Samsung will be revealing its new Galaxy S9 on February 25 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and we Australians are desperate to find out everythi
Samsung will be revealing its new Galaxy S9 on February 25 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and we Australians are desperate to find out everything we can.
But thanks to some rather diligent leakers, there will likely be no surprises at the big event. The leaks began in December when the media got its paws on renders and have continued to trickle out. Here’s what we expect:
Leaker extraordinaire Evan Blass has the dug up some dates, so if you want a shiny new Samsung, mid to late March seems like a reasonable bet.
Blass says the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ will be launched on the February 25, with pre-orders opening on March 1 and shipping or official release on March 16.
Whether or not these dates will vary for Australian customers remains unclear, but it looks to align with the global release.
According to Tech Radar, the S9 will go for £739 in the UK and the S9 Plus around £829. In Aussie dollars that’s about $1300 and $1470 respectively, although Samsung is likely to set an Australia-specific price that may vary from this amount.
Using the UK price as a benchmark makes the cost sound painful, but it would still make it cheaper than the iPhone X.
At launch, the 64GB iPhone X had an outright price tag of $1579, and the 256GB version was going for $1829.
There is no word yet on the plans Australia’s various telcos will be offering for the S9. We’ll update you when more info comes in.
The leaks show a phone that is slightly thinner and with a higher screen-to-body ration than the iPhone X, which has its stats affected by that stupid notch. Yep, the S9 will thankfully be ‘notch-less’ (not even the most rabid Apple fanboy can truly say they like the notch). Oh, and also unlike the iPhone X, the 3.5mm headphone jack is staying.
On the back of the S9, there’s a camera and a fingerprint reader, and for some reason, they are keeping the daft Bixby button on the side. The S9 and S9 Plus will have 5.8- inch and 6.2-inch sAMOLED displays respectively.
Samsung is making a pretty big deal about the S9 camera. The invite for the February 25th event says the camera has been “reimagined” and leaks have suggested that it may have a variable aperture, with the ability to switch between f/1.5 and f/2.4.
The front camera will be 8 megapixels and the rear will be 12. In the S9 the rear camera will sport a single lens, but we can expect a dual lens in the S9 Plus. Both models may support super slow-motion video at 960 FPS.
The Galaxy S9 will probably run on Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 9 Series 9810 processor. According to PC World, this chip has a new 8-core architecture, with half of those cores reaching speeds of up to 2.9GHz, resulting in a 40% performance boost.
There is speculation that some of that speed may be used for Face ID tech similar to what is used in the iPhone X, but there’s a chance the S9 will just continue with regular old iris scanning.
As we have already reported, a Redditor got his mitts on a retailers box in mid-January. Here are some other assorted leaks from that post and around the interwebz:
