The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 ($999.99 for 128GB; $1,249.99 for 512GB) is the ultimate productivity phone.
Packed with a huge battery, a massive screen, and a powerful stylus, the Note 9 has more of everything than any other phone on the US market.
This kind of beast won't be for everyone, that's for sure.
But if you want to stay connected everywhere, constantly creating, with no worries about running out of juice, this will be your beloved monster.
It's certainly our Editors' Choice for big-screen phones.
Design and Size
The Galaxy Note 9 ($999.99 at Amazon) looks almost exactly like last year's Galaxy Note 8.
At 6.38 by 3.01 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and 7.09 ounces, it is very slightly narrower, very slightly thicker, and 0.2 ounces heavier than the Note 8, but you probably won't be able to notice the difference immediately from the front.
In the US, it comes in blue and purple, but surprisingly not black.
Let me make it clear: This phone is very large.
And when you put it in a case, it will be even larger.
This is not a one-handed phone for any but the largest hands.
Also keep in mind the Note 9 will not fit into Note 8 cases because Samsung moved the fingerprint sensor—it's now below the camera module, as opposed to next to it.
That will please people who are worried about smudging the camera lens.
Otherwise, the phone has a 6.4-inch quad HD Super AMOLED curved screen, and USB-C and standard headphone jacks.
I'll spin out some more buzzwords here just to get them out of the way: Like other Samsung phones, the Note 9 has IP68 waterproofing, fast wireless charging, Samsung Pay, Knox security, and the Bixby voice assistant as well.
The phone comes in two storage models, 128GB and 512GB.
The 128GB model ($999) has 6GB of RAM, and the 512GB model ($1249) has 8GB.
You can pump up the storage further with a microSD card.
Both models come from various US carriers as well as an all-carrier-compatible, unlocked model direct from Samsung.
Screen, Connectivity, and Battery
Superficially, the Galaxy Note 9's screen looks a lot like the Galaxy Note 8's.
We generally turn to DisplayMate Labs, which has extensive lab equipment, to judge top-of-the-line smartphone displays, and DisplayMate's Dr.
Ray Soneira says that the Note 9's AMOLED screen is significantly better than the Note 8's and sets new performance records.
What's so great about the 6.4-inch, 2960-by-1440 curved screen? Soneira says it has very high absolute color accuracy, the screen is even less reflective than other leading smartphones, and its brightness is among the highest available.
You won't, at this time, get a better smartphone screen than this one.
The Galaxy Note 9's modem is the same as the one in the Galaxy S9+, which is great news.
This chart shows you how the Galaxy S9+ gets better LTE speeds than either previous Galaxy generations or iPhones, thanks to its Category 18 Qualcomm X20 modem.
It supports all of the frequency bands, and all of the band combinations, used by every North American carrier.
I know 5G is coming next year, but I wouldn't worry about that too much; it will be at least another year before 5G is widespread and before chipset makers work out the power-management kinks that come with new wireless data systems.
Meanwhile, I've seen the existing X20 modem get speeds up to 700Mbps with the right carrier setup, showing there's still plenty of room in 4G.
We saw some odd behaviors while testing the Note 9's WiFi—sometimes we got slower results than the Note 8, which shouldn't be the case given the phone's class-leading Wi-Fi hardware.
I've seen this happen on new, pre-release phones before, and it was always a pre-production firmware problem that got fixed with an update, which could very well be the case here.
The Note 9 brings the S9+'s dual speakers to the Note line.
The two speakers are by the earpiece, and along the bottom.
Compared with the Note 8's single bottom speaker, the speakers here aren't much louder.
But they're clearer: The Note 8's sound is tinny, while the Note 9 is richer and deeper.
That makes a real difference.
Phone call quality is nothing short of spectacular.
With calls on the T-Mobile network, we got loud, clear and noise-free connections.
The dual speakers work for the speakerphone, adding audio richness.
The phone supports the EVS voice codec, the most advanced one currently available in the US, as well as Wi-Fi calling and VoLTE.
Our unlocked model supported T-Mobile Wi-Fi calling, but to get Wi-Fi calling on other carriers, you need the carrier-provided model.
The Galaxy Note 9's standout feature is its 4,000mAh battery.
It ran out our 12-hour battery test video we stream over Wi-Fi with 15 percent of juice remaining, projecting screen-on battery life out to 14 hours.
That beats every other flagship smartphone we've tested.
The battery is significantly larger than the one in the Galaxy S9+ (3,500mAh, 10+ hours), the Galaxy Note 8 (3,300mAh, 6 hours), or the Galaxy Note 5 (3,020mAh, 8 hours and 30 minutes).
This may win over some of those old Galaxy Note 4 users who are still clinging to their phones because they have removable batteries.
The Note 9 may not have a removable battery, but it has as close to an anxiety-free one as you'll see on a leading smartphone.
The phone also supports both fast charging over USB-C and wireless charging.
An Even Better S Pen
The new S Pen looks a lot like the old one, but it has a major new feature: Bluetooth.
It's also a new color.
If you have a blue phone, you get a yellow pen; a purple phone has a purple pen.
As before, this is the best stylus on a smartphone, by far.
No other phone has anything really like the S Pen.
There are stylus phones—I'm thinking of the LG Stylo line—and you can use a capacitive stylus with almost any phone, but their styli aren't as precise or as responsive; it's like using a crayon versus a fine ballpoint pen.
Pop the pen out of its spring-loaded slot and you can immediately write on the screen, a feature called "screen off memo." Otherwise, the pen is perfectly accurate and pressure sensitive, ideal for taking notes, making sketches, or doing annotations.
I gave the pen to two artistic types who are passionate about their Note 4 phones.
The finer tip gave them more precision in drawing and sketching.
The pen also has a better texture on the screen, they said.
The S pen has a battery now.
It charges when the pen is in the phone, to the tune of 30 minutes of usage for a 40-second charge.
It works fine as a pen when it isn't charged; the only thing that needs charging is its ability to be a Bluetooth button.
The single button on the pen can be set to do various things in various apps if clicked, double-clicked, or long-clicked.
Most usefully, it's a presentation clicker or a selfie shutter button; it will also pause your music or step through web pages.
Samsung is making an SDK available so other apps can support the button, too.
As for distance, we tested the button to work up to about 15 feet away.
It's Also a Desktop PC...Almost
The Note 9 sometimes feels like it's almost the size of a laptop; with Samsung's DeX mode, it can turn into a desktop.
DeX mode has existed since the Galaxy S8 series.
If you pop your phone into the appropriate dock, you can connect a mouse, keyboard, and larger monitor, and use your Android apps in a multi-windowed context.
Our previous review of DeX foundered on the problem of…who really has a mouse, keyboard, and monitor but not a PC? And if this is for road warriors, who's going to carry those things around with them? Samsung has a bit of a solution this year: a $49.99 DeX HDMI adapter that plugs straight into a big screen; you can then use the Note 9's screen as a keyboard and trackpad.
You can use a dual-screen mode that's exclusive to the Note 9, for instance, to show a presentation on the big screen but your presentation notes on the phone's screen.
You can also use the S Pen as a presentation clicker.
This makes a lot of sense for people who do presentations or want to share media.
You won't be writing long memos this way, but you can certainly pop up Netflix or PowerPoint.
We haven't tested the adapter yet, so we can't speak to its performance.
Processor and Performance
Like most current flagship smartphones, the Galaxy Note 9 uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor running at a maximum speed of 2.8GHz.
Benchmark results make sense when you take into account the 2,960-by-1,440 screen.
Geekbench, which measures raw processor power, got 2422 single-core, 8973 multi-core, which is right about where other 845-powered phones fall.
It's lower than the iPhone X, which has faster CPU performance, but about 30 percent higher than the Galaxy Note 8.
(For more, see our story on the Galaxy Note 9 vs.
the iPhone X.)
Results on the GFXBench graphics benchmark came out at 32fps for the advanced Car Chase benchmark, also on par with other 845 phones, and more than double the result we got on the Galaxy Note 8.
See How We Test Phones
The Note 9's score on the complex PCMark benchmark, which simulates regular applications, doesn't impress as much.
We got 7,662 with the screen turned up to full resolution, which clocks in lower than the LG G7 (7,983), the OnePlus 6 (8,484), and the HTC U12+ (8,518), but higher than the 6,866 we got on the Note 8.
This may just be because Samsung's Android overlay still slows things down a touch.
Samsung says that using new cooling technology, it's managed to keep the phone going for longer at higher power, which is great for gaming.
We ran a processor-pounding benchmark to figure out the difference between the Note 9 and an S9+.
After about four minutes, both phones started to throttle their speeds down to reduce heat.
The difference wasn't in the fact of throttling, but the method.
The S9+ would drop way down, and then push its speed back up, creating valleys of performance that could cause games to stutter.
The Note 9 ramped down much more smoothly, giving games time to adapt, which leads to smoother performance.
The phone runs Android 8.1 with plenty of Samsung add-ons.
You can refuse to load much of the bloatware during the installation process.
One thing you can't turn off is Samsung's Bixby Home, an additional screen of widgets activated by pressing a physical button on the left side of the phone.
You will keep accidentally pressing this button; there is nothing you can do about that.
It's annoying, but not a deal breaker.
The Camera: So, You Like Filters?
The Galaxy Note 9's camera is, physically, the same as the Galaxy S9+'s.
That means two 12-megapixel main lenses; one switches from a f/2.4 to a f/1.5 for low light, and the other is a f/2.4 "2x" camera.
In our tests of the Galaxy S9's camera, we found that the hardware is excellent, but we were put off by aggressive oversharpening in the JPEG encoder.
The bad news is that the oversharpening is still there.
Many of the photos we took, in good light and low light, show no real differences from the S9+.
The S9+ isn't bad at all, but it depends on how you feel about JPEG edges.
The Note 9 photos show more saturated colors than the S9+, though.
At least some of that comes from the phone's "intelligent camera," which, like the camera on the LG G7, automatically tries to scene-select based on what it thinks it sees.
In testing, that caused photos of plants, especially, to have richer, deeper colors and more detail.
So that's good.
I had less luck with the Note 9's "flaw detection," which is supposed to detect if photos are blurry or someone is blinking.
It told me my "last shot might be blurry," but didn't offer any suggestions on how to fix that (hint: raise the shutter speed).
It also didn't detect blinks when I tried it.
At this nosebleed level of the smartphone world, honestly, cameras are all pretty good.
The big choice to make is whether you want to go with a device that has a 2x optical zoom, like the Note 9/S9+/iPhone X, whether you want to go with the LG G7's wide-angle camera, or whether you don't care about either of those.
I personally like the wide-angle approach more than the 2x one, but not enough to revolve my buying decision around it.
The front-facing, 8-megapixel camera is also exactly the same as the Samsung Galaxy S9+'s camera.
The main camera records 4K video at up to 60 frames per second, with a 10-minute maximum on individual 4K30 clips and a 5 minute maximum on 4K60.
There's no time limit on 1080p video recording.
The camera also has all the modes that were added on the Galaxy S9: hyperlapse, bokeh, selfie bokeh, 960fps super slow-mo, and Samsung's rather creepy AR Emoji, which are like custom Bitmoji.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbLjz-QnYSg[/embed]
The camera should not make or break this phone purchase for you.
The pen should.
Comparisons and Conclusions
Old Galaxy Note owners, it's time to put those failing, ancient phones down and pick up this beauty, with its all-day battery.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is the ultimate productivity phone right now, a gorgeous beast of a phablet that lets you sign PDFs, annotate presentations, and take conference calls like nobody's business.
If you're creative, nothing matches a Galaxy Note because of the S Pen.
My daughter, an artist, carries a Galaxy Note 4, and it's full of scribbles and doodles.
Writers can use the immediacy of the screen-off note-taking function to jot down ideas.
No other phone works like this.
It's glorious.
But all that power comes in a big, heavy, expensive package.
That means it's not for everyone.
There are very many people who don't need a three-inch-wide, seven-ounce, thousand-dollar phone.
If you don't intend to use the S Pen or hoard stuff in the massive onboard storage, you'll be just about as well-served by a $720 Galaxy S9, or even a $529 OnePlus 6.
How about the Galaxy Note 9 versus the iPhone X? Simply put, an iPhone can't do what this thing can do, because of the S Pen, and the Galaxy Note 9 kills the iPhone on battery life.
But you might be drawn to the iPhone platform because of iMessage or iOS's superior creative apps, in which case you should stick with the iPhone.
It's a little infuriating that Samsung still can't combine the world's best art-making phone hardware with the best art software, but that's where we are.
While many people are comfortable driving cars, some people need a truck.
The Galaxy Note 9 is the kitted-out monster truck of the smartphone world.
That power makes it a clear Editors' Choice.
