Do We Really Need Longer Software Updates! *Galaxy S9 Plus*

0:00 guys I want a phone and at 25 to 30K which one should I get get this one it is a good camera nah don't get that one that camera lags get this one it is smoother and it has 4 years of software updates look this phone has 5 years of software update and it is compact as well forget all of those get this it has 6 years of software updates do I really need a phone with 5 to 6 years of software update well smartphone companies like Apple Google OnePlus they all promise bigger software update like 4 years update 6 year update even 7 to 8 years of software update but real question that has to be asked is can a 7-year-old phone with the latest software function smoothly moreover do we really need longer software updates on a smartphone

0:46 well we'll answer all of that now we gave a small glimpse of this in our shots recently and you guys not only completed the light target but also wanted a long video on it well you ask can we deliver this video is an interesting one cuz we'll do something that we usually don't do in our other videos i'm really excited pratik Techisor let's freaking go now we have the legendary Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus it comes with a full HD plus curved AMOLED display and obviously Xenos 9810 processor UFS 2.1 storage and only 3500 MBH battery now it launched in 2018 with Android 8 and it got Android updates up until 1 UI 2.5 which was based on Android 10 that was back in 2020 that was only 2 years of Android updates back at that time other than Apple no one was

1:31 offering longer software updates to their phone but are only iPhones capable of that will a 7-year-old Android phone handle the latest software update well Shawik installed the latest 1 UI 7 on the Galaxy S9 Plus yes that's right but how did we do it well it was a bit difficult to install and a disclaimer here this process is risky if you mess up anything in the installation your phone is dead so a developer ported this 1 UI 7 beta from S24 Plus so this is not a custom ROM this is a port yes custom ROMs are not official OS whereas this is official 1 UI which is fooled into running on an older smartphone more of like G cam is fooled to run on non-pixel phones correct like that now for installing it

2:19 turn on the OEM unlocking and USB debugging in settings it's very important by the way for the next step you need to have a laptop download Odin and install TWWRP via Odin once done reboot to TWWRP and go to wipe to format data and type yes after that flash the universal repartition files next you need to flash the 1 UI7 beta port so tap on the install image and then flash the vendor and system files and at last install the kernel files and now for people who don't know Samsung doesn't play cool if you root or flash your phone your warranty gets void and if anything goes wrong like I have soft bricked the phone and if you go back to the service center they'll ask you to replace the entire motherboard so touching yes and boom 1 UI7 based on

3:05 Android 15 is here now I know the screen is very dim we'll get back to that in just a moment now you get this brand new 1 UI7 on S9+ even before the S24 series so you have the new scrolling app drawer the new split notification and quick setting bars the new charging animation and the other things are there except the now bar now I know what you're thinking Pratik can we skip to the good part the hyped Galaxy AI does that work because if you see Apple hasn't updated their 1-year-old iPhone with AI claiming that the hardware is not capable while Samsung lets Galaxy AI run on older as well as cheaper A series phone the entire S25 series is set to have hardware that is built for Galaxy AI so can that run on a 7-year-old phone or

3:52 are companies just forcing you to buy new phone to get software features well let's try first with sketch to image so in this image I'll draw an aeroplane boom done it works next I'll try AI call translate from Hindi to English boom next thing if I go to email and write a single line about me taking a leave because beaches are calling me boom the whole email content is generated and just like humans AI is also lying here cuz it hasn't mentioned by itself that I'll be going to the beach and all so smart AI beaches don't get you holidays next if I open an article it can summarize that as well ai features are working fine and not just the AI features work well but the most hyped and new goodlog modules also work so we install the home of goodlog module and the animation is set to dynamic and look at that the app animation looks so good like the animations are much closer to

4:38 the current Samsung flagships now this project took us a lot of time like from procuring the device to flashing it to using it it took almost 1 month but we do it because that's what fuels the tech enthusiast inside us and we will build the biggest tech community in the next 10 years and if you believe in the same vision and if you want to make something big come work with us we're looking for experienced gaming writers anime writers for our website and experienced video editors for our YouTube channel now we need relevant experience in the particular field so if you are not the right person but you know someone who is as passionate as us forward the link spread the word do it for the tech community now back to the video so in S9+ the software and everything is fine but by 2025 standards is this 7-year-old phone even usable so we tried the most

5:25 common used apps in 2025 like Instagram Prime Video X and YouTube we opened them one after the other app one by one also we open them in split screen see there is no lag at all now if you switch to the other apps open it in the background they are still in the RAM now we wanted to push this phone more can it handle real life heavy tasks like gaming that too with the games that are popular in 2025 now with BGMIS it opened fine and a surprising thing here is a phone this old can run at 90 fps even though the display is at 60 Hz i played for half an hour and surprisingly the gaming was so good like the frames were stable it does get a bit warm like 33 to 35° but it's fine now let's raise the bar and see if it can play heavy games like withering

6:10 waves insufficient storage well we'll come to that in just a bit but to give you a perspective this phone performs like a 20 to 25,000 mid-range smartphone now so far it seems like wow nice an old phone can still run modern software modern apps and modern UI so yay companies should update their phone for 7 years they are just looting us year on year by bringing 10% improvement in CPU 40% improvement in DSP what does that even mean like come on Samsung where is 1 UI 7 for the S9 Plus where well there's a catch in fact a lot of catches oh nice see I was expecting there would be some problems but I faced issues that made me think should modern software run

6:56 on an old phone like the S9+ was never built for today's animation obsessed power- hungry AI features it drains the battery like crazy for example the phone was charged at 100% we played Cood for about half an hour and we lost around 36% battery so if you game for 2 hours battery is dead now as the phone ages the modern software brings its own set of issues with it so there are quite a few bugs in this ported 1 UI 7 ROM remember while installing the screen brightness was low so there is a brightness bug there is a temporary fix for it if you run this particular script the brightness goes back to normal but you need to keep doing this every time you want to increase or decrease the brightness next the camera doesn't work so you can't click pictures and neither you can scan and pay via UPI now in Galaxy AI the generative field crashes because some part of it works on device so that's there

7:43 also the speaker doesn't work and again the good hardware features that came with S9+ that go in vain like the Galaxy S9 Plus came with an iris scanner yes you heard that right for those of you hearing it for the first time the iris scanner captures high quality images of your irises using infrared light the phone uses that to unlock with your eye rather than your face so with the new 1 UI 7 since this technology doesn't exist the iris scanner doesn't work it also came with a dedicated button called the Bixby button where you could also customize it to open an app even that doesn't work here it also came with a sensor on the back to measure heart rate similarly with the new 1 UI7 that too doesn't work like back then the Tech Wave was all about innovating putting in extra sensors extra buttons that would let your phone do more now these features don't exist so no one remembers

8:29 them at all so after all of this let's answer this one big question do we really need 7 to 8 years of software update well it depends here is the fundamental thing that we need to understand the Galaxy AI mostly runs on the cloud so all the cloud AI features were running fine here but for ondevice AI hardware is too old and from doing all of this experiment we understood two important things like number one the only company that is giving such long-term support for years is Apple and if you see they cut down on most of the features for their older phones heck they didn't even give Apple intelligence for their 1-year-old iPhone 15 also Apple is famous for slowing down iPhones with the new software updates they have admitted it and paid a hefty fine for it as well so way older iPhones whenever they get an update usually it doesn't have the latest features now number two

9:15 company's vision changes in 2 to 3 years for example from 2020 to 2022 the entire wave was for camera/ video features because social media creators were on the rise and now it's AI and this wave will go on for 2 to 3 years until they find the next one so hardware features changes in 3 to four years the tech wave completely changes in 4 years like for example look at the S9+ and in the S25 Plus side by side the heart rate sensor on the S9+ at the back is now completely gone in 2025 there was an iris scanner on the S9+ but now it's completely removed because of the slimmer bezels the Bixby button is dead heck Samsung is now completely replacing Bixby or any assistant with Gemini so it's hard for a company to actually design the latest OS to cater to a 7-year-old smartphone so to sum up everything what we have understood is that 3 to four years of

10:01 software update is a sweet spot the fact is that longer software updates sound great on paper so buy a phone which you can use right now don't run behind this 8 or 9 year software update cycle let us know in the comments how long do you keep your phone before upgrading and would you still use a 7-year-old smartphone if it had the latest software and if you found this experiment interesting tell us what kind of new experimental video you guys want us to cover and don't forget to subscribe on that note this is Pik signing off see you in the next video