“,Bixby’s still..not great… But the smart assistant is getting better. Some cool new features include the ability to translate text in real time and Not Hotdog-style food identification, which feeds calorie counts directly into Samsung’s Health app.”,An often overlooked part of smartphone design, Samsung gave a little extra love to the S9’s speakers. They’re much louder and produces stereo output when the phone is held in landscape mode.”,It’s a small thing, but it shows that Samsung’s been listening to customer feedback. The S8’s fingerprint reader was positioned just to the right of the camera, causing a lot of accidental finger to lens contact. Here it’s been moved down below. Also new on the biometric front is a Intelligent Scanning, which combines the best of iris and face unlocking.”,Samsung’s answer to Animoji falls firmly in the “creepy” camp. The tech uses a scan of your face to make an uncanny valley cartoon character that you can sync to your own speech. The good news here is that help is on the way in the form of an upcoming partnership with Disney that will bring Mickey and Pixar characters into the fold.”,
Want to know whether the Samsung Galaxy S9 is worth picking up when it arrives March 16? Good news: I’ve got 4,000 words on the matter that you can read over here. For those who don’t have the time to take all of that in, however, we’ve also put together this handy guide to the biggest new additions to the handset over last year’s S8.
The new features of mostly good, sometimes great and occasionally creepy (I’m looking at you, AR Emojis). But all told, they add up to yet another solid flagship from the world’s leading smartphone maker.
Brian Heater was the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch until early 2025. He has worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
