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The Samsung Galaxy S9 is, by all accounts, a very good, but predictable and boring 2018 update. The latter sentiment was inescapable, considering that the S9 looks almost exactly like last year’s S8. We smartphone consumers and tech geeks have been spoiled by fresh-looking and feeling smartphones every couple of months.
But Samsung keeping the S9 design language the same makes complete sense , because for one, Samsung’s design language still offers the best in-hand feel ever. I say this not just because the phone has thin top and bottom bezels, but because the handset, with its display curved on both left and right sides and an even more elongated 18.5:9 aspect ratio, is less wide than everything else out there. Consider this: the Galaxy S8/S9 has a similar screen size to the iPhone X, but the phone is about 2mm thinner horizontally across the device (it sounds minor but it makes a difference). Even the larger S8/S9+, with a 6.2-inch display, is less wide than phones with a smaller display like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, LG V30 and iPhone 8 Plus.
This is important because the slimmer a device is from left to right, the easier it to to hold. I can type one-handed on a Galaxy S8/S9 with ease because my thumb can reach all the way to the other side of the screen. I cannot do this on any other modern smartphone except for the standard iPhone 8, and that phone’s design is so hilariously dated by 2018 standards I shouldn’t even count it as a real flagship (the X is Apple’s flagship and future; the 8 phones are Apple playing it safe to cater to less-demanding users).
Still, even with all that said, Samsung could have given the S9 a radical makeover just for the sake of it, so it could avoid the “boring” labels. Samsung could have, for example, done what seemingly every other phonemaker is doing this year and gone for the “notch” design.
That’s what Huawei and LG are doing according to very reliable leaks and rumors. The next flagships from both companies will have that iPhone X-like notch design, which is a bit of a shame, considering that the late 2017 flagships from both (LG V30 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro) were great looking devices that didn't look inferior to the iPhone X in my opinion.
Let it be known that the notch is less a hardware feature than a design compromise. The notch is a company saying “we want to go for a bezel-less, all-screen look, but we can’t figure out where to put the front-facing camera so we have to cut a bit out of the screen.”
Some companies, such as Vivo and Xiaomi, found ways to offer an all-screen look without a notch, but those phones (one of which isn’t even out yet) are not without compromises.
I don’t mind the notch all that much to be honest—there are dozens of other things about the iPhone X that bug me more than a small screen cut-out —but it is sad that all these major Android phone makers are blatantly copying that look. As Vlad Savov of The Verge so correctly commented: these notch followers could give Android a bad name because it feeds fuel to the misguided (and dumb) mainstream belief that Androids are inferior products that just follow Apple.
And so I want to commend Samsung for not going that route. It knew the Galaxy S9 would be deemed a boring, or iterative, or minor update. But it stuck to its guns, partly because Samsung is rightfully proud of its design, but also partly because the South Korean giant is too big a company and too direct a rival to Apple to blatantly go for the copycat move.
It’s safe to assume Samsung will never cave and go for a notch design too, because the company’s senior vice president of marketing, Justin Denison, took a shot at the iPhone X’s notch during the S9’s launch event. You can’t poke fun at something Apple is doing and then break your word and copy that...unless you’re Google.
