All right, you have $1,300 to spend on an Android slab phone in 2024. Why would you get any other phone? No, seriously, why would you get any other phone?
This Samsung S24 Ultra has taken the best things from every other ultra-high-end phone and stuffed them into one place, so anything that you could possibly value, it has pushed to the max. And there’s just multiple cherries on top, just sprinkled all over the place. This phone sets the tone for 2024. (Soft upbeat music)
The Evolution of Samsung S24 Ultra Phones
So, the formula for Samsung S24 Ultra phones has evolved a little bit over the years. At first, it was just the most numbers, the biggest megapixel count, the most zoom and all that.
Then it added the S Pen and got a little more refined and it replaced the Note. Now it’s just everything. It’s just everything in one place. It’s all the best hardware, all the best software I can think of all-in-one phone.
A Familiar Look, but with Big Improvements
So on the outside, like I said in my early impressions, this phone looks almost the same as last year’s phone, but if you think this phone is almost the same as last year’s phone, turns out you’re missing a lot.
So, the more you use this phone, the more you look for weaknesses, the more impressive it gets.
A Display You Can’t Ignore
So maybe what? You’re a screen snob, right? You like to pixel peep, maybe you were thinking about getting one of the ultra-high-end Oppo or Xiaomi phones just for an amazing screen. All right, well, look no further. Literally one of the best screens than any phone.
Samsung S24 Ultra has dropped in a class leading 6.8-inch quad HD AMOLED display and it is awesome. These ultra-phones have had 120Hz LTPO for a while and they’ve been this really sharp quad HD for a while now too. But now on top of that, two new things, one is it’s completely flat and two is its much brighter.
Impressive Brightness and Flat Design
So there’s been this whole new batch of like 2,500 plus nit phones in the past couple months that I’ve seen. This I think is the best looking one that I’ve seen so far.
So now it’s up to a max 2,600 nits, which is awesome outdoors or anywhere. But it also gets extremely dim at night too, without any of the weird banding I’ve seen in some other phones.
And they flattened the display completely and brought the display right up to the very corners with some of the thinnest bezels we’ve seen all the way around.
Display and Design
Plus, there’s also this new anti-reflective coating on this Gorilla Glass Armor that makes a noticeable difference with certain light hitting it at off-axis angles. And then there is a crazy fast ultrasonic fingerprint reader underneath to top it all off.
And you know, maybe I wish the touch target was a little bit bigger, but that’s about it. Honestly, if you’re a screen snob, it doesn’t really get better than this one right here. This is the phone you should get.
Battery Life Samsung S24 Ultra
Okay, so what if your primary concern is battery life? Well, you could always get the Energizer phone that we saw at CES at one time, but as far as reasonably sized flagship slab phones go, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Again, they’re keeping a 5,000mAh battery in one of the best performing battery phones from the past two years, despite making it thinner and keeping the S Pen.
So, you might as well get this one. Still got 45 watt wired charging, you still have 25-watt wireless charging and just battery life-wise, I was able to have long days with no problems, with six hours plus screen on time.
I was able to baby it into getting two full days, that’s at 1440p, at 120Hz and with high brightness use.
Performance Samsung S24 Ultra
So yeah, why get anything else? So okay, what if then it’s just performance is the main thing that you care about. Okay, so we’re seeing all these phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 starting to come out and they’re looking really good.
Great high-end performance, there’s efficiency gains all over the place, plus this phone pairs it with 12 gigs of RAM and it is a multitasking champ. And if it’s a stylus you’re into, I already know you aren’t really considering any other phone, the S Pen is basically the only high-end stylus still going in slab smartphones. It’s really good for note-taking, drawing, highlighting, all that stuff. But if you’re like me and you hardly ever use that, there’s still the gaming performance and the everyday performance.
There’s the newly added rate tracing plus a 90% larger vapor chamber to cool the phone for much longer stuff. Turns out it’s an A plus. Now you could always get a gaming phone and squeeze five to 10% more frames out of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with some huge badass cooling setup, and that’s great, but then you also have to accept all of the sacrifices that come with said gaming phone over this.
And do you really want those extra frames that bad?
Cameras and Imaging Samsung S24 Ultra
Okay, cameras, there’s a lot of other phones out there that you could buy if your 1,300 bucks specifically has to go to the best cameras. You know the Pixel just won the blind camera test. Sony has the best manual mode, like there’s other great camera systems. But here’s a way to simplify it, I think in evaluating smartphone cameras, there’s basically two ways to review them.
There’s the utility, the actual technical evaluation, and the aesthetics, the art of it, the subjectivity part.
And I think utility-wise, like on paper, specs-wise, this camera got it all. Like you’ve seen this camera array before, there’s four cameras on the back of this phone.
Turns out, they’re basically the same cameras as last year’s S23 Ultra except for one. So, there’s a primary camera, an ultra-wide and a pair of two different telephoto cameras.
The primary camera is still the ridiculous 200-megapixel sensor with all the same pros and cons. It’s consistent and versatile across the board.
It has great dynamic range. It’s a quick shooter with quick auto focus and it’s also always bending down to 12 megapixels and you should almost never switch it to the 200-megapixel mode unless you have incredible lighting. It has an ultra-wide with a bit of distortion near the edges, but it’s actually meaningfully wider than the primary camera, so it’s really fun to shoot with.
Even though the automatic macro mode from it looks like trash and you should just turn it off anytime it turns your pictures from this to this, pro tip. And then it has a medium range, 3X telephoto camera that kicks in smoothly and matches the colors and exposure from the main camera really well.
And so, the one new thing in hardware this year is they’ve gone from a 10 megapixel, 10X camera to a 50-megapixel 5X camera. So technically, shorter optical zoom range, but I would say with the extra resolution, it is actually more powerful.
It means all the photos in the gap between 5X and 10X look sharper than last year. And then you can literally put the 10X photos side by side from the S23 Ultra and the S24 Ultra and the new 5X cropped in actually looks better.
Plus, you can still zoom all the way in and shoot at a 100X if you still want to take ultra-stable pictures of faraway objects like the moon. But basically, what I’m saying is utility-wise, this camera system checks every single box. It has everything.
Samsung S24 Ultra Software and AI Features
So, from there you get into the more subjective aesthetic differences which you could always lean one way or the other. I think, I mean, looking at these photos, they’re still very much Samsung’s slightly extra process-looking, a little bit extra contrasts, a little bit higher exposure, a little brighter color, that still happens with these photos.
So, you could still convince yourself to lean Pixel or even iPhone, but if you just want to be able to check every single box, why look anywhere else? Honestly, the changes that you notice more aside from the actual camera quality are just like features using it.
Like the Samsung S24 Ultra shoots everything HDR by default now, it’s actually in Google’s new ultra HDR format. So, when you have specular highlights or big dynamic range differences in a photo, it will tastefully crank up that stuff for a more dramatic looking picture on the phone screen, similar to what Pixel and iPhone already do.
And this passes through all the way from capturing the photo to viewing it in the gallery, and then one more step, to actually publishing it on social media.
So, Samsung S24 Ultra has worked with Instagram and Snapchat for native quality photo and video uploading pipelines because at the end of the day, once you take the photo, what are you 99% of the time planning to do with it?
Long-Term Software Support
All right, maybe you’re a software person, maybe the top of your list when buying a new smartphone is you want the smartest smartphone. It’s got to have all the software and AI features.
And honestly, it should have a nice long roadmap ahead of it of on-time software updates, sounds like I’m describing a Pixel but turns out, this phone now has a ton, a ton of helpful AI features built-in that are actually good, they make a meaningful difference to everyday use.
Now the funny part about a lot of this is a lot of these features are made in partnership with Google, as you’ll see. And I can’t help but keep thinking like it feels like Samsung needs Google to have all of these features in their phone to compete especially against the iPhone.
But then Google, now their own phones are a little bit less competitive, but it’s probably worth the trade off because now technically they’re helping to compete against the iPhone. It’s this weird like thing where they need each other.
I think it’s fascinating and probably worth its own separate video, maybe let me know with a comment or by subscribing if you’d be down to see that. But that’s all the background, all of this.
Unique AI-Driven Photo Editing by Samsung S24 Ultra
We were just talking about photos a second ago, the second you’re done taking a photo and opening it up in Samsung’s Gallery app, there’s a ton of useful AI driven stuff that you can do with it.
And it’s kind all based on what sort of scene it auto detects that you’ve taken. So, lots of photos just end up with a remaster button where you click it and then it can add some contrast and brighten things up a little bit as needed and gives you a solid before and after.
But if your photo has some glass or a window, it’ll show you can Erase Reflections button and then you can literally go in and circle the reflections you want to get rid of and it’ll generative fill what should actually be in the glass.
And it works pretty well. Now with this photo, I didn’t take it in portrait mode but it’s recognized that there’s a subject and so it’ll offer to add background blur.
And even without a bunch of extra depth information, it analyzes the subject and it lets me add a little bit or a lot of background blur with a pretty good cutout, if you ask me, to just create a portrait mode shot out of thin air.
But if you ever really, really want to go crazy, there’s a whole separate Magic Editor that feels exactly like what we just got with the Pixel minus any restrictions, it’s never told me it can’t do something. So, you open any photo, hit that Edit button, and then there’s this little blue green button with the stars, that’s Samsung’s new Magic Editor. And once you’re here, you can just go nuts.
Samsung S24 Ultra Software and Features Overview
Now real OGs will know that there used to be a feature on Pixels called Now on Tap. It was like the same exact thing, hold the home button and it would just Google whatever was on your screen and help you out but that was everything on your screen and they kind ended up wrapping that into Google Assistant.
This is just so much faster and more selective. Also, Pixels are going to get this feature very soon as well. But then bonus points, if you really love software, Samsung is now promising seven years of security updates and seven generations of major software updates on this phone, on this Samsung S24 Ultra lineup.