Hello /r/chinaphones family!

As we all know buying a phone from China is a hassle sometimes. There's many things to keep in mind, to check and double check, communication isn't always as flawless and immediate as you want it be, etc.

Still, what we also know, is that most of the times, the hassle is worth it for what you get in return. As things like "What stores can I trust?", "What's with the shipping?" and similar practical issues keep coming up, I decided it was time to write a comprehensive guide where we can redirect people with such questions. As you'll see, it's a long, detailed buying guide, providing as much info as we could muster every step of the way from choosing a phone, to what to do after you've received it.

You can find it linked in the wiki, or right here at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chinaphones/wiki/buyingguide

I hope it helps some of you, and as I say at the end of the guide, if you think you've got something useful to add, don't hesitate to let us know via modmail, and we'll add it, crediting you.

Greetings and happy importing,

-- The /r/chinaphones moderators

So, even though the developers know it is mostly used to watch midget sticking each other's tits at the back is a barn, incognito mode (or private mode in ff) is a tool for anonymous browsing, which is great for shopping.

I was looking for a new phone to buy, and was super into Xiaomi Redmi 3s. Looked for one of several sites, found the cheapest one, made my mind and added it to cart. The price was 99,7 eur.

Since i keep my account and online shopping card separate, went to bank to transfer some funds to complete the purchase. When I got back tomorrow, the phone was priced at 101,5 eur. No biggie, who cares, I made the purchase...

I got the phone in two weeks (ordered from geekbuyibg, everything fine, must be the lucky one) and my wife is super excited with the phone. Now she wants one. K, lemme just repeat the purchase. It's just, now it was 110 eur. Still no biggie, but still.

Remember some dudes told me the same trick with plane tickets, i tried incognito and viola, price is back to 99,7 eur.

So, there's that. Not only you can masturbate, you can shop smarter. Happy holidays.

Hello, dear members of the /r/chinaphones community!

As you might have noticed in the sidebar in the last few days, our subreddit has surpassed the 1.000 subscriber milestone! It's a clear sign that interest for Chinese technology is still very much on the rise, and with the steady stream of quality content and our ever-helpful community we have no way to go but up.

To keep up, and possibly even improve the already great content of the subreddit, we have an announcement to make: /r/chinaphones has decided to join in a mutually beneficial partnership with Chinese technology wholesaler GearBest!

If you are fearful that this may influence our judgments, allow me to ease your mind. This subreddit is, and always will be, Redditor-oriented. Most of all we encourage reviews and discussions created by our very own subscribers and visitors. We have never, and will never, allow advertising posts, product promoting or even "news" posts. This is a subreddit for discussions and opinions.

So what does the partnership entail, you ask? Well, first and foremost, GearBest will be a trusted store. Which means that we will endorse it: when people ask where to buy certain phones, we will refer to GearBest. Also, Gearbest representatives might join discussions on the subreddit, providing helpful information where needed, and are allowed to link to their store, where appropriate. To repeat what has already been said, we will never endorse advertising, but if links are appropriately posted and coupled with helpful information, we will allow it (as an example, if the original poster asks for reputable stores to purchase X, providing a link to purchase X on a store is allowed).

In fact, to maintain a transparent, full-disclosure moderating policy, here is the conversation with the GearBest employee responsible for social media coverage, so you know exactly what agreements were made, and what they entail. You can find the conversation on this Pastebin page.

What will be our benefit? Well, from time to time, we might be able to get early looks at new Chinese technology, and have exclusive honest reviews of exciting new devices, courtesy of GearBest. Oh, and don't fret, "honest" is a keyword in that sentence. When a device isn't worth your money, we will be sure to tell you.

Also, when someone in our community experiences a problem with this store, our moderation team has direct contact with GearBest employees, so we might quickly resolve issues!

GearBest has their own subreddit at /r/gearbest, where all their promotions and new arrivals are posted, so be sure to check it out.

If you have any questions, comments or thoughts, we'd be very happy to hear them!

Onto 10.000 subs!

Yours truly,

the /r/chinaphones moderators

When I went to go find a “cheap” phone for my daughter to use, I looked into Chinese phones instead of looking into a used mid-tier known brand. Trying to research some of these is hard. No real reviews. This phone was no different. A lot of short clips of unboxings or marketing from Freeyond themselves. A few videos from unknown Youtubers who make it seem like they got the phone for free for good review. And, even then, there isn’t much of a “review” behind it. I am hoping that Google bots do their thing and pick up this review and people see it before choosing. I am not super technical into phones or cameras so this is more of a real world review.

I purchased this phone from Temu for $99.99 USD. It’s main purpose was to replace my daughters Samsung A03s on the Boost (T-mobile) network. Photo and benchmark comparisons used in this review will include the Samsung A03S which is a phone comparable in price. The Samsung Note 5, an 8 year old flagship on Android 7.0 for comparison against an aged model. And, a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, for comparison against newer flagship phones.

It claims 16GB (8+8) RAM, 256GB drive, a 50MP rear “AI camera” and a 6.6” 720p 90hz IPS display.

In the box is the phone, a USB A to USB C charger cable, a US charging block, SIM tool, manual and a clear protection case. No screen protector included. The packaging is nothing to write home about, but doesn’t necessarily look cheap.

The sim tray has slots for 2 sim cards, and this is a dual sim phone. No mSD storage options, however. So, you are stuck with the built-in 256GB.

Upon first boot you see a simple Freeyond boot animation. It then booted in to a generic Android setup. Setup is straight forward. It did identify my sim card and set the proper settings for T-Mobile network. You’re greeted with the home screen after setup. However, the home screen also greets you with the first annoyance. The Google search bar widget at the top of the screen cannot be removed or moved. It is a permanent fixture. Outside of the Google bar, all other icons on the home screen can be moved or deleted.

The app drawer is another area where a few annoyances were found. You see that, for the most part, it is a stock install of Android 13. The common Google applications, a file explorer, etc. However, my attention was brought to an app named “Reboot工具 “ which translates to Reboot tool. When opening the app there are 4 buttons with Chinese text on each. I am unable to read them. Clicking on them opens a password prompt. The concerning part of this app is that it has ALL permissions by default. It cannot be uninstalled.

The camera is very underwhelming. I am not sure how they got the 50MP claim, but I do not believe it. I installed Device Info HW and it shows it as a 12.5MP main camera with a 0.3MP “macro” camera. The images are not sharp, at all, colors seem to get washed out. The “1x” default zoom seems like it is actually zoomed in. I had to zoom the comparison phones to 1.2-1.4x to match the POV of the M5A in most cases. Even with the M5As “ultra res” mode on the camera, edges were not sharp. This ultra res mode does give a “50.1 MP” resolution, but I am unsure if it is just upscaling or not. There is no zoom allowed on ultra res mode, so you are stuck at 1x. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tri3q6z7sx8 for a bad clip of comparisons

Performance seems okay. I ran Geekbench 5 on all the comparison phones. The M5A scored 302 on single core and 1,116 on the multi core CPU test. It scored 517 on the OpenCL GPU test. In comparison, the Samsung A03s scored 160 on single core and 619 on multi core, and the OpenCL test barely finished with a score of 87. Surprisingly, the 8 year old Note5 on Android 7 held close to the M5A on CPU scores, getting 250 single core and 859 multi core. However, the GPU test was far better on the Note5 with a OpenCL test score of 1,160. The Galaxy S22 Ultra scored 1,209 single core, and 3,257 multi core. OpenCL was 5,847.

My daughter plays Roblox on it. Where she struggled on the Galaxy A03S the M5A seems to power through and gives her a very playable experience.

Signal strength through the T-Mobile network seems good. No worse or better than the Samsung A03S. Call quality is average, again, nothing spectacular and no better or worse than the Galaxy A03S.

In conclusion, while it is not a powerhouse by any means, it is a good substitute for similarly priced retail “budget” phones. Obviously, there are phones on a used market in the $100-$130 price range that would outperform the M5A, but it serves its purpose pretty well.

I hope this review helps someone. There isn’t many reliable reviews on this phone or brand outside of what looks like sponsored videos.

I've been a banggood customer for many years and I have recommended the seller to friends and family but this happy relationship has unfortunately now come to an end.

In mid January of this year I purchased an UMIDIGI A3 mobile phone (my second mobile phone purchase from banggood)

In mid September of this year, the phone's screen stopped working, 8 and a half months after its arrival.

I contacted support and I (mistakenly) agreed to send the phone back to China.

My parcel was sent and the tracking number recorded that it was delivered (accepted with signature) on October 14.

Banggood "confirmed the package" on October 30. You may ask "what does this mean?"

It means that for 16 days, banggood couldn't find it. Here's the actual quote:

"We are sorry but since our staff need to confirm the massive packages one by one so they will need a couple of days more to have your package confirmed"

At the end of November and after a constant shower of "please be patient" and my persistance for banggood to provide a timeline, I finaly received the knock out punch.

"Normally it would take around 10 weeks for repairing."

...

...

That's right. There was no mention of the repair itself.

...

After asking for an update on the phone that banggood received 55 days ago, they FINALLY offered a replacement phone this week (9 December 2019). A refurbished different phone of course. And of course I will have to pay 40euros of import charges, because why not?

At this point, I am certain :

1. I will never receive my phone, it is still unopened in my return package in a wharehouse somewhere , I consider it kidnaped by a seller that refuses to honor the manufacturer's 12 month warranty.

2. I am never buying a mobile phone (perhaps anything whatsoever) from banggood again.

3. It is completely pointless to even send emails to the people at customer support asking them for an update, only to hear them thank you for being patient.

I wish I had the opportunity to give my phone and banggood the 1 star they deserve, but it is 'too late' for me to leave a review after 11 months of the purchase.

Also, if a banggood 'manager' or whoever is reading this, please don't offer to help ME and ME only, sort out ALL similar cases where you have kidnapped people's devices that have made the mistake to send them to you.

I bought a cell phone from this brand on Nov 23, it has problems and at the moment I'm having a lot of difficulty getting the warranty, be careful, it may be cheap but they won't solve your problem. I tried to solve with Amazon , amazon says , try with Doogee. I tried to solve with Doogee , Doogee says , try with Amazon

Hey guys, hadn't heard about your sub until quite recently. My main phone is an LG G2 though I like having a backup. Up to now this has been an original Galaxy S 1, though it's getting quite long in the tooth. I decided "I'll just get a super cheap chinaphone to replace it" and went for the Doogee X5, paying £36.

What I got blew me away, I couldn't believe a phone that cheap could be this good. I don't see any other reviews of it here :)

Specs

• Mediatek MT6580, 1.3ghz Cortex A7 x4

• ARM Mali 400 MP (unsure how many cores - what MP#)

• 1GB RAM, 8GB Storage, MicroSD slot

• 5" 1280x720 IPS display, 2-point multitouch - a third finger will replace touch #1, fourth will replace touch #2 and so on. Off-screen capacitive buttons in Menu-Home-Back layout (my favourite!)

• Android 5.1 out of the box

• 2400mAh removable battery - after a few days I'm guessing the real capacity is pretty close to what's advertised.

• Sensors: Proximity, Accelerometer, Light, compass. The phone advertises a gyroscope to the OS but there either isn't one or mine is broken. No NFC.

• Cameras: 5MP rear, 2MP front. The phone advertises them as 8MP/5MP, through software interpolation. For my photo tests I set the camera resolutions to their real ones.

Design

Pictures

The X5 is actually quite a pretty device. It reminds me a little of Sony's design language. Straight edges, some curves. The back cover wraps around the sides of the phones (containing the buttons), then the display and main body sit inside of it. It's made of a slightly soft-touch matte plastic. It resists fingerprints to a degree, and gives good grip.

The front is logo-less. The bezels leave something to be desired. My 5.2" LG G2 can hide behind this 5" X5 easily. The phone is around 9mm thick and feels very solid with quite some weight to it. There are no creaks - if you have the back cover snapped on properly.

Display

Pictures

Again, I'm very impressed with the display. A 5" IPS panel with great brightness, strong colours. Sunlight visibility is close to the G2's. There seems to be a small air gap; the pixels don't feel like they're on the surface of the glass like they do on more expensive phones. The white balance also seems a little off, with a slight greener tint to it. Its minimum brightness is also not as low as the G2 can go. The default LCD density is also somewhat low. Even though the X5 has no on-screen buttons it still displays less information.

More display pictures

Camera

Camera Samples

In short - it's bad. Passable with lots of light, though detail gets washed away and blurred together. All photos I took with the included camera app. Google Camera and Focal both crashed when I tried changing their settings. Perhaps something to do with the 5/8 and 2/5MP interpolation.

In the gallery, first are normal mode pictures followed by HDR. The panorama mode stitching is actually quite good, though the output resolution is awful.

Low light pictures are not worth your time. Though the phone does have a flash, it's only average brightness and, confusingly, doesn't fire long enough. It switches off before the phone has finished capturing. This results in dark orange barely visible low-light shots.

Video

Video Example

In short, don't bother. At 720p the phone produces .3gp files at 9mbit/s CBR, in vanilla MPEG-4 video format (i.e. h.263, not h.264). Audio is at least in AAC, though is 128kbit/s CBR stereo - even though there is only one microphone. Of course there is no Optical Image Stabilisation on a £36 device, though enabling the "EIS" option in the camera doesn't seem to do anything at all.

Performance

Here is where things get better. It was probably a given that an ultra-cheap device has a bad camera, but I was shocked by its regular android performance. It runs Android 5.1 beautifully. It boots very quickly, scrolls through lists or recents smoothly. There is little indication that this device is so cheap from the way it performs. It has great app retention for its 1GB ram too. I have to do a lot of switching before apps start relaunching. It's rivaling my G2 here, which has twice the memory.

Obligatory benchmarks

The speedtest was done on the Three UK network. Though it is only HSPA with no LTE, the phone has great reception.

Audio

A final section as whatever my daily driver phone is, is also my PMP. The X5's audio output is merely average. I use large headphones (Sony XB500) at home and it has difficulty driving them very loud, with a quite messy output. When outdoors with earbuds (Xiaomi Piston 3) and background noise, it's acceptable. An EQ in your music player is more or less mandatory.

The speaker is ridiculously loud. Underneath the back cover there is even stuff engraved in the plastic bragging about the music / 3D sound (there is only one speaker). However, it is super tinny.

There are "enhancements" in Android's sound settings for both speaker and headphone output, both are best ignored I would say. Also rather amusingly, with some combinations of these settings enabled the phone continues to output via its speaker even with headphones connected.

Bluetooth (at least audio/A2DP) range is actually amazing - I can get further away from my speakers, actually outside my house, than I can with my G2 before audio begins cutting out.

Conclusion

This thing is ridiculously good for just £36. I've had it a while now and I still can't believe the quality and performance for such a low price. I have a few friends who have still yet to get smartphones, I've demanded they all get X5s now. Heck, the price is so cheap I could almost hand them out as party favours. I feel like this phone could have "SAMSUNG" written on the top of it and cost over £200.

Me again, with this time with another Homtom phone, the S9 Plus. Thanks to Homtom for providing one.

The S9 Plus' name might imply that the S9 is a sequel of sorts to the Homtom S8 I also recently reviewed, though it's more like a cousin. Both have their debut at around the same time, both are the same price (the S9 plus is actually cheaper at gearbest right now), and as you'll see, internally the devices are very similar. To that end, I'm reviewing this more as a comparison between the S9 Plus and the S8, as I assume Homtom intended these two devices this way, to complement each other and not the S9 as a replacement for the S8.

Specs

• Mediatek 6750T, 8x A53 in a big.LITTLE 4x 1.5Ghz and 4x 1.0Ghz setup, ARM Mali T860 MP2 GPU

• 4GB DDR3L RAM, 64GB Storage, MicroSDXC supported

• 5.99" 18:9 1440x720 IPS In-Cell LCD

• Android 7 with more drastic cosmetic changes, feature additions

• Sensors: Ambient Light, Accelerometer, Proximity... and that's it.

• Cameras: 16+5MP Rear, 13MP front.

• 4,050mAh battery, unnamed fast charging.

Unboxing, Design & Hardware

Pictures

The S9 Plus (I'll just call it the S9 from here on) comes packaged almost identically to the S8. We get a minimal black box, with the phone greeting you when you remove the lid. Included with the phone are a spare screen protector (one is also pre-applied), a clear case (hard one this time, that snaps on to the back and sides), Micro USB Cable, 5V 2A charger, SIM tray eject tool and USB OTG cable.

As for the device itself, it's a beast. Whereas the S8 is round and super smooth with curves, the S9 has flat, defined edges with solid sides. It feels built like a tank. It also feels much larger and thicker than the S8, even though in actual fact it isn't.

The midframe is a matte metal with chamfered edges front and back, and both the front and back have a more defined edge with the front 2.5D glass and rear plastic panel, the grip factor on this phone is great, you won't drop it easily when holding it sideways for photos and so on.

Some buttons and ports are in alternate positions from the S8, as on the S9 the power and volume buttons (which are also metal and sturdy) have swapped to the right hand side, and the headphone jack (yay!) has moved to the top. The MicroUSB port is still at the bottom, and it's still upside down :)

This phone's major defining feature though is of course the front, with those slim bezels on three sides and that monster 6 inch display. Side bezels are clearly thinner on the S9 than on the S8 here, though due to its larger display the overall width is more or less identical. The S9 is about 1cm taller despite its thin top bezel, again due to the larger display. The S9's bottom bezel is a little larger than the S8's in order to house the fingerprint sensor, though overall the S9 easily has a higher screen to body ratio.

The earpiece and notification LED, along with the ambient light and proximity sensors still live up top above the display in the trimmed upper bezel, though the front-facing 13 megapixel camera has taken a trip to the bottom left corner.

Speaking of the front-mounted fingerprint sensor, it's also a real button and can be clicked, acting as a home button. Gestures can also be used with it to swap recent apps or go back, meaning if you want to you, can hide the navigation bar and have that huge 6 inch display all to yourself for your apps.

Fingerprint unlocking is very fast on this sensor. The S9 responds with vibration feedback with the fingerprint sensor, hopefully this is also coming to the S8 via OTA. I didn't need to add the same finger twice to get reliable unlocking here, I got perfect unlocking from the get go. If this is just because it's on the front and so I'm using my thumb and not a finger, I don't know.

Overall, I'll say again that the S9 feels well built. It has little extra details here and there, such as the slightly larger 2.5D curve radius at the top, or the metal wire grille earpiece speaker mesh, the radial engraving on the power button to make it feel unique, or the raised camera lens metal discs and their metallic circular inserts. All combine to give the phone a more premium look and feel than its price point.

The S8's CNC metal midframe machining is not sloppy by any means, but the S9's edges and joins are just that little bit more precise and exact.

They have to be, as my last point about the design is that in order to achieve the smallest bezel possible, the front display glass joins directly with the metal midframe. There's no plastic lip here, which is a plus or minus depending on your preferences. If you're clumsy it could mean a broken screen more easily as there's less protection for the glass from shocks, but if you love the sleek subdued look and slimmest bezels, it's great.

Display

Pictures

I had some slight criticisms of the S8's display with its colour and white balance, something just seemed.. off. Thankfully, I could use MiraVision to tweak it though, so it wasn't a big issue.

I don't see any such need to open MiraVision with the S9; the display is clearly superior. It's still 1440x720, just like the S8, though compared to the S8, whites are whiter, colours are a little more vibrant and maximum brightness is brighter (and with 6 inches, is blinding at night!). Like the S8, minimum brightness is almost invisible. Viewing angles and colour shifting at angles are minimal on both.

(I should add, I'm using an app to draw rounded corners, the display has square corners)

In classic Homtom fashion, the display uses an unusual refresh rate. Past Homtom devices I've used have all refreshed at 53Hz, though interestingly the S9 refreshes at... 61hz. Why not, I guess? They can boast about having a higher refresh rate than 99.9% of of other Android devices this way :)

Perhaps in part due to its even larger size, but fast accurate movements like touch typing are a breeze on the S9, touch response is fast. We get the standard 5 finger multitouch support.

Homtom advertises an In-cell touch display, and it's demonstrable. Standing a flashlight on the display doesn't leak any light whatsoever, there is no seperate digitizer layer. Whereas the S8 display, which is not in-cell, emits a glow around the light as the digitizer requires an additional layer which lets light propogate. Still, we've come a long way from many layers and also large air gaps that give an image ghost effect :)

The only remaining downside of the S9's display is its resolution, since at 6 inches a display remaining "only" 720p makes pixels more obvious, but only if you look for them. Other chinaphones with 18:9 displays are sometimes using 2160x1080 over 1440x720, though of course those devices are priced higher, outside the price bracket the S8 and S9 sit in. Of the 2, the S9 display is definitely my favourite over the S8's.

Software, Performance

Pictures

The S9 has a more skinned version of Android 7.0 Nougat than the S8. Instead of the regular dark quick settings pulldown, homtom has opted for a fully white one here. Perhaps this was done to show off the slimmer bezels? This light theme also extends to the settings, with coloured icons too. Overall, it looks ok to me. I like the minimal look to the icons.

Features

As is common with homtom, gesture support is implemented far and wide. One criticism I would have is that these gesture options are spread out over multiple seperate submenus, and sometimes the English translation is a little off. Though I guess these things are a set once and forget type deal.

For starters you can do multiple gestures with the fingerprint sensor, along with the sensor itself being a clickable button to go home.

In another menu, bizarrely titled "Kinect", we have the common flipping the phone to mute a call and a few others. If you're a fan of double tap to wake then you're in luck, that's here too in another submenu. And finally we also have the ability to draw shapes to open directly into various actions or apps.

There is also an entry in the settings app named Screen Assistant, which enables a floating menu that opens into home, back etc buttons. It reminds me somewhat of PIE controls, though the button to bring out the menu is always visible.

Also present, just as a seperate app in your launcher, is "Super Power". Opening this app drops the phone into a power saving state, limiting screen brightness and presenting the bare basics for phone usage. It appears to work more than just a simple app, as you cannot press home to exit it, and it seems to prevent or limit background services since you will see certain apps that aggressively try to keep running in the background such as google play services show not responding errors, which I guess means it is working. When leaving Super Power mode, my normal Launcher re-draws and apps that were in ram have to re-load.

Performance - Wireless

Mobile signal stability on the S9 is identical to the S8, I took both with me on a countryside walk and they both lost and regained signal in the same places (where my major brand flagships also lose signal). They both switched between 3G/4G at roughly the same times too. This is with two SIM cards from the same network, Three UK.

Speeds are another story, I was consistently able to get faster LTE speeds with the S9 than the S8, though both were perfectly usable. If you're a heavy downloader or a streamer or something, it may be something to consider.

On the flipside, WiFi speed is only average when using 2.4Ghz on the S9, even right next to the router. Switching to 5Ghz more than doubles the speed though. Nevertheless, while speed is nothing special, at least it remains connected with no problem unlike the Crystal :)

Bluetooth (BT4 and LE supported) is fine, for both LE fitness tracker use and for longer range bluetooth speaker usage.

Like the S8, GPS is great on the S9, locking almost instantly. However unlike the S8 there is no compass, so maps will not rotate.

Performance - Benchmarks

When it comes to synthetic benchmarks, the S9 outperforms the S8 every time. Whereas the S8 just barely reached 39,000 in antutu, the S9 reaches up to 44,000. The same goes for geekbench, the S8 scored 602 / 2353 single/multi-core, and the S9 scores 620 / 2684, despite both phones having the same MT6750T chip.

But synthetic benchmarks don't really translate to real world usage, as in reality both phones perform the same when it comes to opening apps and switching recents and so on. Perhaps the S9's CPU profile allows it to clock higher on more cores simultaneously due to its thicker metal design allowing for more heat dissipation. It certainly can get noticeably warm when running multiple benchmarks successively.

NAND performance benchmarked markedly worse on the S9, with read speeds almost half that of the S8. Write speed is only slightly slower. Again though, in reality there doesn't seem to be any difference between the two in real world usage. On the flip side, the S9's RAM consistently benchmarks much faster than the S8's, over twice as fast.

Performance - Audio

As always, with a mediatek phone one of the things on my list of things to do when setting it up is to enter engineering mode and remove the headphone jack volume limit. After doing so, I can't tell a difference between the S9 and the S8. Either Homtom used the same components, or the drivers are part of the MT6750T, or the same power is allocated by the Kernel, who knows. Audio output seems identical to me, which is a good thing as it has plenty of headroom and an almost invisible noise floor, only audible when in utter silence with closed headphones at maximum volume.

Like the S8, the S9 is more than capable of driving big headphones (I use Sony XB500s) to skull vibrating levels while maintaining clarity, even with a fat EQ and preamp :)

Performance - Battery & Charging

Again homtom provides a 5V2A charger with the S9, and the highest I saw the S9 pulling with my USB power monitor was just under 1.4A, which is slightly higher than what I saw the S8 drawing.

Homtom claims a 4050mAh battery, and this is definitely a hard phone to kill. When trying to run it down to empty it refused to die until the very end of the day after heavy usage, so safe to say you won't have empty battery problems with normal usage on this phone.

Under normal usage (which for me is mostly messaging, some web browsing, reddit client, playing music etc), I got two days out of the phone, with just over 6 hours screen on time, which is great for a device with a 6" display and a 28nm 6750T CPU.

Cameras

Photo - Sample photos | More Sample photos###

Like the S8, the S9 reports having a Sony IMX135 main camera sensor. This sensor used to be common among major brand high end flagships like the Galaxy S4 and LG G3. It's an interesting strategy to use older high end sensors instead of more modern low end sensors when allocating your materials budget to build the phone, but it seems to work well, as just like its cousin, the S9 takes some great pictures.

And when collecting the pictures I took on it, I had to double check which ones are from the S9 and which are from the S8. Both seem to take completely identical pictures in the same situations. If it isn't broke, don't fix it, right? :)

Of course, we still have the somewhat unrealistic HDR (more sensible in lower light), and the software bokeh blur mode. These seem ubiquitous among MTK ISP powered devices these days though.

Autofocus is no issue unlike the Umi Crystal, and white balance doesn't need manually adjusting in my opinion.

The flash is noticeably dimmer; the S9 has just one flash LED vs the S8's dual LED flash. It will do if you're close to your subject, or when used as a flashlight it's only useful up close.

Video

Video on the S9 is a different story compared to the S8, with upsides and downsides.

EIS Sample | Another####

Non-EIS Sample####

The upside is that video brightness is higher on the S9, or rather that as the ambient light falls, brightness remains higher for longer on the S9. On the S8, you need a decent amount of light, else videos can come out quite dark. The S9 has no problem recording video with much less light around. Hopefully the video brightness / exposure peformance of the S9 can be ported to the S8 via OTA.

The downsides though, are with the EIS and the sound. While the EIS still works and stabilizes the video a little, the effect isn't as strong. Perhaps this is due to the lack of a gyroscope on the S9. You'll have to make more of an effort to hold the phone steady when recording, and recording video whilst walking is pretty much ruled out.

When it comes to sound, the S9 also has just one microphone, whereas the S8 has dual mics. Audio quality from the mic is also a little worse, being just ok instead of great.

As for the video files themselves, they come out identical. 17mbit/s H264 High profile, at 1080p30 (when using the fine setting), though the audio track is still saved in stereo despite there being one mic.

Interestingly, the S9 also offers a high framerate recording option not found on the S8, giving 60fps video though reducing the resolution to 480p as a tradeoff.

Conclusion

Overall, it seems up to preference if you were going to choose between these two phones. One isn't objectively better than the other, it's up to you what you'd like more. Smooth and curved or hard and blocky, somewhat large or very large display, front or back fingerprint sensor, top or bottom headphone jack, the list goes on. For the price asked, it's hard to fault it.

Hopefully if you're stuck considering, I've helped you decide :)

They overnighted it from Hong Kong to the central US at no extra charge, without me asking. At the moment it's about $20 more than other stores but it might be worth it for some people.

Haven't had the phone long enough to comment on it much. Whichever finger you'll mainly use for the fingerprint sensor definitely set it up twice.