The Samsung Galaxy S9 may not look very different from last year’s phone, but it’ll at least sound a lot better, according to the latest leak ahead of its February 25 unveiling.
It’ll include stereo speakers, reports ETNews, a change that will allow the phone to compete with the LG V30S that’s also rumored to be getting stereo speaker treatment.
Given the rather ho-hum sound quality that came out of the Galaxy S8’s sole bottom-firing speaker, this is a key area in which Samsung can improve upon last year’s best smartphone. This is especially important in 2018, as new competitors like the Google Pixel 2 and Google Pixel 2 XL use twin speakers that are great for watching videos and playing games.
Samsung’s stereo speaker implementation is likely to be more akin to what we’ve seen in the iPhone X, as 9To5Google posits. In this case, there would be a bottom-firing speaker and another built into the earpiece.
This isn’t the best setup for dual speakers, as it can still require you to cup your hand around the bottom speaker to have all of the sound project toward their ears. Samsung is reportedly tapping its internal audio gurus at AKG for tuning purposes, so speaker placement be darned, they will probably sound pretty nice.
Another chance to stick out
Samsung led the charge in terms of smartphone design in 2017, but it couldn’t compete when it came to the iPhone X’s popular Animoji. But amongst the murmurs in this report includes a mention of “3D Emoji”, which leads us to believe that the S9 will feature a competing set of tools that allows users to map emoji onto their faces to send fun animations.
Even though Apple’s flagship only boasts one front-facing camera to execute on Animoji, Samsung’s 2018 flagship appears to pack in two front-facing cameras. With that, it might work in more lighting scenarios and be more accurate, though Apple’s works just fine with what it uses.
The Samsung Galaxy S9 will launch later this month at MWC 2018, and we’ll definitely be putting its stereo speakers and 3D Emoji functions to test should they arrive.