The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus will officially hit the store shelves on Friday, March 16, but people who had pre-ordered Samsung’s latest flagship devices have already started receiving their units. Samsung wouldn’t want any bad press when the devices go on sale on Friday. However, customers who have got their hands on the phones have taken to various discussion forums to complain about issues with Samsung Pay.
The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus owners have complained on Reddit that Samsung’s proprietary payment service doesn’t work on their brand new phones right out of the box. One Galaxy S9 Plus owner said they purchased the T-Mobile version from Samsung’s official website, but the phone they received was “Unlocked by Samsung.” The user tried setting up Samsung Pay, but it was “not compatible with this device.”
https://twitter.com/MrCippy/status/973999980779155457
Deleting the app and reinstalling it from the Google Play Store yields the same error. The user then installed it from the Galaxy App store. Now there was no message about incompatibility, but the user kept getting a pop-up that there was a new software update. Unfortunately, pressing the OK button on the pop-up would simply take the user to the home screen.
Many other users also shared similar experiences on Reddit. One Redditor said clearing the cache and data on Samsung Pay, and even factory reset doesn’t fix the problem. Another user pointed out that the Samsung Pay app’s size in the Play Store is just 2.95MB compared to 80MB on the Galaxy App store.
One common theme in all these user complaints is that only the unlocked versions of Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus were affected, not the carrier variants. The issue affects both the US and international variants of smartphones, indicating that it may have nothing to do with the Snapdragon 845 or Exynos 9810 processors. Even installing the latest firmware update that Samsung has pushed out to users doesn’t fix the problem.
According to one affected user, the Samsung Pay Support team told them the unlocked versions of Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus were indeed facing issues with Samsung Pay. The Support team assured them that a software update would be rolled out to fix the problem. The update will be pushed out “soon,” though Samsung did not specify a date.
Meanwhile, the Korean company has rolled out the first software update for the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus even before the devices hit the store shelves. It doesn’t fix the Samsung Pay problem, though. The update brings stability and improvements to the Face Unlock and camera along with a few bug fixes. The software update is 286MB in size. Unfortunately, the US-bound update doesn’t include the March security patches, which were included in the update pushed out to German users.
Installing the latest update brings the Galaxy S9’s software version to G960U1UEU1ARBG and S9 Plus to G965U1UEU1ARBG. The March security patches could be rolled out to the US customers soon. You’ll get a prompt when the update becomes available on your device. Alternatively, you can check for it manually by going to Settings > Software Update.
The camera is the biggest selling point of the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. According to DxOMark, the Galaxy S9 Plus camera is even better than iPhone X in both photo and video shooting. Samsung’s phones have an 8-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies. On the back, the S9 sports a 12-megapixel lens with dual apertures of f/1.5 and f/2.4 for better low-light photography. The camera automatically switches the aperture to f/1.5 in low-light conditions and to f/2.4 in bright light conditions to capture clearer photos with high color accuracy.
The Galaxy S9 Plus gets a 12-megapixel telephoto lens besides the 12MP wide-angle lens with variable aperture. The telephoto lens allows you to capture portrait images with blurred backgrounds. The S9 and S9 Plus also allow users to record super slo-mo videos at 960fps and 720p resolution. Samsung has also added a feature called AR Emoji in the camera app to take on Apple’s Animoji.
The Galaxy S9 is available with 4GB RAM while its bigger sibling gets a higher 6GB RAM. The S9 Plus also has a bigger 3500mAh battery compared to the S9’s 3000mAh, and it promises a longer battery life than its smaller sibling. The additional screen space, bigger battery, higher RAM, and the dual camera setup make the Galaxy S9 Plus a better choice than the regular S9.
