Galaxy Unpacked 2018! Things you need to know!

Samsung’s most anticipated devices, the S series flagships of 2018 the Galaxy S9 and S9+, were announced at their Galaxy Unpacked event, at the Mobile World Congress 2018, the launch event was a grand success and Samsung introduced two brilliant pieces of tech to the world. Here’s a sneak-peek of the event and all the things you need to know regarding the Galaxy S9 and S9+.

As always, let’s first talk of the specifications of the S9 and S9+, in terms of hardware the S9 and S9+ are powered by the Snapdragon 845 SoC for the Global variant and their Homegrown Exynos 9810 – EMEA SoC. The S9 and S9+ both come in 64/128/256 GB memory options, the S9 comes with 4 GB of RAM and S9+ comes with 6 GB of RAM. The S9 and S9+ follow their predecessors, the S8 and S8+ with regards to the design and the overall footprint, they sport the same screen size, the same infinity display panel, and the same resolution as well, which is 5.8” and 6.2” when it comes to the display size and a 1440x2960 pixels Super Amoled QUAD HD screen and a slightly brighter and improved INFINITY display.

The button placements too remain almost the same as the S8 and S8+ with some minor changes here and there, on the left sits the Bixby Key and the Volume Rockers, on the right sits the Power button, the front has the front camera, the earpiece that doubles as a speaker and the sensors followed by the display itself and nothing at the bottom. The back has the camera setup in the center, with the heartrate sensor and the flashlight surrounding it. Luckily this time around Samsung has moved the fingerprint sensor right under the camera setup, and not alongside the camera and the flashlight as in the S8 and Note 8, which was very oddly placed and hard to reach. The top is home to the sim tray and the bottom homes the bottom firing speaker, the USB Type – C jack, and the 3.5 mm headphone jack. You read that right, the S9 has the dedicated headphone jack.

The camera on the S9 was rather an interesting factor and also the main highlight of the S9 and S9+, which have a single and double lens variable aperture camera setup (the first time ever on a smartphone camera), the S9 has a single 12 megapixel camera with OIS and a variable aperture of F/1.5 – F/2.4 and S9+ just has an additional lens of the same specifications and resolution. The other highlight of the groundbreaking camera setup on these smartphones is that not only do these shoot 4k video, slow motion video at 1080p with 240fps and time lapse videos, but it can also take super slow motion videos at 720p with 960fps for the first time ever in any smartphone (which roughly translates to creating a 6 second shot from a capture of just 0.2 seconds), though the super slow motion has some limitations such as the shot limit being 0.2 seconds only and no sound being captured.

Apart from the exceptional features, there are certain features which aren’t as ground breaking as the above but they deserve a mention. Samsung has taken steps into the field of Augmented Reality (AR) such as the concept of ARemoji that they introduced which lets the users create emoji’s that look like them with steps as simple as taking a selfie, they also partnered with leading makeup brands to let people have a AR trial and then ordering their preferred makeup with a simple touch. Samsung has Thealso improved Bixby to a greater extent and now Bixby can translate signs and foreign language boards live with the help of the Bixby mode in the camera and it can also help you grab information on things and buy them instantly.

Samsung with the University of California Medical Science department has also partnered in making the Heart rate sensor better, and this time around they have implemented an Optical Heart rate sensor in the S9 and S9+ which will also be able to measure Blood Pressure eventually, and they have also added S Health calorie counter in the camera which will let you know the nutritional info of the food with just a click of a picture. And finally Samsung has also taken steps to improve the Knox ecosystem of security and made it enterprise grade secure with the S9 and S9+ with the help of the dedicated DRM chip in the smartphones.

Samsung confirmed that the S9 and S9+ will be available at all the leading stores from March 16th, and that you can Pre-order the smartphones from Samsung.com as well as the leading retail partners. These are all the things that you need to know about the Galaxy S9 and S9+, which were officially announced at the MWC 2018, which was held in Barcelona, Spain.