Big screen entertainment Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro available in your flipkart:- Click & Buy
Big screen entertainment
Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro
preview
Introduction:
Introduction
Samsung popularized the big screen smartphone back in 2011 with
the launch of the Galaxy Note. Back then, the phone was considered freakishly
large and was laughed off for being too big to be successful. Fast forward six
years and now every smartphone being launched has a screen over 5.0-inch in
size, with 5.5-inch quickly becoming a popular option. In contrast, the
original Galaxy Note had a display that measured only 5.3-inch in size.
And with big screen phones growing in popularity today, going even
bigger seemed a logical path to take. Enter the 6.0+ inch phones. Samsung is
surely no stranger to this category - but it seems phones like the Galaxy Mega
6.3 came too early to a market that wasn't quite ready for it. Today, however,
6.0-inch phones suddenly don't seem all that big so this might be the perfect
time to jump back into this segment and try your hand at it. And so we have the
Galaxy C9 Pro.
Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro key features
·
6.0-inch, 1920x1080 Super AMOLED display
·
Qualcomm Snapdragon 653; 4x Cortex-A72 at 1.95GHz + 4x
Cortex-A53 at 1.44GHz; Adreno 510 GPU
·
6GB RAM, 64GB storage with microSD support
·
16 megapixel rear camera, f1.9 aperture, PDAF, two-tone LED
flash; 1080p video
·
16 megapixel front camera, f1.9 aperture, 1080p video
·
VoLTE, dual SIM, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, A-GPS,
USB-C
·
Stereo speakers; fingerprint sensor; FM radio
·
4000mAh battery, Quick Charge 2.0
·
Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow
Key shortcomings
·
No water or dust resistance
·
Imbalanced stereo speakers
·
Heats up when in use and charging
·
Too much bloatware
Launched first in China, the C9 Pro has now made its way
internationally and we have the Indian model here for review. Users in both
China and India have shown considerable interest in big screen phones and as
such are perfect for the C9 Pro. But Samsung hasn't just stopped at the screen
size; it seems the Korean giant has taken some pointers from its Chinese
rivals. So now the 6.0-inch display is coupled with a powerful octa-core
processor, 6GB of RAM and a big 4000mAh battery. Because if there's one thing
that Asian markets like it's big numbers, and the C9 Pro has them in spades.
Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro press photos
The C9 Pro specs get about as good as a non-S or Note series
device specs can get. Samsung even went overboard with 6GB of RAM, which is a
first for any Samsung phone. But numbers only tell part of the story so let's
get to the part where we use the phone and see what it's really like.
2. Hardware Overview
Design
At first glance, the C9 Pro looks pretty much like any other
Samsung phone. But hold it in your hand and you realize it is easily one of the
biggest phones the company has ever made.
There is no getting around the fact that the C9 Pro is a big
phone. However, due to some clever packaging, the phone isn't all that much
bigger than the iPhone 7 Plus, which has a smaller 5.5-inch display.
Front • Navigation keys
The front of the phone is classic Samsung. On the top is the
earpiece with a metal grille, flanked by the front facing camera on the left
and the notification LED and sensors on the right.
Below the display is the physical home button with
integrated fingerprint sensor. On its left is the multitasking key and on the
right is the back button. Android purists might bemoan the reversed order of
keys compared to what Google likes to do by default, however, right handed
users will definitely appreciate having the more commonly used back button
closer to their hand on the right. Both capacitive keys are backlit and without
the backlighting the keys become invisible.
Right • Left
On the right side of the phone is the power button. Below
the button is a tray for the microSD and below that is another tray for two
nano SIM card slots. Unlike most phones these days, the C9 Pro does not make
you choose between a second SIM and a microSD and is a true dual SIM phone.
On the other side of the phone are the volume buttons. The
volume buttons are placed slightly higher than the power button so when you
grip the phone to use the power button you don't end up pressing the volume
buttons on the other side but the same cannot be said about using the volume
buttons. In the end, there is still some amount of unintentional button
pressing happening and it would be nice if Samsung just switched to having all
the buttons on the same side.
And while we are on the subject of buttons, Samsung still
requires you to press the power and Home buttons to take screenshots, which
unnecessarily requires two hands when the default Android configuration of
power and volume down can be used with one hand. But that's nitpicking.
Bottom • Top
Moving on, on the bottom is a headphone jack, a USB-C port,
a microphone, and a loudspeaker. The bottom speaker acts as the right speaker
along with the earpiece, but we will talk about the speakers in detail later
on. On the top is another microphone.
Back
The back of the phone features some of the neatest antenna
lines on any phone. The split triple bands running across the top and bottom
take up less visual space and also look a lot cooler than a single thick band.
Near the top is the camera (with an ever so slight bump)
along with a two-tone dual LED flash.
Overall, the C9 Pro is a beautiful device. The unibody metal
construction is absolutely rock solid with no flex or creaking. Even
deliberately attempting to bend the phone with a small amount of force didn't
cause it to give in. The phone feels like a tank in hand and although it's
unlikely the glass will survive a drop considering it goes all the way to the
edge, the phone should handle everyday use with absolute ease.
Size comparison with OnePlus 3T and iPhone 7 Plus
As for usability, it is a big phone and it won't be ideal
for those with small hands. However, it is remarkably thin and reasonably heavy
so if you can get used to the width and the height, it would be fairly easy to
live with it.
Display
The Galaxy C9 Pro has a 6.0-inch, 1920x1080 Super AMOLED
display. First things first, pixel density really isn't a concern at all. Even
at 6.0-inch, the pixel density is sufficiently high and images and text look
sharp. This is not true for VR applications, however, and if you care about VR
performance then you should be looking elsewhere.
Display settings
In terms of image quality, out of the box the colors are
oversaturated and the white point temperature is set too high meaning some
whites and grays can appear bluish if you have reference color to compare them
to. However, Samsung offers handy controls in the Settings menu and switching
to Basic mode allows the screen to render colors as they were intended. You do
use some of the contrast and punchiness, however, so we found Amoled Photo to
strike a nice balance between accurate and pleasantly saturated. If you care
about color accuracy, you can always switch back to Basic mode when you need
it.
As for other aspects, the display gets sufficiently bright
and is perfectly visible even under direct sunlight. Under auto brightness the
display will boost brightness and saturation to extreme levels beyond what can
be manually set to increase visibility. This kicks in even if auto brightness
is disabled but only if you are already at maximum manual brightness.
The viewing angles are good for the most part, however, at
extreme angles the colors distort and a rainbow patterns appears on screen,
which is common for AMOLED displays. It's not a problem at the viewing angles
you will probably use it at.
Software:-
Android 6.0 Marshmallow with a new
face
The Galaxy C9 Pro runs on the latest iteration of Samsung's
TouchWiz UI based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. It first debuted on the
ill-fated Galaxy Note7 and featured a lot of minor UI improvements all around
over the previous version.
Homescreen
Starting with the launcher, we see that Samsung is still very much
committed to the homescreen + app drawer layout, complete with the app drawer
button in the corner that is obligatory for Samsung phones. The leftmost
homescreen is still taken over by Flipboard Briefing but that can easily be
disabled.
The C9 Pro comes with 5x5 layout by default for the icons, which
makes great use of the available screen space.
You can press and hold on the icons to get a small popup but
instead of having some interesting app specific options such as on the Pixel
launcher or 3D Touch on iOS, you just get the options to uninstall the app or
to put it to sleep.
By default, all the icons have a square border around them,
something Samsung picked up from the Chinese OEMs. The good thing is this can
be disabled and you can just have the default icon shapes for every app if
that's how you prefer them.
The App Drawer
The app drawer still has the sliding pane design unlike the
vertical scrolling in the Pixel launcher. You get folder support and by default
most of the apps are grouped together in some folders.
You can choose to arrange the icons in alphabetical order, which
doesn't upset your folders. When you have the apps sorted alphabetically, the
new apps that you download no longer go to the end of the grid but instead fall
into place in accordance with the alphabetical sequence.
Notifications
The notification shade has also been improved with a row of
toggles that does not slide horizontally as before and can be expanded by
swiping down again. Being a dual SIM phone, you also get options to choose your
default SIM for calling, texting and data but you can't change anything from
here and tapping any of these opens the Settings app.
Unfortunately, Samsung has buried the brightness slider in the
second level so you have to swipe down twice to adjust the brightness whereas
previously you could just swipe once.
Additionally, Samsung continues to use a tiny Clear all button
that requires way too much precision on the user's part to touch it without
hitting the notification below which it appears.
Settings app • Wallpapers, themes and icons • Advanced features
The new UI also comes with a new Settings app, which has a
simplified structure and the top level menu items list some of the options
contained within to make things easy to find. It's still quite convoluted,
however, and you'll often need to use the search function to find things in
here.
Multitasking • Split view • Pop view
Samsung has always been at the forefront when it came to having
features built-into the UI. However, that has changed in recent times and
they've dialed back on going too crazy with new features. They are instead
focusing on mostly the tried and tested (and most of all practical) features.
We'll try and sum these up:
·
Split-screen mode, which would normally require you to have
Android Nougat
·
Blue light filter
·
Easy mode for a simplified interface
·
Always-on display (AOD) feature that shows the time and date along
with your notifications when the screen is off
·
Customizable icons and themes
·
Single-handed mode, which can be enabled by triple tapping the
home button
·
Game mode, which automatically combines all your games in a single
folder and provides options like suppressing alerts during gameplay, locking
the tough keys under the screen, locking the touch input on the screen, taking
screenshot of the gameplay or even recording the action as a video.
·
Locking apps on the device with your fingerprint or passcode.
·
Quick launch of the camera, which lets you start the camera by
double pressing the home button.
·
Smart capture, which shows additional options for sharing,
drawing, cropping and even taking a longer screenshot after you capture one
·
Direct call that calls the number on screen by simply picking up
the phone and putting it against your ear
·
Smart alert, which vibrates the phone when you grab the phone if
you have pending notifications
·
Easy mute, which lets you silence the phone by keeping your palm
on screen or turning the phone over.
·
Unicode 9.0 emoji set, which Google introduced in stock Android
only with Android 7.0 Nougat but is available here even though the C9 Pro runs
on Marshmallow.
·
Finally, there is a background app monitor that puts apps to sleep
if you don't use them often.
Then there are some frivolous features, such as swiping your palm
on screen to take a screenshot. Or the Pop-up view gesture, which shrinks the
current app down to a small window so you can run it on top of other apps. This
one is yet to prove useful considering the screen is not big enough to have
multiple apps on-screen at the same time. And finally, there is the
ever-so-popular (and not really needed) storage and RAM cleaner.
Device maintenance options
But frivolous features is fine. What isn't fine is the amount of
bloatware that comes installed. Samsung still insists on having the entire
Microsoft suite pre-installed. That means Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive,
OneNote, and Skype are just chilling there on your phone, taking up space.
Naturally, you cannot uninstall any of them.
Then there's Opera Max, which is a VPN service that also
compresses data. The app is probably not all that bad to have on its own but
the phone will remind you to use it literally every single time you turn on
Wi-Fi. In fact spam notifications are a bit of a concern on their own, as there
seem to be a myriad different apps and services on the phone that will spit
notifications at you every now and then. You also cannot disable some of these
apps or stop them from showing notifications.
The Opera Max integration can be nagging
Benchmarks, stereo
speakers, Fingerprint reader
Device performance
In terms of performance, we found the Galaxy C9 Pro to be
reasonably competent. The phone is perfectly usable for daily use and performs
basic tasks with complete ease. Standard activities like opening and closing
apps, scrolling, and multitasking are handled quite well and even more
adventurous use cases like running two apps in split-screen mode or running six
apps side by side in Pop-view mode are also no big deal when you have 6GB of
RAM at your disposal. Samsung never quite got around to improving the memory
usage of its software but the solution to throw more memory at the problem
seems to have worked great.
Games work fine too on the C9 Pro. Most of the games we tried ran
perfectly fine without any performance issues.
There is one drawback to all the power under the hood, and that is
thermal performance. The C9 Pro stays cool in normal every-day use but push the
CPU or GPU hard and the temperatures rise quickly. The top part of the phone
can get significantly hot at times, which can be uncomfortable.
·
Other aspects of day-to-day use
The C9 Pro is one of the few Samsung phones to have stereo
speakers. The phone makes use of the earpiece at the top as the left channel
and the speaker at the bottom as the right channel.
There are a few problems with Samsung's implementation. Like HTC
with the HTC 10, the C9 Pro uses the earpiece speaker as a tweeter and the
bottom loudspeaker as the woofer. The earpiece can only really produce high
frequency sounds, which form about 10% of the total sound being produced by
this speaker. If you cover the earpiece, most of the time you can barely tell
that it's not playing but cover the bottom speaker and suddenly almost all the
sound is gone.
While it sounds okay in portrait mode, in landscape mode you can
clearly tell the left and right channels are on different levels, which makes
the sound feel unbalanced for the user. While your right ear is getting most of
the sound the left ear is only really getting the high frequencies. This was
the case with the HTC 10 too although HTC cleverly never marketed the phone for
having stereo speakers.
The second problem is that because of the size of the phone, the
two channels are really far apart from each other. This means mono sounds don't
really seem to come from the center of the phone but from the two corners, which
is less than ideal.
Lastly, unlike the iPhone 7, the C9 Pro does not flip the channels
when you flip the phone. Regardless of how you hold the phone, the earpiece
speaker always plays the left channel while the bottom speaker always plays the
right channel. If you don't hold the phone correctly, you are going to have the
sounds coming at you from the wrong sides. With the iPhone 7, there is no wrong
way of holding the phone as it adjusts the speaker output to the way you hold
it.
Stereo mode is
optional
One interesting thing about the C9 Pro is that it only plays
multimedia sounds in stereo mode. Also, the phone lets you disable stereo mode
entirely and play all sounds from the bottom speaker only. If you ask us, it's
better to have it turned on at all times, we just would have preferred it if
Samsung had implemented it properly as the stereo effect and even the actual
quality of the speakers isn't great.
Fortunately, the phone still comes with a standard headphone jack
and the in-ear headset provided in the box is also good quality, and has
built-in remote controls.
The fingerprint sensor performance on the C9 Pro is a bit of hit
or miss. While it is fast and you don't even need to press down on the home
button to unlock, it is still frequently bamboozled if you use the finger at a
slightly odd angle or use one of your lesser used saved prints. For example,
while we had both our left and right thumb prints saved, the right one was used
most often and the few times the left print was used the phone would often fail
to recognize unless the thumb was very precisely on the button, which wasn't
the case with the right thumb.
Fingerprint settings
Also, for whatever reason, Samsung only lets you save three prints
on this phone unlike five on most other devices, including some of Samsung's
own. Samsung frequently does this on its cheaper phones, as if there is some
weird correlation between the amount you pay for your phone and the number of
fingers you can have recognized.
Camera, battery life, conclusion
Camera
The Galaxy C9 Pro has a 16 megapixel camera on the back with
f1.9 aperture, phase detection autofocus, and two-tone dual LED flash. The
camera can also record 1080p 30fps video.
Camera app
The camera software on Samsung phones has been refined over
the years and remains one of the best out there. However, the app on the C9 Pro
is a bit too simplified, as is often the case with non-flagship phones.
There is a Pro mode but it's simplified and it doesn't offer
shutter speed control or manual focus adjustment.
Fortunately, there aren't too many compromises in image
quality and photos taken with the C9 Pro generally come out looking good.
Photos taken by the Galaxy C9 Pro
Daylight images have good level of detail and accurate
colors. Closer inspection reveals some smearing of finer details and occasional
patchiness but it does help keep the noise level down and isn't too
distracting.
The dynamic range isn't great and the center-weighted
average metering often blows highlights to keep the center of the frame well
lit.
Fortunately, the HDR mode works really well most of the
time, dialing just the right amount control for the shadows and highlights
depending upon the scene. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer live preview or auto
mode.
HDR Mode: Off • On • Off • On
In low light, the image processing gets a bit more
aggressive and we see more of the smearing and patchiness in finer detail but
again it's not particularly problematic. The phone does come with a very
capable Night mode, which takes multiple shots and combines them, much like the
HDR mode, to clean out the noise and restore some of the lost detail.
The video capturing doesn't come with Slow motion mode, 60fps
option or electronic stabilization (EIS), with the latter being its biggest
drawback.
The video quality is also quite good. The dynamic range isn't
great but the level of detail, colors, and the focusing are perfectly fine. The
lack of stabilization does make the video quite shaky, though.
Battery Life
The Galaxy C9 Pro has a massive 4000mAh internal battery. The
battery is not replaceable but that's fine because it does last a really long
time.
The average Screen-On times we got are generally between 6-7 hours
even with heavy use. The overall standby times are generally over 24 hours,
which means the phone can easily get you through an entire day and still have
some power left towards the end.
Battery life times
If that's not good enough, you also get Quick Charge 2.0 support,
which means the phone does a full charge in just over an hour and a half. The
downside to this is that the phone gets ridiculously hot while charging, which
is a common problem with Quick Charge devices.
If you are someone who charges the phone overnight, it would make
sense to use a standard 5V 2A charger and use the bundled fast charger only for
when you are in a hurry.
Verdict
Samsung played a huge part in carving the phablet niche out of nothing
with its Note series. Of course, up until recently, having a 6+inch phone
seemed like an outlandish idea. But now that users are finally warming to the
idea of having the biggest possible screen in their pocket, there is no better
time for Samsung to have another go at this segment. And so we have the Galaxy
C9 Pro.
In our time with it, the C9 Pro proved itself as a really good
smartphone. It is well designed and very well made. It has an excellent
display, an excellent battery life, good performance, good camera, and a full
bag of proprietary software features, which add positively to the user
experience.
It may not be as good value as something like the Xiaomi Mi Mix or
the OnePlus 3T but if you want the peace of mind that comes with a big brand
like Samsung and are also looking for a big screen phone then you can't go
wrong with the C9 Pro.Big screen entertainment Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro available in your flipkart:- Click & Buy
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