from February 27 to March 6, 2018.