Samsung Galaxy Note 9

5owners with an opinion

60%of verdicts positive

1/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for battery and durability.

What people wrote

Likes it

I have MLCCHAT on my old Note 9 phone. It is actually still a great phone, but has 5GB RAM. Running an on device model is the first and only use case the RAM actually matters. And it has a headphone jack, OK? I just hate Bluetooth earbuds. And yeah, it isna problem, but I digress. When I run a 2.5B model, I get respectable output. Takes a minute or two to process the context, then output begins at somewhere on the order of 4 to 10 tokens per sec. So, I just make a query and give it a few and I have my response. Here is how I see it: That little model, which is Gemma 2.2b sorry, knows a lot of stuff. It has knowledge I don't and it gives it to me in a reasonable, though predictable way. Answers are always of a certain teacher reminding student how it all goes way. I don't care. Better is nice, but if I were stuck somewhere with no network, being able to query that model is amazing! First aid, how to make fires, materials and uses. Fixing stuff, theories of operation, what things mean and more are in that thing ready for me to take advantage of. I consider what I have fast. And it will get one or two orders faster over the next few years too. I did it on a lark (ask the model what that means) and was surprised to see I gained a nice tool.

Likes it

My phone goes up to 980nm and it is a Note 9. Both front and rear cameras work. The light shows up as a pinkish purple.

Doesn’t like it

My Note 9 screen just broke.... :( I want a flagship with headphone jack please.

Likes it

My Galaxy Note 9 can do it. I use the OpenCamera app, which gives manual exposure control, manual shutter speed control, manual focus, and can shoot in raw. Of course auto modes still work. That's a nearly 5 year old phone, though it was rather high-end for the time.

Likes it

I have manjaro installed on my note 9 under termux, with vnc viewer to loopback to display x-windows stuff. With the Dex functionality I can plug in a mouse, keyboard and monitor to use it as a Linux desktop. It runs blender and gcc pretty well!

Doesn’t like it

If the Note 9 is any indication, it's not the hardware, it's the bloody software - Samsung is seemingly terrible at it! The North American Note 9 used a Snapdragon 845 SoC while the European version used Samsung's own Exynos 9810. The Exynos consistently benched lower, had worse battery life and ran hotter. The upside was that the Exynos version has an unlocked bootloader, which is huge imo. With a custom kernel made by hobbyists in their spare time, you can have the 9810 on par with the SD845 or even better. It has great undervolting and overclocking potential on both the CPU and GPU. The difference between the stock Samsung kernel and Zeus for example, is mind boggling. Sadly, flashing a custom ROM on it involves tripping an eFuse and losing some Samsung functionality, but if you don't care about Samsung Pay and whatever other "secure" garbage they offer, it's worth it.

Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it

"Long after?" They released 2nd edition of Gear VR on 2017. I bought mine on December 2018. They stopped supporting it on September 2020 (email with the wonderful news received on April 3). That's literally less than 2 years. So either this is some type of sarcasm I'm not able to detect or your definition of "long support" is ridiculous. The next year's Android update basically made the Android Daydream service non-installable, so the Gear VR became a paperweight (and likely the reason in the reddit you quote people scramble for old non-updated devices). But this is typical behavior for Samsung. E.g. they were literally publicly beta-testing DeX on Linux on Note 9 devices only to announce the final version would be available _only_ on Note 10 devices, not Note 9 devices from which they were removing support immediately. An absolutely baffling decision considering the software was actually developed for Note 9 in the first place, so their cost was zero. But ranting about this was very short lived since they eventually just deprecated the entire thing within one year of release, and again made sure the next Android major update would be totally incompatible with it. And thank god we got a major Android update at all. I'm quite sure there's people out there who bought a Note 9, THEN a Note 10 to use DeX on Linux, and within a year all they got is not one but TWO paperweights. For those people: Samsung appreciates your generous donations.