Samsung's Galaxy S9 Takes The Stage At Mobile World Congress

Samsung debuted its new Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus smartphones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday.

The new phones feature upgraded cameras that provide expanded low-light capabilities and can record super slow-motion video. CRN got a preview of the phones at a briefing ahead at Samsung’s offices in New York City.

"I’m most excited about the range of new capabilities and features we’re adding to the device," said Eric McCarty, vice president of products sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics America.

Samsung’s intelligence platform Bixby is integrated into the camera. Using augmented reality and deep learning technologies, Bixby can instantly generate information directly on top of the image that the camera is facing. For example, users can translate foreign languages and currency in real time with Live Translation.

It’s the first smartphone to support the new SmartThings App, a central hub for users to manage other Samsung or non-Samsung connected devices. It’s part of the tech giant’s push to make all devices intelligent by 2020.

"The design around that strategy and what we mean by intelligence is that not only can the devices talk to you as the user, but the devices can communicate with each other," said McCarty.

The DeX Pad also got an upgrade; the device makes some form factor improvements over the first DeX device for the Galaxy S8. The DeX Pad lets users connect the phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. It also transforms the phone into a touch keyboard.

"Smartphones are powerful enough to be your primary computing devices," said McCarty. "You can do everything on a smartphone that you can do on a laptop. You can run virtual client environments, so you have a full Windows 10 view that looks just like a laptop environment running on your smartphone."

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