Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Review

The Note 9 is the phone Samsung's loyalists still describe when they say the company lost the plot. It has a 6.4-inch QHD+ Super AMOLED that DisplayMate rated the best it had tested, a 4000 mAh battery when rivals sat at 3300 or 3500, a microSD slot, a headphone jack, IP68, and a 512GB model with 8GB of RAM that meant a terabyte with a card in it. Nothing was removed to make room for something else.

The Snapdragon 845 in US units was quick and stayed quick, helped by a copper vapour chamber Samsung called water carbon cooling. The Exynos 9810 in Europe and Asia was a step behind on both speed and endurance, the recurring Samsung asterisk. The main 12 megapixel camera switched between f/1.5 and f/2.4, the 2x telephoto was useful, and while a Pixel 3 beat it on a dim street the Note 9 was better at video and far more consistent. Charging stayed at 15 watts, slow even in 2018, but with 4000 mAh most owners charged overnight and never thought about it. The S Pen gained Bluetooth so it could fire the shutter from across a room: a nice trick and nobody's reason to buy.

Software is where the grades stop climbing. Android 8.1 with Samsung Experience 9.5 was cluttered and Bixby had a hardware button that could not be remapped at launch. One UI arrived with Android 9 in early 2019 and made the phone feel new, Android 10 followed in 2020, and that was the last version. Two OS updates and four years of patches was normal then and looks thin now.

Reliability was the quiet strength. The glass back scratched but nothing bent, the battery aged well, and there was no scandal of any kind, which after 2016 was itself news. At $999.99 it was the priciest Note yet and the first that felt like it earned it.