Hands On With the Samsung Galaxy S20 Lineup By PCMag

Samsung's new Galaxy S20 line up brings broad 5G, ultra high-resolution cameras and superzoom to the US market. Now, you're gonna pay for all that, prices are $1,000 and up. But Samsung has really set the agenda for this year with these three phones. Let's take a closer look. The Galaxy S20 comes in three sizes. The smallest S20 has a 6.2-inch screen, the S20+ has a 6.7-inch screen, and the S20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch screen. The screens are all AMOLED, all Quad HD and all curved at the edges.

The two smaller models have 10-megapixel front-facing cameras, while the Ultra has a 40-megapixel camera, which can also take 10-megapixel photos with Quad Pixel binning. The screens now have 60-Hertz and 120-Hertz refresh rate modes. The 120-Hertz mode uses more battery but it makes gaming and web scrolling super smooth. You're not gonna be able to get the new phones without 5G. The lowest end model will only have the slower, low and mid-band forms of 5G.

The two higher end models will have all three forms of 5G. The phones have big batteries, four to 5,000 mAh to handle the stress of the new networks. Samsung also spent a lot of its time this year improving its cameras. All three models have regular, ultra-wide and 2X cameras, with bigger overall sensors and better low-light performance than last year. But the camera on the S20 Ultra is special.

The S20 Ultra has a 108-megapixel main camera and a periscopic zoom camera for up to 10x hybrid optical zoom and up to 100x digital zoom. At high zoom levels, you see this handy guide to what you're zooming into. The 108-megapixel camera can do nine pixel binning for very sharp 12-megapixel images. Single take mode is probably the other coolest camera feature. You capture 10 seconds of the scene and then the phone automatically chops it up into what it thinks are the best short videos, photo stills and animations.

There's no dedicated Bixby button, but Bixby isn't going away. You activate the assistant by holding the power button. Samsung says Bixby is still valuable because it enables more hardware device control than you can get with Google Assistant. Other than Bixby, Samsung is trying to back away from offering its own apps, relying more on partners. The dialer now includes Google Duo as a default video call button, for instance.

I'm also sure we're gonna see a lot of preloaded Microsoft apps and of course, those carrier preloads. You won't find a fingerprint scanner or a headphone jack visible on these phones. As regards to the headphone jack, Samsung is really pushing wireless earbuds. The fingerprint scanner is under the display and sounds like the same hardware as last year. Although Samsung says its improved the software.

I'm glad to hear the phones have a microSD card slot. Those 108-megapixel images and 8K videos are gonna take up a lot of space. And they can quickly fill up the lower end model's 128 GB of storage. All three phones will have up to 12 GB of RAM with the Ultra having a 16 GB option. You'll be able to lock at least three apps into RAM through software settings, so they'll remain in the same state you left them.

Of course, there are accessories too. There's gonna be a wide range of cases and new Galaxy Buds Plus Earphones, with supposedly 11-hour battery life. We'll verify that when we get them in for testing. We'll have a full review of the new phones as soon as we can, so check back soon at PCMag. com.

Source : PCMag