Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus review: great design, display, and speed, has headphone jack, but average battery life, gimmicks galore, and Bixby is a failure
The Galaxy S9 is all of the good and all of the bad we've come to expect from Samsung — Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales; Video by Becca Farsace and Tom Connors
Context & Ripple Effects
The Galaxy S9 verdict lands one year after The Verge flagged the S8's awkwardly placed rear fingerprint scanner and a useless Bixby — and the new review reads as a direct response: the sensor has moved to a better spot, while Bixby is again called a failure. The hardware complaints are being fixed generation by generation; the software assistant is not.
Read alongside the later S10+ review, where the in-screen fingerprint scanner proves unreliable, the S9 sits mid-arc in Samsung's multi-year attempt to relocate the sensor without breaking what works — keeping the headphone jack and strong display while layering on features the reviewer dismisses as gimmicks.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between the S9 and S9 Plus get the S8's design strengths with the fingerprint complaint addressed, but face an average-battery trade-off and a bundled assistant the review says adds no value.
Second-order effects
- Two consecutive pans for Bixby put pressure on Samsung to either materially improve the assistant or stop preloading it so prominently, since it now functions as a recurring negative in flagship reviews rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — hardware gripes fixed one cycle at a time while Bixby stays broken — Samsung's flagship identity becomes iterative hardware polish plus tolerated software bloat, a structure the S10's unreliable in-screen scanner suggests persists even when the fix introduces new problems.
The trend: Samsung's annual flagship cycle reliably repairs the previous year's hardware criticism while its own assistant, Bixby, remains a persistent failure point across generations.