GALAXY NOTE 20 by Samsung (Better Than You Think, but Worth The Price?) By Mike O'Brien

So this right here is the Galaxy Note 20, which is the phone you'd be buying. If you wanted the newest Galaxy Note, but you wanted to save 300, and you didn't want to haul around one of the biggest phones ever made and the Galaxy Note 20 didn't get any kind of crazy name. Just the note 20, not the note 20 plus, not the ultra, not the mini. Just the note 20. And this phone honestly has been getting really controversial reviews. Some people love it.

Some people hate it. Some people are saying it has too many compromises, and so Samsung is in this new kind of dilemma, where their flagship phones are creeping up, more and more expensive being now thirteen hundred dollars for the top model, and then their mid-range ones are also coming up in price as well and as in features too. So. The note 10 lite, for example, is only a few hundred dollars less and offers a lot of the same stuff. So that puts us in a fascinating situation, and we have a lot to talk about in this video, so obviously I'll get into what this phone can do, how well it can do it and, of course, if it's worth the money, but I want to first take a look at the physical aspects of this phone and I want to start off with the elephant in the room, most people, if you've seen any review so far.

The first thing they address is the plastic back. It's for most people that consider this a big drawback and honestly, I would say that if you hold it up next to the glass back of the ultra you'll see that it has really the same shine, the same gloss, really similar color levels as well, so from just an aesthetic. If you're sitting on a table, you probably would not know that this is not the glass back. You wouldn't be able to tell which one is a plastic back for most people now, once you pick it up and start feeling it, the actual texture on the back is also really similar. They feel pretty similar until you start pressing on it, and there is a really really really slight flex that you know.

If you really picked it up and started pinching it, you might be able to guess that this one is the plastic version and the other one is the glass version, but until you do that, you probably wouldn't really notice that it's a plastic back. So while that is a huge drawback for some people, I would say personally I'm not necessarily going to hold that against the phone here now. There are some other things that I will hold against this phone, but the plastic back like I said some people actually do prefer it, and aesthetically it's really not that different. Now, in the top left corner of the back, we have the camera bump. This one is very different from the note 20 ultra.

In fact, I will be doing a full comparison head to head of these two phones in the future. So if you want to see that go down and click subscribe, but this one doesn't have the periscope lens, which is why the camera pump is so much smaller, but we still have the three camera setup. In fact, the best camera of the three the telephoto lens is a 64 megapixel shooter, which should give you perfect zoom capabilities up to 30x and perfect photos in general on the top right. We have our flash right there. We don't have any kind of depth camera or laser autofocus or anything like that.

Honestly. I don't know that you necessarily need that with this camera set, then on the bottom right, we have our microphone, which I'll test out later on should be perfect for videos. In the middle of the back, we have reverse wireless charging and regular wireless charging to charge your phone up or charge your peripheral devices. So that's a really nice flagship feature to have on here, and it's one of the things that really differentiates this from some of the more budget lines of phones. Now, on the bottom, we have our speaker.

We have our s pen on the left side now, and we have the USB type-c no headphone jack and, of course we have a microphone now. Something interesting about the USB type-c is without a headphone jack. If you want to listen to earbuds, you will either have to get a dongle or USB-C earbuds and the USB-C earbuds used to come in this box, but for in the US for some reason they just don't include them in here. I think for a thousand dollar phone. It's really weird that they did not include that and did not include, like you know, some Galaxy Buds or something like that.

I mean if you pre-order, you get some credit towards that, but it just seems like that's something that probably should come in the box now on the top. We have our sim tray. This sim tray is not a SD card slot. So not only is this not dual sim, but it also has no expandable storage, and so, if you're buying this phone, it's coming with 128 gigabytes of storage. On the right side, we have our buttons they're all on the right side now compared to the note 10 last year, when they were all on the left side, so it should be more accessible for your thumb, but also kind of difficult to take a screenshot looking at the front.

This is where it starts to get a little iffy on this phone. So we have a 6.7 inch display. That's awesome! It does not have rounded edges, so it's just a flat display some people like that. Some people don't like that the benefit is, you won't, have any kind of palm rejection issues. The downside is, your bezels are definitely larger on this phone.

You also won't have things like edge lighting. Another drawback is the hole punch camera on the top, which is significantly larger than we're seeing on the s20 or the note 20 ultra or so many other Samsung phones, although I believe it's the same size as last year's note 10 phone series, it is a bit of an eyesore when you look at the phone on the front, and you're used to these smaller hole, punch cameras, and we didn't even really get to the big drawback, the big one that I really can't. Let Samsung slide on this one. The screen is 1080p and on top of that, it's not 120 hertz. Instead, it's a 60, hertz 1080p display and that's the same display we're seeing on a lot of the mid-range phones out there.

So considering many other phones at the thousand dollar price point. Have you known quad HD? They have 120 hertz. They at least have 90 hertz, the slower display or the slower refresh rate on this phone is kind of a bit of a drawback. Now, realistically, a lot of people using this phone won't necessarily notice the difference, and you won't really see any kind of issue with that. But charging that price point for a 60hz 1080p display is definitely a drawback.

There are some benefits with this screen, however, the fingerprint sensor, I think, is really in a great location. The s pen on this phone also has a significantly lower latency coming in at about 26 milliseconds, which is almost perceivable last year. I think it's around 45 for the note 10. So that's a major improvement there, but it's still not at the level of the note 20 ultra, which has a 9 millisecond. So that's significantly faster but again, like I said the average user.

You probably won't perceive that difference when you're just trying to write or scribble around now. The internals of this phone are honestly pretty impressive, so the chipset is the snapdragon 865 plus, which is the fastest android chips that we have. It's the exact same one. We see on the note 20 ultra it's faster than the s20 lineup, it's faster than the s20 ultra, and so it's really a fast processor. We can get up to eight gigabytes of ram, we have 128 gigabytes of storage, and we have 5g capabilities for connectivity on this phone, so all of that are those are some flagship specs there.

This also has a 4 300 William hour battery, which is kind of an unsung win for this one, because having a smaller screen, having a slower refresh rate and having a lower screen quality in comparison to the ultra means that the battery life on this should be significantly longer, so now I mentioned the cameras a little, but let's actually get into a full test now and see what this camera is actually capable of doing all right. So this is what the selfie camera looks like and sounds like comment down below. Let me know if this is clear honestly I'd say that I mean it's given a lot of daylight right now. It's doing a perfect job with the colors and the dynamic range all right now. This is the rear camera again shooting in 4k, and I think this sounds perfect, because we have a microphone right on board but comment down below.

Let me know if this sounds good to you guys and let's test out the camera with some other clips all right now this is the rear facing camera, and I assume the audio would probably sound better from the other side, so we're going to zoom in and that's all the way at 10x zoom right there. So if we go back out, you can easily go back to ultrawide or the standard lens, so starting with the rear camera, you can see overall good sharpness, good saturation, and we'll show more of these in a second uh, but getting into just the skin tones on the selfie camera, as you can see here, overall, it's a little washed out, but it looks generally decent in portrait mode or live focus mode. I think this did an excellent job looks much better. Now the rear camera skin tones look better overall, good balance, good sharpness and when you go into the live focus mode it does zoom in, but it still does a really, really good job. Now, here's the ultra-wide angle lens as we crop into 1x zoom you'll, see the color still looks really consistent.

Perfect sharpness using the telephoto lens, which is more of a hybrid zoom, actually at 3x, again really, really good crisp photos here at 20x you can still see it's not the most usable photo and then a 30x. This is kind of more of a blur, but you can still kind of see what's going on now. The 108 megapixel camera gives you tons and tons of detail, but definitely cuts out a little of that saturation and then here's a dark photo not using night mode and then, as soon as you turn night mode on you can see, it does a much better job, although it does a little of over sharpening. So I found that if you give it even a little of extra light, it really does an excellent job all right. So, let's get into some pros and cons with this phone to figure out if it's actually worth a thousand dollars and of course a thousand dollars is just the price point at the time of making this video I'll put a link down below, because Samsung phones are known to change in price, especially around maybe like Black Friday, for example, so the pros this has really strong haptics.

I really like the feedback on this when you're getting notifications or playing games or whatever you're doing, has a really nice strong, haptic feedback. They also have some really cool s. Pen features on here. So, besides the low latency, you also have some s pen gestures, the air gestures that I generally don't use like zooming in on your camera. I think that's kind of pointless the things like taking a screenshot again kind of pointless, but I do use the s pen for writing for taking notes and for using it to remotely take pictures with my camera, especially if you're in, like a group photo for example.

So those are things the s pen does really well the minimum. Like honestly, the minimal camera wobble is really a nice feature on this one, even though this phone is slightly thicker than the s20 ultra, the camera bump is so much shallower that getting any case at all would totally eliminate the camera wobble and even without a case, the camera wobble is relatively minimal. It's really not that extreme, or at least nowhere near the level of the ultra and then the last big pro I want to talk about is something I mentioned before, and that is the good battery life on this phone. This should easily be getting you through an entire day with really no problems at all. Now getting into the cons, as I said, not having earbuds in the box, is a big drawback for me not having a screen protector pre-installed, so I'm going to have to sit here and actually try to put one on myself for a thousand dollars.

So many other phones just come with a screen protector, pre-installed, and I think that's really nice to have and then the last one, unfortunately, is just the screen. I mean. I know that this is still a really hefty upgrade from the note 10 last year, especially from the base level. So this is a bigger screen. It's a just overall, better phone, but the thousand dollar price point is just so competitive these days that you really can't have a 1080p, 60 hertz display all right.

So should you buy the note 20? Well, honestly, it's a very impressive phone. It has a really great processor. It has a very large screen. Has a great camera set great s pen, it's a major upgrade from last year's note 10, but, like I said it's a very competitive space out there, so I would say the people who would most enjoy this phone will be people who don't really care that much about the refresh rate or the screen quality, and they still want a great note experience. That's a larger screen has a great battery life and doesn't cost thirteen hundred dollars, and is you know slightly smaller than the ultra, so for those people this is going to be a great phone, but for almost anyone else who has a thousand dollars to spend on a phone.

I would say this one might be a little overpriced if Samsung gave it 120 hertz display. I definitely wouldn't say that or if the price slid down to maybe like 850 or 900, then I would say it's definitely a great buy, but at a thousand dollars it is a little too expensive in my opinion, but comment down below. Let me know what you think of this phone. Like I said it's definitely an excellent phone, really great upgrades, but that's just so expensive for a phone that has this display and a plastic back so again comment down below. Let me know you guys think of this.

Thanks for watching I'll see you next time.

Source : Mike O'Brien