Samsung Galaxy Note9 hands-on review

Camera

Samsung Galaxy Note9 borrows the dual-camera setup from the most recent Galaxy S9+ flagship. It's got a 12MP sensor with a pixel size of 1.4µm (Samsung's own ISOCELL for the Exynos model) behind a stabilized variable aperture lens - f/1.5-2.4. The positions are fixed though, you can either opt for f/1.5 or f/2.4 and nothing in-between. And unless you are in Manual (Expert) mode, the camera will decide this for you. There's dual pixel phase-detection autofocus - that's what a portion of each of these large pixels is used for.

The telephoto cam is another 12MP unit, but being a smaller sensor, pixels are 1.0µm on this one. The lens has an f/2.4 aperture and is stabilized, too.

In extreme darkness or for fill flash applications, a single LED flash is there to help. Nothing has changed in this matter since the Galaxy S2 - no dual-tone quadruple-LEDs from Samsung.

The camera does 4-frame image stacking, three times, and then combines the three resulting images to cancel out noise. Samsung promises 30% less noise on all images, which is an impressive achievement right there. Combined with the bright f/1.5 aperture, the results should be cleaner low-light images with less noise and more fine detail.

The camera is now intelligent (we like how Samsung didn't use AI) - it has smart scene recognition. It has also flaw detection - the camera app will notify you for dirty lens, if you shot a blurry image, and it will even suggest taking another photo if you photograph people and someone blinked. Nice!

The smart detection for the 960fps slow-mo videos is here to stay, too.

We snapped a few samples, but as usual we'll keep our judgment for when the retail unit arrives in our office.

Camera samples

Selfies: normal • Live Focus

Live Focus

Zoom: 1X • 2X

First impressions

The Galaxy Note9 wasn't meant to be a tempting upgrade over the Note8. The eight Note is as powerful and attractive as it was on day one and it's hardly worth upgrading to the Note9. We doubt the Galaxy S9 owners would be interested either, otherwise they would have just waited until August to get the S9 with an S-Pen.

But for the rest of the world, the Galaxy Note9 is the new major threat to any recent or coming soon flagship. And there is a very obvious reason for that - it has everything you can squeeze within a smartphone, sweetened with a professional-grade skillset.

The S-Pen is the Note's key feature, but no one should ignore that big high-res Super AMOLED, or the snappy chipset with large storage, or the great all-round camera experience, or the beefy battery. Except for the speed of fast charging, there is nothing that's not 2018 in the Galaxy Note9.

The best phablet in the world just got bested. Which means the Note is dead, long live the Note! Or at least that's what the Note fans are thinking after today's presentation was over.