The Note 9 was the last of my “greats”. I actually think this phone was part of the issue I began switching phones so frequently after this one, I was chasing the experience of it. That and the absolute boredom of the Covid-19 authoritarian times.
This phone was released in the third quarter of 2018, however I think I only got this early 2019. My boss, who by this time I’d developed a decent relationship said pick the best phone for you (me) that helps you do your job to the best of your ability. I pored through the corporate price list and came across this Note 9. The S-pen caught my attention as it would make precise clicks in tiny remote sessions a lot easier. So I settled on it.
Immediately I could tell this device was worlds above anything I’d owned before. The screen stood out, with such a high resolution and colour depth. Samsung really did throw everything they had at this thing. It had an iris scanner, standard face recognition and a rear fingerprint reader just for biometrics. It had Dex mode which was fantastic for me often travelling. It even had a heart rate monitor and blood oxygen sensor next to the camera. It had different levels of touch force recognition and haptics that just made the whole user experience a joy.
If in the UK we’d had the Snapdragon chipset this really would have been a 100/100 device. However after about a year and a half of usage, problems started to arise. The phone started to get very hot in normal usage, and battery drain became more prominent. The phone actually got so hot on regular occasions that the adhesive on the rear glass degraded and it became loose. The battery began to swell and cracked the glass.
By this point, the boss I had that enforced the one phone policy had left and I wasn’t overly impressed with the new leadership. I decided it was time to get my own number again, and split my work and personal life properly as it should’ve always been. The Note 9 got a fresh battery and back glass and was resigned to just work phone duties for around another year before it was replaced with a Note 10 plus. As that was a dedicated work device I won’t give it a dedicated review, but in short it was underwhelming. However it didn’t have the same issues the Note 9 did, but the Note 9 was the last of Samsung throwing everything they had at their flagships and they started stripping back features.
Leave a Reply