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VPNs for ad-blocking It comes at a significant cost, but the Galaxy Note 9 is one of the most well-rounded smartphones that you can purchase in 2019. As a complete package you get yourself a very well built device with a great display and stylus, plenty of processing power and RAM, a big battery that lasts through prolonged heavy use, and all the flagship bells and whistles like water resistance and Qi wireless charging. Built around a 6.4-inch Infinity display with Samsung’s hallmark curved edges, the Galaxy Note 9 is quite a large phone, measuring 161.9mm tall and 76.4mm wide. Without a case it’s still a very skinny handset at just 8.8mm but at 205g it’s a little heavier than the circa-150g weight of the average iPhone or Samsung. You can buy it in a variety of colours, but all come with a S-Pen stylus hidden away in the body, which can be used for writing digital notes on the Note 9’s display - hence the name. Samsung’s theme on top of Android - which used to be the much-maligned TouchWiz, but has now been succeeded by the much cleaner and more user-friendly One UI - is relatively clean and straightforward, though it doesn’t rival the speed and streamlined nature of stock Android on a Google Pixel handset. One UI is big on suggestions and value-added information, telling you more about where you are and what’s on around you. The Note 9 is also another Samsung smartphone to feature the Bixby voice assistant with a dedicated button on the phone’s side - put simply, it’s not our virtual assistant of choice, falling far behind the Google Assistant (which can also be enabled on the Note 9). In essence, while the Galaxy Note 9 can handle just about any tasks that you throw at it, its party piece is its big, beautiful, notch-free AMOLED display. When it was launched, it was touted as the most colour-accurate and detailed smartphone display that you could drop your hard-earned dollars on, and this remains true today. If you’re watching or streaming any high-quality video, the Note 9 is your one best choice for viewing it. The lack of a notch cutting into the usable display area while watching a widescreen video in landscape mode is just the cherry on top - in all environments the Galaxy Note 9 has a bright, colourful and accurate screen. If a fast and powerful phone with a big screen sounds like the kind of device you’re looking for, and if your budget can stretch far enough to suit its $1499 asking price, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is the phone for you. It’s somewhat of a jack of all trades, and has many features and tweaks that no other phone consolidates into one device - its big screen doesn’t have a notch cut into the top of the display, for example, and of course you get that S-Pen stylus built into the body of the Note 9 as well. Compared to a regular Samsung flagship from the Galaxy S series, the hallmark of the Galaxy Note 9 is definitely its S-Pen stylus. New in 2019 is Bluetooth support that means you can take the stylus further from your phone and use it as a remote control - a nifty feature if you’re binging YouTube or Netflix in bed, but it’s not much use besides that. You can use the stylus as a timed trigger for photos, too, which makes a posed selfie easier if you’re on your own. The S-Pen enables some quirky functionality that you might absolutely love about the Galaxy Note 9, or that might fall completely flat. You can easily screenshot and annotate your image with handwritten notes or drawings, which is very handy for visual thinkers or for sharing feedback on designs. You can also use the S-Pen to select and record short videos of what’s happening on screen, creating short GIFs that can easily be shared. And all of this comes without a huge cost to battery life. Because the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a physically large phone, it has a 4000mAh battery cell hidden away inside with room for the S-Pen stylus to spare. It easily eclipses the ‘all-day’ battery life test with room to spare; you might find yourself running short half-way through a second day, but if you set the phone up with Samsung’s included battery optimisation software you can stretch usage easily to two full days of moderate usage. As software goes, you might not like the One UI skin that Samsung bundles on top of stock Android, and this can’t easily be removed. The same is true of the Bixby voice assistant - it’s not particularly useful, especially in comparison to the Google Assistant that Samsung has obfuscated in the Note 9’s settings to make Bixby more prominent. You can download an app to turn the dedicated Bixby button to a more useful purpose like toggling the phone’s silent and vibrate modes - which comes in handy far more often than Bixby does.
