Samsung has unveiled its new flagship smartphone with a focus on augmented reality features as it seeks to keep its title as the world’s biggest smartphone maker.
The S9 features essentially the same design as last year’s previous flagship, with the full screen and curved glass edge of the S8, which was followed by Apple’s iPhone X and others.
But it includes louder sound, a faster processor and software that turns selfies into animated emojis, which will appeal to consumers who are increasingly preferring to use their phones to send text messages rather than talking.
Samsung also included a dual-lens camera on the Galaxy S line for the first time, which will improve the low-light capture and enhance slow motion video, which is popular on social media. There is also the super slow-motion video running at 720 to 960 frames per second, allowing you to capture great moments accurately in really slow motion. There are two lenses: a regular one and a telephoto zoom that allows you to zoom into the action without having to crop the image. Each of the lenses has 12-megapixel resolution capabilities. There is also the new placement on the back of the phone of the fingerprint sensor relative to the Galaxy 8 series. It is now centrally placed as in all competing phones, rather than the skewed location in the Galaxy 8 phones.
A service powered by artificial intelligence (AI) allows users to point its camera to instantly translate a sign in a foreign language.
It is also one of the few flagship phones left that still comes with a standard headphone jack.
S9 has brought back the headphone jack – which is otherwise extinct in other high-end phones – with enhanced stereo surround sound to boot. In S9, you can unlock your phone with facial recognition, iris scanning, or a combination of both, both techniques being derived from separate capabilities in S8, but are now both supported in S9.
Here are the main differences between S9 (and S9 plus): Display: 5.8 inch (6.2 inch); weight: 163g (189g); camera: single 12-megapixel (dual 12-megapixel); random access memory (RAM): 4GB (6GB); storage: 64GB (128GB); and battery: 3,000 mAh (3,500 mAh).
“Despite these incremental innovations, Samsung will have to smartly leverage its brand and marketing machine to correctly position the new smartphones to a target audience,” said Forrester analyst Thomas Husson.
Global smartphone sales fell by 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter due to slower than expected Christmas sales, according to research firm IDC.
Overall global smartphone sales for 2017 were virtually flat — down 0.1 percent at 1.47 billion units — as phone makers struggled to come up with innovations that encourage customers to upgrade their devices.
– Cost concerns –
Samsung suffered a humiliating recall of its Galaxy Note 7 device in 2016 after several devices exploded, but its Galaxy 8 smartphone was a consumer and critical success.
While it kept its lead over Apple as the world’s biggest seller of smartphones in 2017 with a 21.6 percent market share, up from 21.1 percent in the previous year, Samsung faces stiffer competition from Chinese rivals like Huawei and Xiaomi that offer cheaper handsets with many high-end features.
The S9 will sell for 859 euros ($1,055), a price which analysts warned could turn off many consumers.
While the S9’s camera is “markedly different” in quality from older smartphones that people already own “consumers may delay purchase because of rising flagship prices,” IHS Markit said in a research note.
“Samsung must work hard to market the benefits of these designs to counter negative pricing perception.”
Huawei unveiled a new laptop and tablet in Barcelona earlier on Sunday but will present its new flagship smartphone — the P20 — on March 27 in Paris.
Thomas said this will allow it to “fine tune its marketing message based on how the new Samsung S9 devices are perceived by consumers”.
Earlier on Sunday South Korea’s LG unveiled the V30S — an updated version of its flagship V30 smartphone launched six months ago — which features higher memory and artificial intelligence-based technologies that focus on photos and voice recognition.
