After the VoLTE saga [1] and the problems with battery life on the PinePhonePro [2] (which lasted 4 hours while idle with the screen off in my last test a few weeks ago) I’m running a Galaxy Note 9 [3] with the default Samsung OS as my daily driver.
I don’t think that many people will be rushing out to buy a 2018 phone regardless of my review. For someone who wants a phone of such age (which has decent hardware and a low price) then good options are the Pixel phones which are all supported by LineageOS.
I recommend not buying this phone due to the fact that it doesn’t have support for VoLTE with LineageOS (and presumably any other non-Samsung Android build) and doesn’t have support from any other OS. The One Plus 6/6T has Mobian support [4] as well as LineageOS support and is worth considering.
The Note 9 still has capable hardware by today’s standards. A 6.4″ display is about as big as most people want in their pocket and 2960×1440 resolution in that size (516dpi) is probably as high as most people can see without a magnifying glass. The model I’m using has 8G of RAM which is as much as the laptop I was using at the start of this year. I don’t think that many people will have things that they actually want to do on a phone which needs more hardware than this. The only hardware feature in new phones which beats this is the large folding screen in some recent phones, but $2500+ (the price of such phones in Australia) is too much IMHO and the second hand market for folding phones is poor due to the apparently high incidence of screens breaking.
The Note 9 has the “Dex” environment for running as a laptop if you connect it to a USB-C dock. It can run nicely with a 4K monitor with USB keyboard and mouse. The UI is very similar to that of older versions of Windows.
The Samsung version of Android seems mostly less useful than the stock Google version or the LineageOS version. The Samsung keyboard flags words such as “gay” as spelling errors and it can’t be uninstalled even when you install a better keyboard app. There is a “Bixby” button on the side of the phone to launch the Bixby voice recognition app which can’t be mapped to any useful purpose, The Google keyboard has a voice dictation option which I will try out some time but that’s all I desire in terms of voice recognition. There are alerts about Samsung special deals and configuration options including something about signing in to some service and having it donate money to charity, I doubt that any users want such features. Apart from Dex the Samsung Android build is a good advert for LineageOS.
The screen has curved sides for no good reason. This makes it more difficult to make a protective phone case as a case can’t extend beyond the screen at the sides and therefore if it’s dropped and hits an edge (step, table, etc) then the glass can make direct contact with something. Also the curved sides reflect sunlight in all directions, this means that the user has to go to more effort to avoid reflecting the sun into their eyes and that a passenger can more easily reflect sunlight into the eyes of a car driver. It’s an impressive engineering feat to make a curved touch-screen but it doesn’t do any good for users.
The stylus is good as always and the screen is AMOLED so it doesn’t waste much power when in dark mode. There is a configuration option to display a clock all the time when the screen is locked because that apparently doesn’t use much power. I haven’t felt inclined to enable the always on screen but it’s a nice feature for those who like such things.
The VoLTE implementation is apparently a bit unusual so it’s not supported by LineageOS and didn’t work on Droidian for the small amount of time that Droidian supported it.
Generally this phone is quite nice hardware it’s just a pity that it demonstrates all of the downsides to buying a non-Pixel phone.