I've just spent a little over two weeks with the Samsung Galaxy S9+, Samsung's latest phablet flagship.

That's why we're a bit late to the party. 

But we like to be thorough. And this review is definitely detailed (and rather long). 

The Galaxy S9+ packs a brand new processor, a new and tweaked dual-sensor camera, and tons of other new features.

We've also now reviewed the regular-sized Samsung Galaxy S9.

As well as giving an overview of how the two differ in size, handling, and a few key spec differences (mostly the smaller battery, slightly less RAM, and the single-sensor camera), our Galaxy S9 review shows off the design aesthetic in the new purple colour; giving a better view of the bodyshell than our all-black Galaxy S9+ review unit.

Is the Galaxy S9+ any good? Let's take a look...

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Design & Display

There’s no two ways about it; the Samsung Galaxy S9+ looks virtually identical to the Galaxy S8+, and aside from size is VERY similar in design to the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S8 too.

It’s also not far off the Galaxy Note 8 in overall aesthetic, although it is a bit shorter and curvier at the corners.

Pretty much the only way to distinguish the Galaxy S9+ visually from its predecessor is on the back panel, where we find a dual-camera array instead of a single sensor, and with a fingerprint sensor positioned below the lenses rather than to the side.

In other words, if you’ve seen a Samsung flagship in the last few years, overall this is more of the same.

Is that a bad thing?

Some might argue it’s a stagnation, but frankly, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

I think Samsung has honed in on a very appealing design style, built solidly from premium materials, and there’s no reason for it to change anytime soon.

My one minor gripe is that I keep getting the Midnight Black colour for my review samples.

I don’t have a problem with black phones per se, they are indeed necessary for business settings (or if you are one of those people who wears all black all the time - like Johnny Cash, or a Goth), but even business-centric BlackBerry handsets give themselves the luxury of some contrasting silver trim and buttons.

Samsung’s Midnight Black is entirely black - every single component and surface.

This turns the whole phone into an amorphous slab of pure darkness, which is not only a bit boring to look at, but as a reviewer makes it almost impossible to photograph in a way that looks good.

There are enough promotional images floating about of the Galaxy S9 series wearing its other available colour variants, and in my opinion, they look much more attractive and do a far better job of showing off the phone’s carefully crafted visual style.

I honestly think it would be better if Samsung changed its black option in future to have some silver contrasting accents as the all-black “stealth” option lacks character.

Although it’s more of the same, I will say that on close inspection of the Galaxy S9+’s bodywork it is pretty impressive; the metal frame and curved glass panels are shaped and blended together beautifully, and the build gives the impression of being both solid and of a high quality premium feel.

It’s a nitpick, but the edges do feel a little on the thin side, although I’m not too worried about dropping the phone, I am aware my grip could be a bit more secure than this; if this bothers you then a case might be a good idea, and Samsung itself has plenty of them not to mention aftermarket options.

As with previous flagships, it is IP68 water and dust resistant, so it will survive you dropping it in the sink, bath, toilet, or pool.

On to the display.

As with the design, this is also similar to what we’ve seen before from Samsung; a 6.2in Super AMOLED with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio, curved edges, a QHD 1440 x 2960 pixel resolution at 529 pixels-per-inch (ppi).

The sharpness and colour are particularly on point and seem slightly better than the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8 series, with finer details and edges, and richer colour.

I might be imagining it, however, because as far as I can tell from Samsung’s documentation the actual display tech and spec hasn’t changed since the previous generation.

At the very least it’s just as good, which means it’s way out in front of everything else on the market still, it excels in pretty much every area that counts on a display; clarity, sharpness, colour (at 100% sRGB accuracy), contrast, black depth, brightness, sunlight readability, white purity, and viewing angles.

As with the last-gen, the neat Always-On Display and adaptive brightness features remain and are very well implemented.

Samsung also has a new addition with Edge Lighting Notification, which essentially allows you to see notifications without disrupting whatever main app you have up on-screen - additionally, if that notification is a message, you can view and reply in a small pop-up window, again keeping your film or game maximised with no fuss.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Battery Life

The Galaxy S9+ houses quite a sizeable battery cell; a 3,500mAh unit with fast wired charging via Quick Charge 2.0 on USB Type-C and fast wireless charging (WPC/PMA).

For the battery testing I fully charged the phone to 100%, turned brightness to maximum, and ran a two-hour film (Mad Max: Fury Road) which had already been pre-loaded onto the device. With the credits rolling the Galaxy S9+ was down to 80% charge.

Interestingly, that’s actually ever so slightly worse than both the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8+ from the same testing routine - which showed 82% and 86% respectively - but even so, it’s not a big enough difference to gripe over and it still puts the Galaxy S9+ in the top tier of smartphone battery performance.

I did have some concerns about other aspects of the Galaxy S9+’s battery performance, not least when it dropped from 80% to 39% overnight while performing an update.

I’d consider that kind of power consumption somewhat excessive for a software update, but subsequent overnight testing without software updates didn’t show the same kind of drain, so I can only conclude it was indeed the update process that caused it and recommend that updates be done while connected to a charger.

Aside from this, I’d consider the Samsung Galaxy S9+’s battery to be above average.

As with the film discharge rate, playing a video game for an extended period saw the tick-away of about 10% per hour or so. When left idling under normal conditions (as in, without an update or other background activity) the Galaxy S9+ will lose about 10% power in a 12-hour period, which essentially means that you can have it lasting at least several days, if not the better part of a week.

Such minimalist use isn’t very realistic, of course, as most users will at least be giving the phone a poke throughout the day and using various messaging, social media, and utility apps, not to mention multimedia. With normal use a couple of days isn’t out of the question, although power users might find it doesn’t last quite this long.

Importantly, however, although this battery performance is decent, it is a step down from the Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note 8. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed either, with similar findings from both AnandTech and PhoneArena.

“Our test shows a nearly 12% decline in battery life, while AnandTech shows a much larger percent of more than 30%. Keep in mind that our testing methods are different, so it's only natural that the results vary, but what both tests confirm is that battery life has declined significantly,” reports PhoneArena.

The long and the short of it is the Galaxy S9 series battery life is decent, however, if battery performance is your primary concern, you’d be better off going for 2017’s model instead.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Performance

As is usually the case for Samsung’s flagships, there are a couple of different processor variants depending on which region you’re in.

The models for China, the US, and Canada, are based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, while for those of us in the UK, our neighbours in Europe, and consumers in most other world regions, we’re looking at a Samsung homebrew Exynos 9810 chip.

Both are based on the 10nm LPP (Low Power Plus) architecture and are octa-core CPU setups, and allegedly performance is broadly comparable between models.

We can, of course, only comment on the Exynos model, as that’s the one we’re testing.

The Exynos 9810 is an absolute beast, easily capable of multitasking over fifteen applications at once, not to mention the split-screen mode which is also handled deftly.

I couldn’t find anything that would cause slowdown during my time with the handset, no doubt the hefty 6GB of RAM helps keep things ticking over (note that you only get 6GB in the Galaxy S9+, the regular Galaxy S9 has 4GB).

The UI navigation is silky smooth at all times, while higher performance tasks such as gaming are an absolute breeze; I tested the handset with the brand new Tekken game which has insanely high-end, console-like graphics and it just blitzed through it without breaking a sweat.

Having said that, I did notice that the rear panel gets a little warmer than both the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8+, but even so, it’s nothing to write home about and even these warmer temps don’t seem to impact actual on-screen performance.

In short, there's more than enough power here for any user's needs.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Software & UI

The Galaxy S9+ runs Android 8.0 Oreo out the box, with Samsung’s “Samsung Experience 9 UX” software on top, which is, on the whole, very similar to the TouchWiz Grace UX we saw on previous models.

This is a very slick approach to Android and MUCH more minimalist and Material Design-friendly than past Samsung UI’s.

However, it’s far from stock, so if that’s your bag you may have to do some fettling here, or look elsewhere.

I am not overly fond of some of Samsung’s default settings here, but most things can be tweaked if you have a dig in the menus, a prime example being the absence of an app drawer shortcut in the bottom bar - this is the default setting, but you can toggle one on.

Most other foibles have similar workarounds.

While a lot of features of Samsung’s Galaxy series have hinged on users setting up a Samsung Galaxy account prior to the Galaxy S9 (for things like downloading and updating the Samsung app suite, and using Bixby), it seems to be more central than ever before this time round.

This bothers me a bit. With prior editions, one could still use the phone quite happily without having a Samsung Galaxy account, as it was possible to skip over certain features, but this time it seems like even some basic functionality has been tweaked to require one.

As an example, what really bugged me about this was when I tried to change the wallpaper on the Homescreen.

To be clear, Samsung’s built-in its own “Themes” store that’s tied into your Samsung Galaxy account where you can purchase and install new themes and wallpapers - this has been present for the last few generations of flagship devices, and many of the wallpapers and themes are completely free.

However, I distinctly recall on the Galaxy S8+ that I had no problem simply downloading an image from Google search and setting it as the wallpaper - crucially, I wasn’t forced to login to the Themes app.

This wasn’t the case with the Galaxy S9+, I must’ve spent over an hour trying to just put a generic image downloaded from the web as the wallpaper to no avail.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’ll admit I may have overlooked some method, but when I did this with the Galaxy S8+ it was quick, easy, and took about five minutes; if it is possible on the Galaxy S9+ then such functionality appears to be heavily squirreled away, to the extent that I as a veteran Android and Samsung user, could not locate said function.

The only workaround I could figure was saving an image to Google Photos and syncing that account with the handset.

Is this the end of the world? No, not at all, but it is a bit sucky.

In our increasingly connected world, I cannot be the only one who wants to minimise the number of extra accounts, logins, and services I sign-up to, and for a phone to actively lock you out of certain basic functions if you don’t want to opt-in to yet another account is not the best move in my view.

Apart from this I don’t have any big complaints about the UI.

The operation is smooth and the multitasking and split-screen features are superbly implemented.

On the whole, things are laid out very intuitively, although as usual with Samsung’s settings menus, they are somewhat densely packed and you will likely have to rummage around to find what you need.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Camera

I’ve been a pretty vocal fan of Samsung’s flagship cameras for several generations now, not only for the quality of imagery, but also the ease-of-use as a quick point-n-shoot setup with excellent results from the novice to the experienced pro.

On top of that, I found it admirable that Samsung stuck to a finely honed single-sensor camera rather than jumping on the dual-sensor bandwagon.

That changed with the Galaxy Note 8, and I was a bit nervous about the possibility of seeing a compromise in image quality on that handset for the sake of keeping on-trend, as I have seen with some other rival devices.

Turns out the Galaxy Note 8 performed very well indeed, with the dual-sensor not negatively impacting image quality, but in my view it also didn’t really add much to the formula.

The Galaxy S9+ adopts the dual-sensor approach just like the Galaxy Note 8, while the regular Galaxy S9 has a single-sensor. However, both phones add some other new features that the previous models didn’t have.

Most notably, the addition of a variable aperture, which is a pretty sophisticated bit of kit that really does make a big difference to photo quality.

The variable aperture operates quite similarly to such setups on full-blown DSLR cameras, with a series of mechanical sliding components that mimic the human iris’ ability to expand and contract, in order to allow in more or less light depending on the ambient light around you.

The Galaxy S9+ can adjust between a wide f/1.5 aperture size (which is wider than Samsung’s older f/1.7 aperture) and a narrower f/2.4 aperture size.

In most of the standard shooting modes, this is all automated, with the phone figuring out for itself which size to use - it’s only in the Pro shooting mode, where you can manually control everything, that you can dial in which aperture setting you want.

This combines with Samsung’s existing suite of effective imaging technology - the Dual-Pixel Phase Detection Autofocus makes a welcome return once agai,n together with optical image stabilisation, a large sensor size and large pixel size.

All of this allows the maximum required amount of light in for a given shot - not too much, not too little - with the autofocus being some of the fastest I’ve seen anywhere, enabling the whole setup to deftly avoid overexposure or noise while grabbing as much detail as possible.

All of this works with a remarkably easy-to-use set of controls that literally anyone will be able to make use of and generate fantastic snaps and video.

The resulting imagery is noticeably sharper than what is produced by its predecessors - and that was already impressive to begin with - capturing tons of incredibly fine and crisp detail with excellent contrast and dynamic range.

Colour is Samsung’s typically robust and saturated style, enhanced further by the HDR mode, and although I’m not fussed about optical zoom capabilities, it is true that the 2x zoom on the Galaxy S9+ does produce some very impressive zoomed in results - this is not merely a crop or sharpening, it’s the real deal. You can see the images of the Church spire below to get an idea of the zoom capabilities.

The Galaxy S9+ camera is extremely capable in auto mode, even when quickly adjusting different focal points both close in and far-away, and like its predecessors it does very well on very close-in macro shooting even on default auto settings.

On low light photography, it's as least as good if not better than the Galaxy Note 8. You can see some samples below shot first in low light with ambient artificial lighting (no flash), then in low light, then low light with flash, and finally in total darkness with flash.

As you can see, low light with ambient light and no flash gives best results, which is good as this is your typical low-light capture scenario, however, it does perform reasonably well in the other scenarios too.

I’m not sure when Samsung’s relentless march of photography excellence will cease, but with the Galaxy S9+ it has continued on from where it left off and I am once again left rather gobsmacked. A truly sublime smartphone camera.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Specs, Hardware & Connectivity

• Dimensions: 158.1 x 73.8 x 8.5mm
• Weight: 189g
• Display: 6.2in Super AMOLED 18.5:9 capacitive touchscreen (84.2% screen-to-body ratio), 1440 x 2960 pixels (@529 ppi density), HDR10 compliant, Always-on display
• OS: Android 8.0 (Oreo) with Samsung Experience 9 UX
• Processor: Samsung Exynos 9810 Octa, Octa-core (4x2.7 GHz Mongoose M3 + 4x1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A55)
• GPU: ARM Mali-G72 MP18
• RAM: 6GB
• Storage: 128GB/256GB (256GB market restricted)
• Card slot: microSD up to 400 GB
• Primary Camera: Dual-Sensor 12 MP( variable aperture f/1.5-2.4,1/2.55" sensor size, 1.4 µm pixel size, Dual Pixel Phase Detection Autofocus) + 12MP (f/2.4 aperture, 1/3.6" sensor size, 1 µm pixel size, Autofocus), Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), 2x optical zoom, LED flash, Geo-tagging, Simultaneous 4K video + 9MP image recording, Touch focus, Face/Smile detection, Auto HDR, Panorama, 2160p video @60fps, 1080p video @240fps, 720p video @960fps, dual-video recording
• Secondary Camera: 8 MP (f/1.7 aperture, 1/3.6" sensor size, 1.22 µm pixel size), Autofocus, 1440p video @30fps, dual video call, Auto HDR
• Audio: AKG Stereo Speakers, 3.5mm Headphone Jack, 32-bit/384kHz audio
• Misc: IP68 certified - dust/water proof (up to 1.5m for 30 mins), Iris scanner, fingerprint (rear-mounted), Samsung DeX (desktop experience support)
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Dual-Band, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 5.0 LE, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, NFC, USB Type-C
• Battery: Non-removable Li-Ion 3500 mAh, Fast battery charging (Quick Charge 2.0)
• Colours: Midnight Black, Coral Blue, Titanium Gray, Lilac Purple

I won’t go over every last bit of hardware here, as you can see the Galaxy S9+ is pretty well-equipped when it comes to the connectivity and high-end phone features.

The fingerprint scanner is on the back panel and positioned in the much more sensible place below the camera sensor, which is easy to use with either hand.

The storage is more than adequate with 128GB onboard, plus card support for up to a massive 400GB. A 256GB version is available but only in certain markets. 64GB of storage is only available on the Galaxy S9 model.

The AKG-tuned stereo speakers are well worth mentioning too, as they do offer very good sound quality - it’s not quite up there with HTC’s BoomSound, but is certainly better than what you get on most other rival devices.

Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: Verdict

Well, as with the Galaxy S8+ before it, the Galaxy S9+ has one of the best displays on the market, while the new Exynos processor is insanely fast.

In addition, Samsung’s managed to further improve its excellent camera technology to create something VERY special here that is well worth considering just for its own merit.

The main downside of the Galaxy S9+ is the battery, which while still being very capable compared to much of the market, remains nonetheless a step backwards compared to what came before from Samsung’s stable.

I don’t find it difficult to recommend the Galaxy S9+ at all, as it is still a feature-packed handset which does a lot of key smartphone functions extremely well - better than most - but it is important to recognise there are one or two shortcomings here.

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