? The grip doesn't seem that different to my S7E tbh, what do you mean.
Also Lol at semtex!
Matte color frame has more grip than the glossy frame of the S8. Holds well in my hand. Though interesting there is a grip sensor. Wonder if they'll do something with it later? Though probably not.
WRT the grip, I will quote myself. Sorry about late reply I was afk for a while due to personal reasons.
I did not use a case for the S8 and I am determined to not use one for the S9+. A lot of grief comes from that determination, though. The S8 felt amazing in hand: it felt like a seamless, one-piece object, like a well aged pebble stone smoothed-out by a million ocean waves. It felt so good that I wanted to hold it even when I did not use the phone.(!) On the other hand the S9+ is a slippery bitch which digs in the palm with sharp, unrefined, edges. And I am constantly being reminded of its loose buttons which drives me nuts.
On the S8, I could not feel the seams unless I run my fingernail around the phone's frame. With the S9+, the frame feels sharp and slippery, making the grip feel precarious. To be fair, S9+'s grip is still better than many competitors thanks to its narrow body - but compared to the S8/S8+ it is a downgrade.
Meanwhile Mr. Frumusanu has uploaded yet another study on the Exynos 9810.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12620/improving-the-exynos-9810-galaxy-s9-part-2
Impeccable as usual, with a biting ultimate paragraph:
Andrei Frumusanu said:
In the end the Exynos S9 was hampered on two fronts: one being just a very unoptimised BSP (Board support package; kernel, drivers, etc) by S.LSI (With the Mobile Division also possibly being a factor), particularly the seemingly senseless chasing of higher synthetic benchmarks scores such as GeekBench. which in turn backfired very badly in any real-world workloads. Qualcomm provided Samsung with an excellent baseline BSP on the S845 S9’s – so for S.LSI not being able to do the same is just unfortunate. The other front where the Exynos S9 was hampered was that the M3 just seems oversized and power hungry, and it can’t sufficiently act as the efficient workhorse for general workloads. Compounding problems, this comes at a cost of battery life. Here there’s just a lot more to be done to fix the efficiency and the performance discrepancy relative to Arm’s cores.
I would add that Samsung's mishap might even extend to the S845 version of S9/S9+ as well. Speaking from my personal experience over a month of use, the S9+'s battery performance has not been as reliable as the S8's was. My suspicion is that the S845's max frequency (2.8 GHz) is way outside of the sweet spot on the voltage curve, just like the Exynos 9810's is (to a lesser degree, of course). Limiting its max frequency to 2.0 GHz via power saving mode while leaving everything else the same as stock provides with a much, much more predictable battery performance. We will learn more as more S845 devices are released.
From my experience, the reasons to get the S9 over the S8 are:
1. Speakers. By far the single most indisputable improvement of the S9 over the S8, and it is also one of the best on a smartphone.
2. Oreo out of the box, and presumably an extra year of OS update compared to the S8.
3. HEVC encoding (S8 can only decode), but I am not sure how valuable this is when UHD recording is limited to 10 minutes in both phones.
4. HDR playback at 1080p and higher res. Seeing the CPU load is tiny during the playback I do feel like this is a software issue (meaning there is no reason why the S8 cannot do the same), but as of now the S8 struggles with it while the S9 sails through .
Now, if everything else was equal between the S8 and S9, then maybe aforementioned advantages of the S9 might warrant it $120 premium. (S9 = $719, S8 = $599 from Samsung.com) But sadly that is not the case. Most of other "improvements" are tradeoffs that are at best even between the S8 and S9 (e.g. camera), and at worst things actually took a step backward with the S9. (e.g. worse battery life) In a few cases I feel Samsung tried to cut as many corners as it could get away with. (e.g. build quality, NAND performance) It is the first Samsung flagship that makes me think so in a long while. Ever since the excellent Note 3, despite its software/design woes of its products, I felt Samsung always strived to give users the best hardware it could reasonably secure for its flagships. Not so with the S9/S9+. It feels like a cost-cut version of the S8/S8+ with the new SOC serving as an incompetent justification. If I were to choose between the S8+ and the S9+ today I would choose the S8+ and pocket $150. I hope Samsung will correct this ill-fated course with future releases, or it will soon find itself in Apple's shoes and have a rough time fending off aggressive attacks by the Chinese OEMs.