66 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 46
PREVIEW
It’s always worth considering with Samsung phones
that – more so than with any other manufacturer’s
smartphones – SIM-free prices fall rapidly in the few
months following launch.New features and specifications
Samsung reportedly began working on the Galaxy S9
in late March 2017, which would mean it is already six
months ahead of schedule compared to where it was
with the Galaxy S8 and S8+ last year. And that means
more time for quality control, more time for building
in new features and, hopefully, more happy customers.
Amazingly, in July 2017 an early version of the
alleged S9 was spotted in the Geekbench database –
that’s some seven or eight months before we expect
to see the phone announcement. A device with the
model name SM-G9650 is listed with a 1.78GHz quad-
core Snapdragon 845 processor and just 4GB of RAM.
It scored 7371 points in the RenderScript test, which
is lower than the Galaxy S8 managed in the same test.
There are no performance scores.Display
An unnamed source suggests the first work on the
Galaxy S9 began with the screen, and that there is not
expected to be any change with the sizing: so we’ll
see a 5.8in Galaxy S9 and 6.2in Galaxy S9+.
The Bell reports that Samsung has already ordered
these screens from suppliers, but with one key
difference: they will feature the in-display fingerprint-
scanning tech that was rumoured for but never made
it into the final spec of the Galaxy S8.