Supplementing Samsung’s smartphone line-up, the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro has now entered the market offering the latest specs with few surprises. For people who love big screen smartphones, C9 pro is a treat. Samsung has packed a 6-inch screen coupled up with a powerful octa-core processor from Qualcomm, 6GB of RAM and a huge 4000mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro is a solid phone, without any doubt, and has most qualities of a high-end flagship phone. However, is it really worth the price tag of Rs.60,000 in Nepal? Let’s find out in our review.
Design
In the time of our review, we really appreciated the unibody build of the phone that made the C9 Pro more premium and sturdy. The meticulously built smartphone feels huge while you hold it in the hands, courtesy of its humongous display. Albeit the fact that the phone houses appreciable metal body, the phone basically resembles every other phone in the market.
The bezels around the screen are very thin and help to minimize the phone’s size. Despite having a 6-inch display, the phone isn’t too big to hold with one hand, however, it may depend on the size of your hand. But for most of us, the ‘too big’ phone shouldn’t be a worrying factor. The phone has a power button on the right side with one microSD card tray and thankfully a separate dual-sim tray. On the left, it has the volume rockers and the buttons feel premium and clicky, while there’s also a fingerprint sensor embedded right into the home button.
Display and Audio
Design aside, the crowned jewel of the C9 Pro tends to be its Super AMOLED display. The phone has one of the biggest display in the market in such a light form. The 6-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display on this phone offers clear and punchy picture quality — an excellent companion for those media junkies. And then there’s the added Corning Gorilla Glass protection for those clumsy users out there. The screen can get really bright thus, bearing no problem during daytime visibility, and also gets fairly dim for night usage. The sensors on the phone do a great job of adjusting the screen brightness throughout the day.
C9 Pro’s audio, on the other hand, is a different matter. The phone has one speaker grill on the bottom right side that gives loud sounds with low-base, though it comes with a ‘Stereo Mode’ that plays sound via the main speaker as well as the earpiece.
Camera
While the Samsung’s S7 and S7 edge had the best camera in the Android market, C9 Pro falls behind those most flagships out there. This doesn’t mean that C9 Pro doesn’t capture great images. The pictures we took from this phone had great details and exposed just a tad more than necessary. The Galaxy C9 Pro has a 16MP main shooter with f/1.9 aperture that takes crisp, sharp and color-accurate pictures. During low-light situations, the phone struggles to focus and processes the images too much that washes out small details.
At the front, C9 Pro has similar 16MP selfie shooter with f/1.9 aperture. Directly competing with the camera phones out there in the market, the front camera is as good as it gets. Besides the camera’s focus, the selfies taken from the camera puts subject in focus with good lighting. Even when the subject is in shadow, the software processes to produce a decent selfie.
Software
C9 Pro comes with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Samsung’s new Grace UX on top. Some basic but handy functionalities like a Blue light filter, data saving mode, S-Power planning are added into the OS. Then, there’s Samsung’s “Always On” display option that lets you show the time and date with notification icons in white with the background. This doesn’t consume much battery, all thanks to its AMOLED display.
The big size of the phone sometimes presents a challenge while using the phone, mostly for people with small hands. So, there’s the One Hand mode for easy usage that shrinks the whole screen. Although the phone doesn’t have Nougat yet, it features multi-window applications and pop-up application modes that allow using two or more apps at once without minimizing the other.
Performance and Battery
With a powerful octa-core processor, C9 Pro handles heavy gaming and multi-tasking well. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 653 SoC along with an Adreno 510 GPU. The benchmarks put C9 Pro’s overall CPU performance head-to-head with S7, so it is safe to say that this phone offers good processing power.
Memory wise the phone is backed up by 64GB expandable internal memory and has a whacking 6GB of RAM — the first of its kind from Samsung. While playing high-end games like Dream League Soccer and Asphalt, the phone didn’t lag once, which was expected. The ample amount of RAM easily handled multiple apps on the background without any stutters.
The phone, though, lags somewhat on battery management. Despite housing the battery friendly AMOLED display, the 4000mAh battery on this phone lasts through a full day with an hour of gaming and watching movies and other light tasks like internet browsing and phone calls. It would have been better if there was a flagship or battery efficient chipset from Samsung to handle battery management well on this phone, so as to extend battery life even further.
Verdict
It’s a safe bet.
I am not saying it’s the best smartphone in the market, but it is packed with great hardware specs and a good enough camera. After Note 7’s debacle, C9 Pro is here to fill the void before the S8 is here. I got fond of the big display after a while, and although the phone isn’t powered by the high-end Qualcomm processors, the octa-core processors handled every task I threw at it smoothly. I wish Samsung did better, however, I can’t complain much about this phone since it’s targeted to a niche market(those who prefer design over top specs).
So after being all cleared, what do you think about the new Galaxy C9 Pro? Is it worth the money? Will you get one for yourself? Let us know about your thoughts in the comment box below.
