Samsung announced the Galaxy S9 Plus flagship smartphone alongside the Galaxy S9 on February 25, 2018. The Galaxy S series offers high-end smartphones for consumers like the Galaxy S8, S7, etc. The S9 Plus was launch at a price of Rs 54,999, it was more expensive than the standard S9, which cost Rs 49,899.

Display

The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus comes with a Super AMOLED screen that displays 16 million colors. The screen measures 6.2 inches, featuring a screen-to-body ratio of 84.2%, a resolution of 1440x2960 pixels, an aspect ratio of 18.5:9, and a pixel density of 529 ppi. It’s protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5, features HDR10, 3D Touch, and offers the Always-on feature.

AMOLED is short for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode. It’s a type of OLED screen technology, a type of thin-film-screen tech where the electroluminescent material is formed by organic compounds while the active matrix is the technology that addresses pixels. Meanwhile, Super AMOLED is Samsung’s marketing term for its AMOLED screen that has an integrated touch screen digitizer. It’s a layer detecting touch integrated into the screen panel instead of being laid on top. Samsung says that this type of screen reflects only 20% as much sunlight as the 1st-gen AMOLED panel.

To comment on the Galaxy S9 Plus display, we can only say that it’s amazing. The contrast is great, colors are vibrant, and the pixel density delivers a smooth viewing experience as images are sharp. With a frame rate of 120Hz, video viewing and gaming graphics on this smartphone is more than satisfying.

If you have been disappointed by the gaming experience on the standard Galaxy S9, you will be happy to know that the S9 Plus, despite packing the same Exynos 9810, delivers a completely different experience. It turns out that playing games on the Galaxy S9 Plus are very satisfying. You still get the high frame rate and refresh rate, vibrant colors, and great contrast. The graphics performance on this phone is much better, you get smooth and sharp images. Besides, there are nearly no lags or frame drops during the gaming session.

Chip

The Galaxy S9 Plus is powered by either the Exynos 9810 or the Snapdragon 845 processor depending on the market. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the Exynos 9810 consists of four 2.7GHz cores and four 1.8GHz cores. In the US, Latin America, and China, the Snapdragon 845 chipset consists of four 2.8GHz cores and four 1.7GHz cores. The GPU paired with the CPU also varies in different processors, Mali-G72 MP18 for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and Adreno 630 for the US, Latin America, and China.

On AnTuTu 7, the Galaxy S9 Plus gets a total of 246,660 points, about 4000 points lower than the standard S9. At the time, the Snapdragon 845 was one of the most powerful chipsets of Qualcomm after the Snapdragon 855. It offers a 30% improvement in graphics rendering and a 30% improvement in power efficiency. The Exynos 9810, on the other hand, offers less powerful graphics performance, but its CPU outperforms that of the Snapdragon 845.

It appears that the Exynos 9810 performs better on this phone than the Galaxy S9 in terms of gaming. As we mentioned in the previous section, the gaming experience is much more seamless and smooth on the S9 Plus. The game goes on well without any lags, which is attributed to the combination of the chip, an amazing display, and a larger RAM.

Storage

When it comes to RAM and internal storage, users have three options to choose from. The first variant features 6GB RAM and 64GB onboard memory, the second one features 6GB RAM and 128GB onboard memory, and the third one features 6GB RAM and 256GB onboard memory.

So, it appears that you get 6GB RAM, larger than the standard Galaxy S9, with more or less storage.

The good news is, unlike the Galaxy S9, the Galaxy S9 Plus doesn’t seem to heat up during gameplay. After testing, the phone was reported to remain cool on the hand. This is impressive as even premium handsets heat up if you play games on them for a long time.

Battery

The Samsung Galaxy S9 packs a 3,500mAh battery, also bigger than the S9’s battery, which supports 15W fast charging and wireless charging. This translates to 18 hours of battery life, according to the video drain test.

This battery life is also 2.5 hours longer than that of the Galaxy S9, which will give you more use and gaming time.

Camera

On the back of the phone, there are dual lenses, including a 12MP telephoto lens and a 12MP wide-angle lens supported by an LED flash. The camera offers a panorama and auto-HDR modes. It also lets you record video at 4K, 1080-pixel, or 720-pixel resolution with a frame rate of 960, 240, 60, or 30 fps.

On the front, there is a dual-camera setup, consisting of an 8MP wide-angle lens and a 2MP secondary lens. The camera module allows for dual video call and auto-HDR mode. It also lets you record videos at 1440 pixels and 30 frames per second.