Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Android Smartphone Full Review

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Android Smartphone Full Review

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra has 5G, 108-megapixel camera, four other cameras, a huge screen, a high refresh rate, a 1399 dollar starting price. The S20 Ultra goes big, I mean you recognize, literally big, check out the phone. and searching at it I feel one thing is blindingly obvious. Samsung seems like it's something to prove. the simplest word that I can come up with to explain the S20 Ultra is, imposing. it's an outsized and nearly as heavy as just about any phone that I even have ever used. Now the most reason this phone is as big because it is is in order that you'll have this screen which is 6.9 inches diagonally. and since this screen doesn't have a face unlock sensor thereon, it can cover nearly the whole front of the phone. Now I figured that I'd be annoyed at having to travel back to an in-screen fingerprint sensor rather than face unlock, but I wasn't. The sensor is fast and accurate enough. But the important reason I feel that this screen shows that Samsung has something to prove with the S20 Ultra, is that they finally added the choice to modify it to 120-hertz refresh rate. Now, it comes outta the box at 60 hertz to save lots of battery but I hopped into settings and turned it on directly and never looked back because I feel it's enough battery life to handle it. And 120 hertz does make scrolling and screen animations look better and smoother. Samsung even says that it stopped bothering with any variable refresh rate supported the content of the screen nonsense. It's just locked to 120. Oh, by the way, you cannot have both 120 hertz and therefore the phone's maximum 3200 by 1440 resolution. But, I feel the trade for 1080 by 2300 to urge 120 hertz is worthwhile. And in fact, the screen looks nice. Looks nice indoors, outdoors, at different angles along with HDR content. Samsung knows the way to do that by now, it's extremely good at it. And again, because it's nearly seven inches diagonally, it's good 'cause it's just huge. Samsung has already done the make the phone bigger than everybody else thing. That's not actually what the S20 Ultra is about. It's about being bigger in every way, not just size.

And there's no better place to start out talking about what meaning, than to only jump right into the most important number of all, the 108-megapixel camera. (relaxing music) So let's just get into it. If you count the depth sensor, there are five cameras on this phone. And three of them have just silly megapixel counts. The selfie camera is 40 megapixels. The telephoto is 48, the regular wide-angle is 108 megapixels. the sole camera that may not out of bounds megapixel wise is that the ultra-wide which is 12 megapixels. But the S20 goes further than that. So almost like what Huawei did on its phones, the zoom lens here actually hits a prism and a mirror and redirects the sunshine across the body of the phone into the sensor, sort of a periscope. It means the phone can get real optical zoom up to 4 X and something specialized up to 10 X. Then there's this thing that Samsung calls Space Zoom, which pushes the zoom bent 100 X. That's one among the explanations that Samsung went with a 48-megapixel camera on the telephoto, in order that it's more pixels to settle on from when it starts cropping in. It also does this thing where it takes multiple photos to assist get data from all the sensors to assist. So how does all that tech work? Well, I tested this zoom against the iPhone 11 Pro, and therefore the Pixel 4 XL, both of which have telephoto lenses. And for fun, I threw within the Sony RX100 VII. The Pixel 4 XL maxes at 8x zoom, so I just compared it at that level and that I used a tripod for all of those photos that you are looking at. I feel the RX100 wins, but you recognize, it is a standalone camera so in fact it's gonna. once you just check out the phones, the S20 Ultra embarrasses the iPhone, and that I think it edges out the Pixel 4 too. thus far so good, but what about this Space Zoom thing? Well, you'll impress your friends with little who moments by zooming into 100 X, but truthfully, I feel they appear like splotchy messes at that zoom level. I used to be ready to get some fairly nice stuff at 30 X, usually by propping the phone on something stable. But, it still seems like a phone photo to me. Well, Samsung is performing some weird tech stuff here too. So, by default, the 108-megapixel sensor makes 12-megapixel images because the hardware automatically combines nine pixels into one big pixel. it is a process called binning. And combined, those binned pixels are about as big as what they would've been on a lower megapixel sensor.

This does help this camera avoid some of the usual problems that you get with high megapixel sensors.  Like bad low light, and noise. It mostly works. See, to make this entire pixel binning stuff happen, Samsung still has to do a lot in the software. Now, generally, I think the S20 wants to smooth out lighting especially on faces, it wants to keep things bright, and it wants to shift towards less red tones. And those are often really good instincts for photos. Samsung sometimes steers the S20's tuning just a little too far. So, compared to the iPhone, or the Pixel, this photo of me is just plain over smoothed and over brightened. It is super weird. As soon as the S20 camera sees a face, it brings up the shadows too much it smoothes skin too much, and it tries way too hard to adjust the white balance and often gets it wrong. Turn your head 45 degrees where it doesn't see a face, and it's fine. Turn on pro mode, and it's fine again. Turn on Bixby Scene Optimizer, and well, okay Bixby makes it worse, but still. In a lot of brightening conditions, I got nice pics of faces but in challenging conditions it got rough. Samsung tells me that it's looking into it, but there's no setting that you can change to change the default behaviour of what this thing does with faces. The weirdest part though, none of this applies to the selfie camera. Which is great. Now Samsung also lets you take full-on, 108 megapixel photos, and there's yet more camera tech involved in this like re mosaicing but the bottom line is you need a lot of light to get a decent photo at that resolution. And even then, my 108-megapixel photos were noisy enough in the fine details when I cropped in, that I never really saw the point. Now, when it comes to low light photos, Samsung is doing better than it ever has, partly because the sensors are so big here. But it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the Pixel 4. And on portrait, again, better than it ever has, but it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the iPhone. The selfie camera though, which is 40 megapixels, is my favourite camera on this entire phone. It doesn't do the same bad over smoothing on faces, I just really like it.

Now as for video, the headline feature is that you can shoot and edit in 8K, and I don’t know, I think that's kind of gimmicky but I do like that you can pull a still photo out. More important to me is the slightly improved video stabilization because I have pretty shaky hands, but you should know that still doesn't work in 4K and not in 8K. Especially when I was shooting video. I also really like this new feature called single take which does as many of Samsung's weirdo camera modes as possible in one long shot. It's fun, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important 'cause the quality is like, not that good. So, that's a lot. It's a lot of camera which makes sense because this camera bump is so huge right? I mean, okay. Where do I think it all lands? Well, I think Samsung has a little bit more work to do on its photo algorithms. I think it's going to take a minute for them to learn how to take all of these huge megapixel counts and turn them into something that works in every single context.

 Now the S20 phones are the very first mainstream 5G phones. There have been a few before, but they have never been the default and with the S20 line they are. Now you should know that only the S20 Ultra and the S20 Plus support the super high-speed millimetre wave-5G that you can only get at like a few street corners. But, all of them support the slightly slower, but much more widespread mid-band 5G. On T-Mobile's mid-band, I was able to pull anywhere from like 45 down, which is not much faster than LTE, up to 120 megs per second in a pretty good spot. That's fast. But it's not as fast as what I could get on Verizon's millimetre wave, where I saw download speeds hit over 1300 Mbps.  Which is incredible? I got that on one street corner, if I held my phone right, and I didn't turn my body around. And I didn't walk half a block away. And if I was lucky because sometimes it would drop down to LTE anyway in that spot.  Samsung always boasts the best possible specs for an Android phone on the Galaxy S line, and this year is no different.

The Snapdragon 865 processor, which is fast but it's not in a way that I think people are going to notice over the 855. It has 5000 milliamps battery here, which is huge and has let me run a full day with very heavy use. I have done it several times now. 5G might bring that battery life down a tick, but I was clearing six hours of screen time with 120hertz refresh rate turned on. The RAM matters too, you get 12 or 16 gigs of RAM depending on which model you buy and that means that apps close less often in the background and you can even pin apps to memory which means that Android won't be able to close them in the background. This might seem like a weird power user feature, but let's be honest this is a weird power-user phone. Samsung is also sticking to its guns by offering expandable storage and it's not keeping the headphone jack. And it is okay to be sad about that, don't let anybody tell you different. The other side of performance is software, and for the most part, Samsung is doing a solid job with One UI on top of Android 10. I still like it, but Samsung is starting to Samsung it up a little bit with feature creep. Everything that it's ever made is still here, and too much of it is sitting in the settings tray and it's ready to confuse you.

There's Quick Share, which is like AirDrop but only for Galaxy phones. There's Link Share, which lets you throw stuff online for a private link for people to download for a day or two. There's Music Share, which let's other people with Galaxy phones play their music on the Bluetooth device that's paired to your Galaxy phone. But it's not as weird as Samsung Daily which sits next to the home screen and just doesn't offer useful cards for anything. Or, as weird as Bixby which sits under a long press of the power button and it's still just Bixby. Overall, the experience on the S20 Ultra is quite good, but it takes a day or two of dismissing prompts and turning off stuff that you don't want. Which is super annoying. So, Galaxy S20 Ultra. Did Samsung prove that it could make the best screen on a smartphone? Yes, it did. Did Samsung show that it could make 5G a dominant feature for phones? Well, yes it did but that doesn't mean that your city or your carrier has it. Did Samsung prove that it could throw every single performance spec possible into a single phone? I mean, it did. This is Samsung. It also proved though that it's starting to lose it's restraint a little bit on software. But the biggest thing that Samsung had to prove is that it could stay in the camera fight and do so with big megapixel sensors and zoom. And I think on zoom, Samsung has proved that its hardware can beat Google and Apple at around 8x, but it's not magic enough to get something great beyond that. I'm more worried about how the camera treats faces though, because I think Samsung is still Samsung in' up a little bit too much there. Mostly though, Samsung proved that when it wants to it can still go all out with the phone. I mean, they did call this the Ultra, which is another way of saying a lot. And yeah, this phone is a lot. That's all about review. Thanks 😊😊😊😊