Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Review: Is it worth $1,300? By CNET

It's big, it's bold, it's beautiful, and it is really expensive. This is the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra it is a 1300 android phone that is jam-packed with all the high-end features. The question is: is it worth it and that's what we're here to find out? First, let's talk about design. Now this is a very large device. It's got a 6.9-inch screen, which is really great. It's also heavy it's made of glass and metal.

Now this phone is actually a little taller and a little wider than the Galaxy Note 10 plus. For me, that's not so great. I do love a big screen, but it feels just a little more awkward in the hand. Now Samsung prides itself on the fact that this is truly an edge to edge screen, and it is beautiful and those curved sides make it very immersive. Now I almost wish- and this may be an unpopular opinion- that the bezels were a little thicker on the sides and that's just to give you a little more clearance, because I noticed that when I'm holding the phone and using it the notifications' menu may start sliding down the menu on the side, might kind of pop up, or I'll exit out of an app that I don't want to exit out of so the edge touch.

Rejection, I think, could use a little of work, so it either needs to get more sensitive or we need to have slightly thicker bezels there or maybe not even a curved screen all right now, let's flip it over and look at the back. The very first thing you see is that camera bump it is huge, and you really don't understand how big it is. Until you see it in front of you in real life, it actually doesn't look too bad. It just sticks out so prominently. It is so impossible not to notice it.

Furthermore, it's two inches tall, it's two inches at the diagonal, and it's over an inch wide, and you know when I put this phone down on a flat surface, and I'm writing with the s pen. I can actually feel it wobble. I say this every time for every phone you're going to want to get a case, but for this one especially, I just feel like it would kind of round it out a little better and fill in some of these gaps. Keep it for wobbling as much and my biggest fear is that this phone falls out of my back pocket, or it drops it fumbles in some way, and the first thing it's going to hit is going to be this camera area. Strangely, this camera module here isn't covered with gorilla glass victim, which is the latest from gorilla glass.

That's on the phone's front and back. This is using gorilla glass, six, pier kind of worries me, because you would think that you want the most vulnerable part to be using the strongest glass, but we're going to find out in our torture test. One thing I have absolutely fallen in love with is the color. It is called mystic bronze, and it is gorgeous it's just sophisticated and matte. Instead of glossy.

I don't see my fingerprints coming up on it, and I've never cleaned this, and it's just got like this. Really nice sheen to it um. I love it, and it's very easy to tell why this is the signature color. You can also get the note 20 ultra in mystic white mystic black, but they are glossy and don't have this matte finish down here at the bottom, we've got the s pen stylus. Interestingly, it has moved from its home on the right to a new home on the left.

Now Samsung doesn't really have a good explanation for that. Maybe it moved because of the camera array um just so that there is enough room to actually store the pen. As you can see, it wouldn't really fit on this side, and it fits pretty well over here. So it did take me a little while to get used to using the stylus on the left. But for me this placement isn't a problem at all.

Let me dig into the screen a little. It is big and beautiful, really crystal clear. It also has sort of an interesting feature. Furthermore, it supports 120 hertz for the screen refresh rate in addition to 60 hertz. So you can choose 60 hertz.

If you want and save yourself a little of battery life, or you can choose to use, what's called adaptive display, which will basically give you 60 hertz when the screen is just sitting there static like this and then, if you start doing something like playing a video game or scrolling, it will automatically switch over to 120 hertz, which will make it very smooth. Some of you have wondered if the fingerprint reader has gotten better on this device than previous Samsung phones, and in my experience so far I would say yes, when I log into the phone using my thumbprint or any other fingerprint, it seems to provide fewer error messages, so it unlocks the phone faster and therefore causes a lot less frustration. So I'm pretty happy with that. So we've talked about the bump, but now it's time to talk about the sensors, we've got a 12 megapixel, wide angle lens here: 108 megapixel, ultra-wide angle and a 12 megapixel telephoto lens uh. We also have fast autofocused the flash and on the front 10 megapixel selfie camera.

So these sensors may sound really familiar with the s20, but actually they're larger, and the zoom is different too. So we go up to 50x on this phone instead of 100x with the s20 ultra and that's a good thing I'll get to in a minute, and we also have 5x optical zoom, and I've already found that that's made pictures look pretty crisp, as is the case with a lot of Samsung phones. Any picture that you take outside using all the automatic modes. Gorgeous. Sometimes the photos do look a little over saturated the colors can look a little candied, as I like to say so, really you know really red reds or really green greens, for example, and sometimes that's not so pleasant, but overall, all of these pictures are really beautiful.

This is also the second phone to have a 108 megapixel sensor, the first time that I used it on the s20 ultra. I wasn't really sure what it was for at this time. I think that there were a few more natural examples. Furthermore, I was at the park and I found that I had a bug on my shirt, and so I grabbed the phone with one hand, and I pulled out my shirt with the other snapped a little picture, and I was able to zoom in there was actually much more detail on the weave of my shirt than on the bug, but it was close enough for me to send to my family and send to friends and post online and say: hey look what this is when it comes to zoom. Furthermore, I think that the quality is actually a little better on this phone than it was on previous devices, and I don't think that you need 100 x.

It's just way too much even 30 and 50x zoom. There are very few natural instances that I can think of where you would want that, and I would say that you get huge deterioration after about 4x and 10x, but at 2x I thought that was perfect. I took a mouthwatering picture of a croissant, and you could see every layer with 2x zoom, and it was actually much better than when I just took an auto picture and the food filter came on, and I leaned in close. That being said, I of course tested 50x zoom. There was this beautiful gazebo with some wrought iron work at the very top, and I got in really close to it.

Uh there is a viewfinder on your phone, so you can see where you're looking, because when you're that zoomed in you have no idea where you are and even just holding as perfectly still as I could, it was still jumping around. So this is not easy to use it's not something you want to use. Often I really lucked out with the shot testing. Nighttime photography was a little of a challenge for me this time around I'll admit, I'm basically still in lockdown, but I was able to take some photos and the ones that I took. I was actually pretty pleased with, so I think that overall nighttime photography has improved.

I especially noticed this when I take any pictures of neon signage in the specific dedicated night mode. It just really corrals that in and makes it really crisp and easy to read so that you don't have light bleeding out all over the place. Selfie images were also pretty standard. I love that I can use the s pen as sort of like a remote shutter, so I can set up the phone or hold it out, and I don't have to like lean over or hold it in an awkward way. I can just click that button and there's the picture, so it makes it a lot more comfortable to use.

There are also new tone filters, so you can actually warm up the scene or cool it down just by pressing a button. One thing that is new to these note: 20 phones is pro video mode, so using it, you can actually set the microphone to record more in the front or in the back. You can zoom in, and you can set all the controls now I do happen to be filming this on a Galaxy Note, 20 ultra, but I am not using pro video mode because I am not a professional. There are actually a ton of tricks that the stylist can do on the note phone and that's what's always set this line apart from any other device. So one of them uh is a suite of five new air gestures, so you just hold down on the pen button, and you can sign a little arrow to go back sign.

Another way to go home, do a little squiggle. That does something it's fully customizable. The problem is, I haven't, found out where this is useful in my day-to-day life, especially because, as soon as I open an app or gesture to go back, what do you do next you're going to have to reach in and press the button, or you're going to have to use your s pen, one new trick that I, like better, is handwriting straightening. So I oftentimes write at an angle. A lot of people do, I think, and then you can actually just push a button at the bottom, and it will automatically straighten that, for you, the s pen is exactly the same for the note 20 ultra as it is for the note 20, but it is faster on this phone simply because it takes advantage of the 120 hertz screen refresh rate um.

So it feels like it is a lot faster as you're writing and scribbling around on it, and when I'm using the note, I always remember how much I enjoy using the stylus and all the things I like to do with it. I like taking notes I like jotting down my ideas. I love using the stylus to take really precise screenshots. You can take an animated GIF that way as well and there's a new feature too, where you can bring in a PDF and annotate it. I actually used that to sign something and send it back.

This phone uses the Qualcomm snapdragon 865 plus processor, and it is really snappy. Other regions will use Samsung's homegrown Enos processor, so your mileage may vary. You have 128 gigabytes of on-board storage here, plus the option to expand through a micro, SD card slot 12 gigabytes of ram. Of course, there's 5g, but your speeds are only going to be as fast as your network battery life was another kind of funny one for me to test, because normally I would wake up at six. I have a full day in the office, go test this phone and just see how long it lasts.

But these days I don't really go anywhere, but so far I think that it's pretty good. I definitely don't think it's amazing part of that may have to do to the phone switching over to the 120 hertz refresh rate, but I'm I'm very pleased with it. I would love to see what it's like during my normal routine, but I can say with confidence that this is a phone that will take you from the morning to the end of your day, without needing to charge. There is support for 25 watt fast charging. So that's with the charger that comes in the box, but there is no longer support for 45 watt charging.

So you might be wondering what the differences are between the Galaxy Note, 20 ultra and the standard note 20 other than the price. The note 20 by the way is a thousand dollars instead of 1300 um. What is screen size? The note 20 has a 6.7-inch screen. Instead of 6.9, a bigger one would be the backing uh there is a plastic polycarbonate back instead of the glass back on the note 20. And the sides look like they're a little.

Rounder the camera module looks a little different too. You don't have any micro, SD card storage, uh batteries a little smaller, and then there are a couple other little changes here or there. This brings us to the question: should you buy it? The Galaxy Note 20 ultra is beyond a doubt a powerful phone. It's got all of these great features, and it fixes some problems from the s20 ultra like it introduces better zoom technology, but it also creates some new problems like these bezels that cause a lot of errors when I hold it and this camera bump. That is simply too big.

This is a do everything device that makes a lot of sense in a society that is very involved and on the go socially and with work, and that's what it was really built for to be fair. This phone was designed before the pandemic, but I don't really feel like it fits into these times, especially since economists are calling it the worst global recession that many of us will ever experience. I wouldn't personally upgrade from the note 10 plus, because I think it's got a lot of life left in that phone and I think that the features are still going to carry you through in order to make the Galaxy Note 20 ultra a worthwhile purchase. You're going to have to really love big phones, because this one is huge, and you're. Going to have to find a perfect deal for even more on the Galaxy Note.20 ultra be sure to check out our camera comparison shootout, and thanks for watching.

Source : CNET