Quintessential Samsung flagship

SMARTPHONE manufacturers are differentiating themselves through unique and outstanding features, trying to outdo one another in a never-ending game of one-upmanship.

Nascent Chinese brands such as Oppo and Vivo with grand ambitions are racing to see who can design the phone with the thinnest bezels and the most complicated camera-hiding mechanism.

What has come out from Chinese phone engineers will soon give the established makers a run for their money, but not if the Korean stalwarts have something to say about that first.

The Galaxy Note 9 is one of the year's most hotly anticipated flagships, but doesn't shout about itself in a way that some of the aforementioned handsets do. Its quiet and restrained, with just a bit of pizzazz from its yellow stylus (more on that later) - a sign that Samsung's flagship has evolved to be comfortable in its own skin.

My review unit was the "Ocean Blue" variant, the others being "Metallic Copper" and "Midnight Black". Samsung recently said this Ocean Blue variant is the most popular with customers, and it's not hard to see why. It's a deep, resounding blue, subtle but yet gives the phone some definite character.

By the time you read this, you would have either already received your pre-order Note 9, or are queueing in line to get one at any one of the local telcos. Be prepared for a long wait, because this, in my view, is the best Android phone you can get today.

This large tablet-slash-phone is the latest iteration in a long line of well-designed and crafted Samsungs. I said in my previous Galaxy S9+ review the glass front and back of that device melded together with the aluminium chassis to produce a premium feel in the hand, and that trend carries on here with its bigger sibling.

Every corner on the Note 9 is smooth, with no unexpected sharp edges. Samsung has honed its industrial design language to a T, and it's not afraid to show it off.

Rolls Royce of displays

But there's no getting away from the fact that it's a large device. People with small hands will struggle. To mitigate that, Samsung has slimmed down the phone's bezels to fit a 6.4-inch monster of a screen into it. It is the Rolls Royce of displays - bright, colourful, sharp and crisp. Coming from a Pixel 2 XL, it was truly day and night, a masterclass in modern smartphone display technology.

This handset is hands-down one of the most feature-packed devices I have seen. It comes with either 128 or 512 gigabytes (GB) of storage, coupled with 6 or 8GB of RAM. It supports up to 512GB of SD card storage for a maximum of 1 terabyte of storage, which means you could bring along your entire video library if you wanted to (which would be very convenient, but also rather strange).

Powering it all is a speedy quad core Exynos 9810 processor, built on Samsung's 10 nm manufacturing process. If these specifications sound meaningless to you, they might as well be. Smartphone silicon has reached a point where it has become efficient and quick enough for the everyday folk. In my time with the phone, everything from swiping through menus, to playing Youtube videos and graphics-heavy games such as PUBG was fast and lag-free. The phone is so powerful it needs a copper heat pipe for cooling, a concept we first saw on the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The copper pipe - in reality a small tube no larger than your pinky - draws heat away from the processor during intensive gaming sessions, ensuring your phone doesn't roast itself. This year's standout feature on the Note 9 has to be its S Pen stylus, which for the first time is Bluetooth-enabled. In a true feat of engineering, Samsung has managed to squeeze a tiny battery (actually a supercapacitor) and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio into a bright yellow body no thicker than a few toothpicks tied together. It's also a gorgeous colour combo when paired with my blue review unit.

That new wireless capability brings to the table a whole slew of use cases. Use it as a remote if you're taking a picture or a selfie by clicking once on the button, and if you're making presentations, you can use it to flip through your slides.

If you run out of Samsung's claimed 200-button press/30-

minute battery life for the S Pen, simply slide the stylus back into its silo in the phone and it charges inductively. It's incredibly easy and seamless and it amazes me how Samsung managed this.

Never runs out of juice

One battery you will struggle to drain, however, is the phone's own power source. Forget everything you know: this phone tops them all with a ginormous 4,000mAh battery, which is larger than any other flagship phone on sale right now. If there were any reason to buy the Note 9 despite its high sticker price, longevity on a single charge would be certainly one of them. In my testing, the phone never ran out of juice before the end of the day - and that too with me actively trying to kill it with long gaming sessions and Youtube surfing (hey, it's research). Never once did it leave me hanging after a long work day.

Samsung wants to put your fears of another exploding Note fiasco behind it with a "rigorous" 8-point battery safety check, so you can be sure your Note 9 has the battery capacity and safety to go along with it.

And we've got to talk about that camera: a dual-12 megapixel multitasker. One is a wide-angle lens to capture more in your shot, and the other a telephoto lens to get up close to your subject. As it shares the same setup as its smaller brother, the Galaxy S9 Plus, both phones end up producing very similar photos. Autofocus is lightning fast, and pictures are sharp, vibrant, with great dynamic range and lots of detail. The AI-infused cameras are the best you can get on the market now, certainly on a par with (sometimes besting) Apple's iPhone X and Google's Pixel 2 XL shooters. To be sure, they still exhibit the usual Samsung problem of blowing out highlights and sacrificing detail for contrast, but you'd be hard-pressed to criticise this shooter otherwise.

The Note 9 embodies the quintessential Samsung flagship: it has the best and most powerful specs, with a software experience that may not be agreeable to all. The Note line has truly come of age - from the ashes of the literal bomb that was the Note 7, Samsung has stood up, dusted itself down, and hit a home run.

But with a price tag nearing S$2,000, you must really want - and use - everything this phone offers. But if you're prepared to shell out the same amount of money for a decent Bali vacation, then you will own what is one of the best phones ever made.