Review: Samsung Galaxy Note 9

What’s a big smartphone supposed to be in the era of plus-sized, elongated phones with 18.5:9 display aspect ratios? Haven’t plenty of phone makers figured out how to squeeze a substantial amount of screen into a phone size that doesn’t give you hand cramps?

These are the questions Samsung has to answer as it launches the new Galaxy Note 9 smartphone. Sure, the Note line of smartphones has evolved right along with the rest of the industry. But it’s still a big phone, and its bigness has to be justified.

In the case of the Note 9, that justification comes in the form of an abundance of tech we’re already familiar with, rather than brand-new tech we’ve never seen before. The feature that will probably have the most impact on everyday life is the battery: Samsung is shipping the phone with the largest-ever battery in a Galaxy flagship smartphone. Yes I know, this is the same line of smartphones that shipped with fiery batteries two years ago. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t cross my mind when I flew across the country with a new Note 9 phone last week. But Samsung has instituted a multi-step battery check for its phones since then. So far, so good.

The Note 9 has other draws, too: It’s super fast, comes with more storage than even obsessive photo takers or game players might know what to do with, and its S Pen stylus now doubles as a remote control. Samsung has somehow found ways to differentiate this phone from the Galaxy S9, it’s other flagship phone. It has justified the bigness.

It’s also charging for it. The base model of the Note 9, which will ship with 128 gigabytes of internal storage, costs $1,000. Bump that up to 512 gigabytes of internal storage and 8 gigabytes of RAM, and you’re looking at $1,250. Samsung says its Note customers frequently report that they love their phones. That’s some crazy in love.

At first glance, the Note 9 doesn’t look different from last year’s Galaxy Note 8—but there are some small changes. It still has an aluminum frame with Gorilla Glass on the front and back, but the frame around the edge-to-edge display is slightly tapered. The Note 9 weighs just a few grams more than the Note 8. The new phone is also a hair wider than last year’s model.

The Note 9’s display size is the biggest physical difference. Last year’s Note 8 had a 6.3-inch display; the Note 9 has a 6.4-inch display. Considering the two phones are almost the exact same size, this means Samsung has upped the screen-to-phone ratio, an effort to keep up with broader smartphone trends. The display itself is bright, luminous, eye-grabbing. At a time when techies are switching to grayscale to attempt to cure their smartphone addictions, Samsung is luring all the kids back into the candy store.

Like this year’s Galaxy S9, the Note 9 has a plethora of options for authenticating on the device: There’s a fingerprint scanner, an iris scanner, a facial recognition feature, a combination of iris and face scanning… we are mere steps away from unlocking our notes with the unique tips of our noses. Like last year’s Note 8, the Note 9 charges via USB-C or Qi wireless charging. And like the decades of devices that came before it, the Note 9 has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Amen.

The Note 9 is running Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box, which is not the latest Google software. Samsung won’t say when it expects Android 9 Pie to come to the Note 9.

The phone’s interface is easy enough to navigate—but that’s largely in comparison to what it used to be, back when Samsung’s software “skin” made things feel dense and disorganized. It’s cleaner now, though there are still side app panels and side “people” panels (for quick access to contacts) and split-screen views and snapping windows. A big-screened phone is supposed to allow for all of this. At the same time, it demands a heck of a lot of interaction.

You know when you’re about to take off on a road trip or flight or long commute and you realize you forgot to download all the stuff you wanted to download before you left and there’s no way you’re going to be able to do it now, while you’re already in transit? The Note 9 nearly eliminates that problem.

Downloading and installing new apps often took me less than 30 seconds; lengthy podcasts were downloaded in a fraction of that. I downloaded Epic Games’ Fortnite, which is available as an Android app exclusively on Samsung devices for an undetermined window of time, from the parking lot of a Starbucks. It’s a 1.82-gigabyte download, and it was ready to go in a few minutes. Much of this, of course, is also dependent on network speeds. But while Samsung has built a high-end LTE modem into the phone, it does not have support for 5G, which doesn’t futureproof the Note 9 very well.

It’s running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, and the base model comes with 6 gigabytes of RAM. This matches the processing specs on the Galaxy S9, which came out earlier this year. (For what it’s worth, early benchmark tests have shown that Apple’s iPhone X is still a faster phone.) What’s different about the Note 9 is that it includes a water-carbon cooling system and a heat sink that’s three times bigger than the one in last year’s phone.

That’s a lot of mechanical engineering speak for what basically means that the phone’s processing power has been coupled with tools that help dissipate heat. So the phone has been designed to not overheat when you’re taxing it (and not slow down tremendously, either). I’m not a big gamer, but I did (finally, finally) play Fortnite on the Note 9. The phone started to feel warm after just five minutes of gameplay, the edges of the phone especially. It cooled down fast, though. And when I watched videos on it, there was no unusual stuttering or overheating.

If you’re as Slack-and-social-media-attached as I am, then you’re going to appreciate the Note 9’s battery—a 4000 milliampere hour battery, compared to the Note 8’s 3300mAh battery. This should get you a day and then some, which is Samsung’s promise. That was my experience: In one test, I took the fully-charged Note 9 off its charger midday and by midday the following day the phone still had 15 percent battery left. This was with my everyday usage: Slack, Twitter, Google Maps, email, browsing, Instagram, YouTube, and more. But this was also with the Note 9’s built-in battery saving function turned on, and I was surprised I wasn’t getting closer to a day and a half, given the amount of battery-boasting Samsung execs did at the phone’s launch event.

Samsung is also releasing a wireless charging dock that costs $120. Such descriptions can be misleading; the dock itself still needs to plug in, but you can simply plop up to two Samsung devices on the inductive charging pads and they’ll fast-charge. The convenience of this kind of accessory can’t be overstated. However, my loaner unit is possibly a dud, since one of the charging pads charges things quickly and the other does not.

We’ve come to expect things like dual-lens cameras, portrait modes (“faux-keh”), and improved low-light performance in high-end smartphones. What matters more and more is what smartphone makers are doing on the software end to improve cameras. And that’s the tack that Samsung has taken with the Note 9: Its camera hardware is virtually the same as the camera on the Galaxy S9, but the Note 9 is differentiated by its artificial intelligence.

This includes an optimizer in the camera app that reads the scene when you’re shooting a photo in Auto mode, and within a second or so, gives the not-yet-captured imagery a boost. There’s also a feature that lets you know if a photo you’ve just snapped is blurry, or if someone’s eyes are closed; although the notification is so fleeting and the text so tiny that it’s easy to miss this if you’re not staring at your Note after taking the photo.

In certain environments, the AI-powered optimizer was a welcome addition. It makes colors pop, and ever-so-slightly adjusts the exposure when needed. But in other environments, the optimizer boosted colors unnaturally, taking Samsung’s saturation levels to a whole new level; or it added noise. It also created a halo-like effect in certain images, like the edges of the yellow bowl included here. If you don’t love it, the optimizer can be turned off in settings.

The Note 9’s camera is generally wow-worthy. I snapped a series of photos with the Note 9, the iPhone X, and the Pixel 2 XL, and in some instances, the Note 9’s photo was brighter and more crisp than the others. But it also depends on your personal preferences for smartphone photos. I prefer photos to be more true to life, both in color and composition; Samsung’s cameras sometime soften things to the point of stripping away detail, as you can see in the side-by-side photos of my colleague Kayla.

Last week, when I learned that the Note 9's S Pen was not just a stylus but now also a Bluetooth remote-control stick for the phone, I said that this was a terrible gimmick. I was wrong. The S Pen as a Bluetooth remote-control stick has delighted the people around me as we’ve used it to take selfies over the past few days. (I’ve even punked people by handing the new phone over to them and then, as they’re examining it, launching the camera app with the S Pen in my hand.) It’s incredibly useful as a tool for unlocking the phone when it’s resting a few feet away from you at your desk and you don’t feel like picking it up and using your face or finger to open it. Selfie stick S Pen, I salute you.

Samsung markets the Note as something beyond a smartphone; something more akin to a superphone. It comes close to being that, but the Note 9 also lacks the whiz-bang of what a next-generation smartphone should really have (including 5G support and 3D front-facing cameras).

There’s also the question of how big is too big, which is something I’ve personally always grappled with with the Note line. Even when it’s aligned with a Google Pixel 2 XL and an iPhone 8 Plus—both large phones—the Note 9 stands out for its size. It’s not easy to hold and control with one hand. One night earlier this week, I contemplated going for a run, then realized I had absolutely no desire to carry the Note 9 with me on my run. That’s something I wouldn’t get used to with time.

For the people who Samsung insists love the Note line, they’re going to love this one, too. They’ve already resigned themselves to a big, expensive phone, and are getting the performance, storage and battery goodness that should come with that. For those people, the Note’s place in a market full of large smartphones has never been a question. For the rest of the $1,000 smartphone population, other flagship phones will almost certainly do the trick—and might even have more advanced tech if you wait a few months longer.