Flagship vs Flagship. If you are considering which phone to buy, here are our thoughts on whether you should buy the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus or the iPhone X.
Galaxy S9+: http://jer.fyi/galaxys9plus
iPhone X: http://jer.fyi/iphonex
Video Transcript:
Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad with State of Tech, and I have the iPhone 10 and the S9 Plus here next to each other. Now, commonly, you end up seeing the S9, not the S9 Plus compared to the iPhone 10 because of the size of the phones, but in reality, as far as features go and everything, I think both of these phones are more better-suited to be compared here. The only reason that the iPhone 10 is small is because they made it small. I don’t think it actually really lacks anything that a bigger phone would have. It includes all the things that a bigger phone would have aside from the battery, but in my opinion, I’m always going to go probably with the bigger phone, depending on the size. There is a such thing as a phone that would be too big for me, but I would go with the S9 Plus all the time because I think the S9 is just a little too small for me.
In these phones, of course, there are two different platforms, and so we have to start there. Then, we’ll talk about what’s similar between these two. If you are maybe more married to a certain platform, then the conversation’s almost over. If you’re more of an iPhone user, you use all the Mac stuff and you like all of your things to talk, then the iPhone is just going to be a better experience. If you’re a Windows user like I am right now, it becomes a little bit different in the conversation because I can’t use some of the things, the ecosystem that Apple has on my Windows machine. Of course, there isn’t too much of an Android to Windows ecosystem there, so it doesn’t really matter too much. Now, there is software that you can download from Samsung so that you can use your phone on your computer screen. It works sometimes. It’s okay, but it is a little buggy at times, so I tend not to run it because my phone’s right in front of me. I don’t need my phone to be on my computer screen.
Anyways, with that said, the platforms are different, so it really comes down to whether you are more comfortable with Android or more comfortable with iOS, but if you’re thinking about maybe changing or changing back, and you want a good comparison between these two phones, that’s where we’re going to dive in now and talk about what’s similar.
Now, both of these phones have dual cameras. That’s something that both of them have been doing for a few minutes now with the dual cameras. This one does have. The S9 has a sensor from the back, a fingerprint sensor, which the iPhone 10 doesn’t have any fingerprint sensor at all. It does a face ID unlock, which there’s been lots of talk about whether or not that’s good or bad. My experiences with Face ID have been pretty good. In the times when I’m not in a super hurry to unlock my phone or the lighting arrangement is good wherever I’m at, the iPhone unlocks extremely fast. Now, the Samsung phone with the fingerprint scanner is better for all types of situations. For example, when you’re going to pull the phone out of your pocket, which is normally where I keep mine, I could be unlocking the phone on my way up, which is something I can’t do with the iPhone. I have to pull it up and look at it for it to unlock.
I’ve been using the iPhone for quite some time now, and it has started to learn my face from different angles and can unlock even if the phone’s not pointing directly at my face, but not in all situations is that extremely perfect. When I’m in the car and maybe half of my face is lit and half of my face is in the shade, sometimes, I have to move my face a little bit to get the phone to unlock. Now, if you go to compare face unlock from what Samsung has with its infrared scanner versus the iPhone, which uses a combination of technologies, the face unlock on the Android or on this S9 here is not very good. Now, you can combine it with a couple of different technologies that it has. It gets a little bit better. Iris scan, face unlock and all that stuff. It’s still not as good as the iphone, so if you take away the fingerprint scanner and compare face unlock to face ID or whatever, you’re going to have a much better experience on the iPhone there.
However, I do miss when I’m using my iPhone having a fingerprint reader, especially on the back. I think the back is probably the best place for a fingerprint scanner. I’ve been saying for years that I think that the Apple logo on the back would be a fantastic fingerprint scanner. Just perfect placement right there. It’s been on a lot of phones, and when you grab your phone, your finger goes right there. It unlocks it. By the time the phone’s up to your face, it’s already unlocked. With that, the dual cameras, I’ll continue talking about those.
Both have pretty good dual cameras. One is of course for wider, and one is more like a 2x zoom. The S9 has that dual aperture, which allows it to perform a little bit better in low light. I will say that the iPhone 10 does an okay job in low light. It’s definitely not the best phone out there as far as low light performance. The S9 outperforms it a little bit in low light, especially if you put your phone in manual mode or pro mode on the S9 and enforce it, the settings a little bit. You’re going to get some pretty good low light photos out of the S9 over the iPhone. However, the iPhone still does a pretty good. I will argue and say that the iPhone does a better job when you’re using the flash than the S9, and I don’t use the flash very often because usually, the flash on smartphones is pretty bad.
Both of them have the dual cameras. 12 megapixels, 4K 60P. As far as the cameras go, they’re very on-parr with each other in regards to specs with the exception of the dual aperture on the S9, which means the aperture can go as wide as 1.5, and then it can switch to 2.4, which is its standard aperture. They both have beautiful displays. Ironically, Samsung makes the display for both of these phones. Both phones are known for their fantastic displays. Apple has called their displays retina and a number of other things. Samsung’s displays are just fantastic. They always have been. Samsung really flexes their muscles as a manufacturer by putting beautiful displays in their flagship smartphones.
Let’s talk about what’s not the same in these phones. Now, obviously, they’re not the same size. You’re basically getting a lot more of a phone in a smaller form factor here because of the amount of display. There’s no bezels on the iPhone, essentially. I mean there’s a little bit around the edges. You’ve got the notch at the top, but they do a good job of combining everything where Samsung has a little bit of a forehead and a chin here on their phone. You can see that, of course, the display is bigger on the S9 Plus than it is on the iPhone 10. You have the 5.8-inch display here. You’ve got the 6.2-inch display over here. The pixel depth is also a lot higher on this phone as well, which is easier to achieve because of the bigger display, but 529 PPI here over the 458 PPI on the iPhone.
Now, watching videos, movies, whatever on both phones is a great experience. Of course, the notch is something that you have to contend with if you’re going to run your video all the way to the edges whereas you’re not going to deal with that on the S9. I think the S9 provides a little bit more of an immersive experience with the video because of the curved edge display a little bit. It just feels like the video is not contained in anything, really. It’s a little bit more immersive of a display, I think.
The audio is stereo on both of these phones. Both firing the same way with a speaker here at the top and speakers down-firing at the bottom. I think the iPhone, when I’m listening to audio, I feel like the iPhone speaker envelops me a little bit more as far as the way that the audio hits me, but the S9 is a little bit louder and I think a little bit more detailed audio. It’s hard to explain. I’m not an audio file. I just know what sounds good to me, and I try to explain that in the best way possible to all of you.
You’re getting a higher resolution display out of the S9 as well. You’ve got the Quad HD Plus versus what’s basically a WQ HD here. You’re able to go into a higher resolution setting on the S9. However, I don’t run my S9 at that resolution because it’s going to suck a lot more battery life, so I basically run my S9 at the same resolution as an iPhone 10 is natively. Not a big difference there, but for those of you that like to run things at the max, the S9 does have a higher resolution display.
The battery life is a really interesting thing. It always has been in comparison between an iPhone and an Android phone. Of course, Android phones, specifically Samsung phones have gotten so good with their battery life lately because of all the optimizations and stuff that Samsung has done with the Android software. iPhone has always been good. They’ve started to give us more background operations in different things, different features while maintaining a decent battery life. When I first got the iPhone, for the first week, the battery life was garbage, but all of a sudden, it miraculously got a lot better. The S9 was really good out of the box with the battery life. Maybe not as good as my pixel XL, but it’s still fantastic as far as the battery life goes.
The S9 has a huge battery in comparison to the iPhone 10. We got a 3, 500 milliamp battery over here versus the 2, 716 milliamp, very random numbers, battery on the iPhone. The iPhone doesn’t have as big of a battery, but it still is able to get all-day battery life, which is great. Both phones as super bring. S9’s giving me a little bit of a warning here. You can see both phones are really bright, and you can see both of these phones at multiple angles outside, which is great. Just being able to see your phone while outside is super important. These screens have gotten so much more brighter over the years, which is great. It makes for viewing in a bright sunny day very easy.
One thing that the S9 has over the iPhone is the expandability of storage. You can buy the iPhone 10 with 256 gigs of storage stock. It comes 64, the base level, so if you want more than 64, you’ve got to go to the 256, which is extremely expensive whereas the S9, really, all you can buy it with here in the US is 64 gigs, but then you can put in a micro SD card in it and actually expand that storage 128 gigs, which is a lot. Then, you have a way of getting your media out of your phone easily, which on the iPhone, you just don’t have as good of a way of getting your media outside of the phone. Now, I can connect my phone to my PC, but it’s a pain in the butt to get stuff off of the iPhone whereas the S9, it’s basically just like connecting an SD card reader. I can get access to that and get all my photos and everything off of it.
One other difference between the two is that the S9 does have super slow motion at 720P. You can go up to 960 framers per second. It’s a challenge to use, and it’s very high quality, but it is there, whereas the iPhone has slow motion or what they would probably call super slow motion, which at regular HD, you get the 240 frames per second. The S9 also has, at full HD, a 240 frames per second slow motion. Now, as far as waterproofing goes, the S9 is IP68 certified. The iPhone is IP67 certified. I’ve had both phones underwater swimming with them several times for five, six, seven, eight minutes without pulling it out of the water, and both phones have had no problems audio, as far as if you’re filming and you go underwater and come out of the water. I mean they both perform really well. I had a hard time really differentiating between the two without actually knowing which phone I was shooting with. Even looking at the files, I had to look at the metadata to be reminded which one was which. They both do a good job.
Lastly, it really does come down to the price. I mean you can get an S9 unlocked $839 right now. The cheapest you can get an iPhone 10 for is 999, and then of course, if you need that extra storage space, you’re going to pay an extra $150 I think it is for your iPhone 10, whereas you can get 128 gig SD cards, micro SD cards all day long for under 50 bucks. I’ll put a link to those in the description below. Really, it can depend on which phone is superior and which one you should buy. I think first, it comes down to the platform because that’s the biggest thing. Even though both of these phones have so many differences and yet so many things that are the same, the platform is the main difference.
If you’re on an Apple laptop or computer and you have an iPad or an Apple watch or any of those other things, the iPhone is going to be the clear winner as far as that experience goes because of the whole ecosystem and all of that. Even if you have a lot of other friends and family that are more iPhone users, just the ecosystem there with iMessage and FaceTime and all that stuff, AirDrop, the experience is going to be much better if most of your friends and family are on iPhones.
The S9 though has all the latest and greatest features packed into it. Samsung’s always pushing the envelope with their phones and giving you as much as they can for the money, so it really comes down to what you think. I mean for me, I like the iPhone right now because it’s a smaller phone. I feel like I’m getting a lot of phone in a smaller package. The ecosystem is just very good and fantastic. I love the fact that all of my stuff talks. Of course, I’m not on an Apple computer right now, so I can’t utilize those features, but with my iPad, when I’m sending photos to my wife, there’s just a lot of things that are great about there there. However, when I go to shoot video and I want to take the video off of one of these devices so that I can incorporate it into a video like this one, getting the footage off of the iPhone is much more of a pain in the butt than it is getting it off of the S9.
What’s important to you when it comes to a phone? Is platform the most important thing, or is it features? What are the things that make you decide what phone is worth purchasing? For me, like I said, have a hard time choosing between these two phones because they’re both fantastic. Let me know what you think in the comments section below. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it. Give us a subscribe if you want to be notified when new videos come out. Of course, if you want to see some good photos of both of these devices, head on over to stateoftech-staging.qyb0dw80-liquidwebsites.com. The link is in the description below, and I hope to see you back here in the next one. Take care.
