Well, I ended up with an S9. American Express was doing a 25% off points sale, and Best Buy has a small sale on unlocked S9s, so between the two I got it for $450 using only my accumulated Amex points, no cash out of pocket. I was waffling between spending the points on this phone or that stupid Garmin Fenix 5X plus fitness watch that I've become enamored with, but given my S5 was getting twitchy, this was the right move.
Picked it up at the local Best Buy a couple of hours ago, stopped at the Verizon store next door to it for a sim card, and have been playing with it for a couple of hours. First impressions:
Way, way faster than my S5. I was going to first do a clean install of all my old stuff, but just ended up using the Samsung Switch app to do it. Moved everything over seamlessly, but I'm still setting stuff up like icon folders that Samsung didn't transfer. The first con was the incredibly tiny text for my old eyes. I've gone through enlarging text where I could, but there doesn't seem to be anything that can be done about enlarging icon text, which is smaller than on the S5. Even "huge" and "max zoom" doesn't change that text size. I took a recommendation I got googling and downloaded a new font that makes that particular text easier to see. The colors seem a little washed out compared to my S5.
The phone feels way skinnier (width) than my S5 even though it's really not by much, and it's already slipped out of my hand a few times, partially from being slippery, and partially from how I'm holding it to not activate the stupid bixby button. I've got an Otterbox Defender on the way from Amazon, so hopefully that will help with gripping the phone. I'll have to see if there is a way to deactivate the bixby button.
I guess after the first couple of hours I have more negatives than positives, but we'll see how that changes as I get accustomed to the thing.