Put the Samsung Galaxy S9 next to the Galaxy S8, and you’ll struggle to find an immediate difference between the two. Samsung’s latest flagship, announced at Mobile World Congress 2018, boasts quality of smartphone life improvements: Minor changes to the Galaxy S8’s design make for a much better smartphone experience. In particular, it addresses one of the biggest disappointments of the S8 — how similar its camera was to the Galaxy S7. With the Galaxy S9 and especially the Galaxy S9 Plus, the camera has been “reimagined,” with features we’ve never seen before on a phone. It’s exciting, but also a little perplexing. Let’s take a closer look.

REFINED DESIGN

Ever taken a look at the Galaxy S8’s Iris Scanner and think it sticks out like a sore thumb? Do you hate the placement of the fingerprint sensor on the S8 Plus? These are the sort of things the design-savvy among us fret about, and items Samsung has pondered and refined on the S9 and S9 Plus.

The Iris Scanner is now darker so it blends in with the edges around the screen. These edges or bezels are also slightly smaller, giving you even more screen real estate than before. Other than these two minor improvements, the front of these two new smartphones looks undeniably similar to that of its predecessors. That’s a good thing, because the Galaxy S9 continues to look stellar — super sleek and ultra-modern.

Perhaps more important, Samsung has placed the fingerprint sensor in a new position on the back of the S9 and S9 Plus, directly underneath the camera. The old placement made the sensor difficult to reach; it’s certainly much improved now. And this is largely a part of the biggest and most noticeable design difference between the S9 and the S8 devices, The sensor is lower, the flash is on the right side of the camera, and specifically on the Galaxy S9 Plus, you’ll find a dual-camera system. It’s the first time the Galaxy S-series features dual cameras — the first Galaxy device to utilize them is the Note 8.

The back of the phone doesn’t mention the device’s name, it just has Samsung’s logo in the center, a minor change over last year. There’s still the curved edges (also on the front), along with the all-glass back for fast wireless charging.

The right edge of the phone is where you’ll find the power button; the left edge holds a volume rocker and the famed Bixby button below it. On the bottom edge is a bottom-firing speaker next to a USB Type-C charging port, and you may be surprised to hear there still is a headphone jack. The speaker, for the first time, works in tandem with the earpiece at the top of the phone, offering stereo sound tuned by AKG that’s 1.4 times louder than the Galaxy S8. Best of all, the speakers utilize Dolby Atmos technology, which helps make it room-filling and immersive. We’re impressed with the sound quality and how loud the speakers got from the brief music we heard. Still, it’s a bummer Samsung didn’t use dual front-facing speakers.

Both phones still manage to feel compact, while maintaining a large screen. The Galaxy S9 has the same 5.8-inch screen, and the S9 Plus comes in at 6.2 inches.

We love the design of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, and we’re still mesmerized by the Infinity Display, even if it’s not much different from the screen on the Galaxy S8. The changes do improve the user experience, and we’re happy to see them. Better yet, there are a few beautiful colors coming to the U.S. we’re excited about — lilac purple, coral blue, and midnight black.

A MECHANICAL CAMERA, AND SUPER SLOW MOTION

Before diving into the specifications, let’s check out Samsung’s biggest selling point for the S9 and S9 Plus. The company’s heavily pushing the idea of a reimagined camera, and it’s right in saying so, because the S9’s camera has something we’ve never seen before on a phone — a mechanical aperture.

An aperture is the hole in a camera that takes in light. The bigger the hole, the more light the camera can use, which is notably important for low-light photography. An aperture is measured by F-stops, and the lower the number, the bigger the hole. (For more info, read our guide to camera settings and controls.) The Galaxy S9’s 12-megapixel camera has an f/1.5 aperture, the lowest ever yet on a smartphone, as well as an f/2.4 aperture.

It’s a mechanical lens, which means if you look at the back of the camera, you can see it switch between apertures. Samsung said the camera uses the f/2.4 aperture during the day, when the camera doesn’t need to take in as much light, while it automatically opts for the f/1.5 aperture at night to absorb as much as possible.

The switch occurs automatically, but you can change it yourself in manual mode. Yes, it’s fast, but we’re not sure quite yet why we need to switch between two apertures — why not just stick to a fixed f/1.5? We’ll have to do more testing to see the benefits of this mechanical system.

You’re meant to never really notice this change happening when you use the camera, so how does it fare in general use? The S9 took photos quickly, and in the limited time we had, the results looked good. We’ll be experimenting with the camera during Mobile World Congress, so we’ll add more thoughts here once we’ve spent more time with it in varying lighting conditions.

The Galaxy S9 Plus does indeed come with a second lens — a 12-megapixel, f/2.4 telephoto lens. It does the same thing as the second camera on the Galaxy Note 8. You can take Portrait Mode-like photos with the Live Focus tool, where a blur effect is added behind subjects, and you can utilize the 2× optical zoom to take close up photos of remote objects.

It’s a shame the second camera isn’t available on the regular S9, but we’re happy both get the unique mechanical aperture camera. There’s also an important improvement in the camera processing software worth mentioning — multi-frame noise reduction. Tapping the camera shutter icon on the Galaxy S9 now technically captures 12 photos, more than ever before, and this will bring a reduction in graininess or noise by 30 percent. Samsung showed us comparison shots from the S8 and the S9, and the latter had significantly less noise in darker parts of the photo. We’re excited to see how this impacts the overall low-light results from the camera.

The camera app itself has been redesigned to make it easier to swipe through modes, and it functions a lot like the iPhone camera app. If you swipe to the left from the Auto mode, you’ll be introduced to a new category on a Samsung phone: Super slow-motion. Like Sony’s Xperia devices, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus can shoot slow-motion video at up to 960 frames per second. That’s about 32 times slower than real life. Samsung’s version can predict the part of the video you likely want to slow down, and it worked without a hitch when we tried it.

The quality is limited to 720p resolution, and the technology uses machine learning to apply a music track (from a small database) depending on the context of the video. So it can throw in a romantic song if you’re doing a slow-motion video of pouring wine, or something more upbeat if you’re popping a can of confetti. The software will automatically convert these video files into Loop, Swing, or Reverse GIFs so it’s easy to share.

AR EMOJIS

Yet another new addition is AR Emoji, and sadly it’s a pale imitation of the iPhone X’s Animoji. You can become an animated character, like a bunny, and the camera will loosely track your movements and facial expressions. We say loosely because it didn’t follow details such as raised eyebrows and other expressions as accurately as the iPhone’s True Depth camera. Perhaps it’s because the front camera on the S9 is the same 8-megapixel f/1.7 camera as on the S8, with no fancy 3D depth-sensing features.

A feature called Create My Emoji lets you take a selfie that generates an AR Emoji in your likeness. You can then customize it further, and then use the AR tracking feature to create fun videos as the emoji, just like you can with Animojis.

The Create My Emoji will also create an animated sticker pack with the AR Emoji version of yourself, and you can use this in any messaging app as it’s all saved in the gallery, or right in the Samsung keyboard. But would you really? We found ourselves unlikely to use these in conversation as they simply don’t look fun to share. Samsung does have a partnership with Disney to add characters you can become through the AR Emoji experience, so hopefully those will look significantly better.