Samsung Galaxy S9 Pro Reviews

For those who are fans of Samsung phones, and want to keep it small, the S9 is an ideal purchase. However, it’s not particularly cheap, retailing for around £739 at the time of writing - which does make it significantly cheaper than the Samsung S9+, which retails for around £869. You can of course get it on contracts and pay much less upfront, but for just £60 more, you could get the Huawei P20 Pro - designed by DxO as the world’s best smartphone for photography.

The Galaxy S9 and S9+ are subtle upgrades to last year’s S8 line. The most significant improvements are found in the fingerprint scanner position, the new intelligent face scan feature, the AR Emoji 3D avatars, and the camera, but only for the S9+, which gets the secondary zoom camera of the Note 8. In any case, if you’re a current Galaxy S8 user, we’d say an upgrade to the S9 would be completely unnecessary, but that’s expected. For owners of older devices, like the S7 or S6, the Galaxy S9 will feel like a major step forward. Samsung has once again managed to craft desirable handsets with the S9 and S9+; one can hardly find anything remotely as elegant, as advanced, and as polished, all in a single product, on the Android market. The closest it gets to that are LG’s V30 or Google’s Pixel 2, but each of these has certain drawbacks that position them a step below Samsung’s impressive package.

At $720 unlocked for the Galaxy S9, and $840 unlocked for the Galaxy S9+, Samsung has managed to undercut the iPhone X and the Pixel 2 XL while still rising to meet their challenge. The Galaxy S9 is among the best smartphones on the market today, and if it somehow lacks that certain “wow” factor that’s only by virtue of it standing on the shoulders of an already excellent handset. That can only be good news for upgraders.

The Galaxy S9 is an evolution rather than a revolution, but Samsung has upgraded it in all the right places.