Starting Price: $800

Colors: Midnight Black, Lilac Purple, Coral Blue

Carriers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cricket, Sprint, Metro PCS

Our Rating: D+

In the past, it was possible to argue that Samsung had kept their integrity, but that can no longer be said for the company. The new Samsung Galaxy S9 is a copy-cat product that bears striking resemblance to that of their rival company, Apple. This new phone serves as competition for the iPhone X.

“As an owner of the new Galaxy phone, there are barely any changes, so the difference from the older version is minimal. The emojis show that the phone was a rushed product. It is definitely not a game changer since the camera is not that much better either,” freshman Joshua Silva said.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 adds nothing to the phone market, or even to the brand itself. The main feature of the phone that is being advertised is its “new” and “innovating” feature—turning your face into emojis by scanning your face. It is similar to creating a Mii on a Nintendo 3DS using the front camera, but way worse. To further limit users, you are not even allowed to use this feature on any emoji that you want. Instead, you only have a few preselected options to choose from, and they are not even real emojis. The rest of the emojis are just wannabe Snapchat filters. It almost serves as too much work to even send the emoji through messages since you have to stop what you are doing in order to go into your camera, take a picture and then send it as an image or small video.

So, what is new about this phone? Staying consistent with Android’s sugary line-up of operating system names, the phone runs on Android 8.0 Oreo. Compared to its predecessor, the new phone runs slightly faster. So, if you are looking for a phone that opens your applications faster by a few milliseconds, then you are in luck. Their processors are the same, both Snapdragon; so, in the end, you are basically getting the same phone.

The “amazing” part about this phone is its camera, and not the one used by the emojis that was the phone’s main selling point. It takes crisp and clear pictures, and there are plenty of settings to change; you can change anything from the lighting to the size of your picture. These effects and settings are also mostly present in the video recording options. The nice images definitely help compensate for the complicated layout. However, most phones nowadays take good enough pictures that this level of customization is not required, not to mention that it has the same number of megapixels as the previous one, the Samsung Galaxy S8. If you wanted to dedicate yourself to photography, you could easily buy a professional camera.

Apart from the improvement in camera quality, there is no obvious distinction between newer and older Samsung Galaxy phones of the past, except for the cost of course! Both the regular and the plus have the same battery life expectancy and new ways of locking your phone: the fingerprint sensor, the iris sensor and the face unlock. The phone is actually a tad smaller than the previous one, but it is just as water resistant and has the same audio quality. The new phone does not even have any wireless charging, which is important nowadays for any new generation cell phone.

Currently, Samsung is a stagnant puddle of water that seems to be getting slowly infected with bacteria. You might as well buy yourself an iPhone X at this point. As for the outlook for Samsung, no wonder their most popular line is the “Galaxy” phones; they probably plan on continuing to make these until we have an equal amount of galaxy phones to stars in the Milky Way.