Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G Mystic Bronze Review By GSMDome

Hi guys this is json. com, and I'm here with review of the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra 5g, so I know it's a mouthful, but this is the fall flagship that Samsung has prepared for this year. It basically comes after the galaxy s20 ultra and brings forth a periscope camera this time with 50x top level of zoom. It also keeps the Enos 990 CPU, but it's a note. So this means it also brings a stylus with the lowest latency ever okay. So, aside from that, we're dealing with a hefty phone with a 6.9-inch screen and some other innovations which are rather software related in this generation than hardware related anyway. The product is pretty pricey at 1 400 in quite a few countries all over the world and should come with some bonuses like the galaxy buzz live and maybe a special Xbox pass in some regions.

Okay, so, first the Galaxy Note 20 ultra 5g: let's talk about the design so up front. As you can see, we have a glass panel, it's curved on the sides, but not in an exaggerated fashion. It's no waterfall for sure and at the same time is protected by the brand-new gorilla glass Vitus, which is supposed to be more resilient, so gorilla, glass, Vitus at the front, there's also gorilla glass Vitus. At the back side, we have the brand new catchy mystic bronze version, there's also mixed mystic white and mystic black, the camera protrudes quite a bit here, as you can see, maybe it's not as big as the s20 ultra and back to the design. Aside from the Vitus at the front and back, we have a stainless steel frame right here.

It measures, 8.1, millimeters in thickness and believe it or not. This 208 gram phone. It's quite easy to wield, frankly speaking, it's easier to wield for me compared to the galaxy s20 ultra and also compared to the note 10 plus before it. So when it comes to comfort, I'm all in, and I appreciate its build and the choices that Samsung has made. I should probably mention that it's also ip68 certified, which is means it's dustproof and waterproof, quite comfy in both portrait and also landscape.

Okay, speaking of portrait and landscape uh. It's time to address the screen that you're seeing right here. Well, this beautiful display um we're dealing here with a familiar face. We're dealing with a 6.9 inch, dynamic, AMOLED screen with hdr10 plus support and a top resolution of 3088 over 1440 pixels. Keep in mind that by default, the phone comes with full HD press resolution at up to 120 hertz adaptive refresh rate adaptive is the keyword which means it can adapt to the situation and go lower or go to the top level of 120 hertz.

Now the actual viewing experience will be definitely shown via this test, video here, okay, so here we go we're filling up the screen. As you can see, we still have the selfie camera cut in a punch. Hole doesn't bother me one bit. I got an accustom to it. It's an immersive experience with some of the widest colors around also very wide view angles.

It's a pretty bright screen with a, I would say. Decent contrast, that's the word decent. I mean it's good and all, but this powerful august sun made it not very legible in powerful sunlight. Keep that in mind. At some point, I had some trouble with interpreting the camera options when using it in a strong sunlight.

So last year the note 10 plus was quite bright. This needs to be a little brighter with the adaptive mode in full sunlight. Now we also did some tests. As you can see here, we have our hierarchy. We measure up to 453 lux units on this phone.

It beats the s20 ultra, which we measured a bit lower, something like 420 and also beats the Galaxy S10, plus still it stays below the Galaxy Note, 10 plus, as I mentioned before, which is quite a bit higher and also below the Oppo find x2 and several other assets out there. Now you can tweak and tune your experience as you place in the settings. You can go here to the display. You got your light and dark mode. Furthermore, you got your brightness adaptive brightness motion smoothness, so, as you can see, adaptive 120, hertz or standard 60 hertz, and here you can go up to the top level of the resolution, blue light filter and the screen mode.

Furthermore, you can set your colors to be more vivid or natural, tweak the white balance to cool or warm okay. So that's it in a nutshell. I would have liked the contest to be a bit better and a brighter screen wouldn't have hurt anybody now, if you want to talk about the actual specs we're going to get down to the nitty-gritty into the CPU, it's the Enos 990. I know you've seen it before. It was a bit of a scourge for the galaxy s20 series.

Everybody wants the snapdragon 865 plus me included. The problems are not gone, so before I talk about the problems. Let's talk about the other specs there are 12 gigs of ram. As far as I know, lpddr5 uh, there's also 128, 256 or 512 gigabytes of storage. Micros and, to be honest, there's no lag so if you're using the phone on a daily basis like I did, you will definitely not encounter lag, but there will be some throttling sometimes when you're gaming and a person asks me in the comment section if the phone gets hot, if you're using the camera for long periods of time.

The answer is definitely yes, so, sadly, it gets quite heated after a long period of using the camera and also hit it during the games and more so during the benchmarks. Okay, so we have benchmarks here somewhere. Here we go benchmarks uh, the most relevant is probably on two to eight. Now the results aren't half bad. Here you can see the devices beating the galaxy s20 models, or at least the basic s20 bits: galaxy, s20 and Huawei p40 pro stays below the s20 ultra iPhone 11 and one plus eight.

This is on two to eight in geek bench five uh. We have the multi-core subtest. You can see it here, we're surpassing the s20 ultra, but not by a huge margin. At the same time, we stay below the whole p40 pro plus and OnePlus 8. If you're a gamer, you probably want to check out the 3dmark slingshot extreme BS 3.1 uh top nine we're actually on the ninth spot, beating the ASUS ROG phone, 2 um, or also the whole ap40 pro staying below the galaxy 20 ultra oppos find x2 and the OnePlus 8. Usually it should be top 10 material, if not top 15, and we probably stay in the top 15 until the year is out.

However, the temperature is a bit of a bummer and a bit of a problem for me because I will say it again in benchmarks: we go, we went as high as 43 degrees Celsius, and it's not a random occurrence. I found the phone to be very hot, even when taking photographs for dozens of minutes. It was very hot outside as well, but that doesn't justify it. So throttling and temperature are still issues now. The battery choice was a bit odd.

For me, everybody expected a five thousand million per hour battery, and we got a four thousand five hundred million per hour battery with a lower than expected speed of charge or capacity of charge.25 watts we wanted 45 watts, the predecessor had 45 watts, which is weird they're, still wireless charging and also reverse charging. You put your device here at the back, and it juices up automatically okay. So now, let's see how it did in our tests. Okay, so here we are, this is the video playback test, and here we were able to achieve 12 hours and 23 minutes. We kept the adaptive refresh rate and full HD plus resolution 200 lux brightness, and this value I would say it's pretty much equal to the galaxy s20 ultra.

As you can see here, just one minute. Difference means it's basically equal above the Huawei Mate XS above the galaxy s, 20 regular model below the OnePlus 8, and also below the Galaxy Note 10, plus by six hours. So that's quite the drop in PC mark continuous usage is, I would say, decent 10 hours and 11 minutes. It beats galaxy. S20 ultra beats galaxy s20, so that's cool.

It stays below the galaxy s20, plus the note 10 plus and Huawei p40 pro, as well as OnePlus 8. So the battery remains not so impressive compared to the rivals, especially the OnePlus 8, which is a behemoth in this area. The charging is done in one hour and 23 minutes, also rather poor, compared to what Huawei and Oppo are offering right now, at least after 30 minutes you're at 42 and one hour means 81, but I've seen much better on other phones. We also have multiple power saving settings, so at least there's that when it comes to acoustics, we have a pair of speakers. There's the bottom speaker here, there's the top speaker here, which is very well hidden.

You probably cannot even see it. So these are stereo speakers, and we have Dolby Atmos technology, also AKG tuning and don't look for it. There's no audio jack here at the bottom, and also no audio jack at the top side. So there are that headphones, bundled here are tuned by AKG and have an USB connector, and I think it's high time we went to YouTube and looked up some copyright free music for you, okay, so I'm going to put the speakers to the test, make sure I activate the Dolby Atmos setting to make everything proper, and here we go. This should be fine, okay, so definitely a punchy bass.

I can actually feel the bass punching through the case it vibrates a little and uh. What else can I say the sound is pretty clear and loud to be honest. I've heard a bit louder, there's a good voice. The best parts about this speaker, aside from the pretty okay bass, voice and high notes, are quite fine. Now stereo would be good, but there's a bit of discrepancy between the bottom speaker and the top speaker.

The bottom one is quite powerful, and it's also easy to cover with your hand in landscape. As you can see, the placement here is unfortunate. So if you hold it like this you're going to be covering it when you're watching a movie or playing a game, it's better when it they place it here on this side, anyways uh, we also did some decibel meter tests. So there is that so, let's see how we did at the bottom, we achieved 87.8 decibels and at the top 77.8 decibels. So that's quite a difference.10 decibels. These were achieved with a typical acoustic test sample and, as you can see, we're on the 80s and 68 spot.

Only beating older phones when it comes to gaming, we achieve 94.2 decibels, which is underwhelming. Many phones nowadays go as high as 107 decibels like the Nokia 8.2 8.1 excuse me, or the ASUS ROG phone so expect it a bit more from Samsung, but in real life. If you leave the instruments aside, you'll probably be happy with the experience minus the part that you can cover the bottom speaker easily. Now, on the camera front, there aren't many surprises. You can see here the cutout for the selfie camera, a 10 megapixel shooter just like last year, and it's a singular camera.

It does 4k 60 frames per second video capture. So that's nice, there's a dual pixel phase action autofocus and at the back side comes the change goodbye time of flight sensor, hello, laser focus sensor, there's also the 108 megapixel main camera with the Samsung sensor. There's the periscope camera here for the zoom. It's a 12, megapixel, periscope, telephoto, camera optical image, stabilization 5x optical zoom, up to 50x digital zoom, and then there is the 12 megapixel ultra-wide camera led flash once again laser focus mechanism, and you can shoot 8k video this time with a cool 21 to 9 aspect ratios, and also you'll, be able to control the zoom speed from the pro video settings now the core innovation of the camera. To be honest, there is not many innovations here, but if you're really looking for some you'll find them here in the pro video department, so there is the 2129 8k, which is new and there's also the microphone settings which are also new, OMI directional front, rear, USB or Bluetooth, and you can also decrease or increase the level of sound Bluetooth actually means you can connect Galaxy Buds, live to the phone and use them as a microphone.

USB means you can connect the USB microphone and also when it comes to novelties single take has been expanded. Up to 15 seconds single take was inaugurated with the galaxy s20. It takes a series of shots and videos and using AI it creates the most Instagram worthy shots that will gather more likes. Okay, leaving that aside, I have to mention something. First, I was able to test the phone for a few days only got to test it during the daytime, so we don't have low light samples, but I'm going to judge the daytime photos now, since we have so many of them, I'm going to keep things short, I'm going to start with the things.

I noticed that this phone does better, so I was totally blown away by the quality of the reds. It has very rich reds here. This is an area in the shade hiding from the sun and those are some of the best reds I've seen on a phone they're, actually vivid they're. Actually, I would say multifaceted: we have multiple hues of red, not just the regular standard, artificial red. So that's nice to see.

Also. I feel that the exposure has been fixed compared to the s20 series, which sometimes got the vegetation and the sky a bit weird. If it was very sunny outside and, however, the ultra white camera may mess them up a little and overexpose at times now. My favorite part is definitely the zoom and check this out. So this is me sitting by a lake.

I see a block of apartments here, and I start zooming in okay, so this should be about 55x. Let's say this is 10x. This is probably 20x, and I'm thinking we already got 30 or 40 by now, and once again, it's this block here that we're watching this one here, so it's quite far and the zoom is actually more impressive than the galaxy water. This 20 ultra was a bit shaky when you start zooming in too high need a tripod. This one actually doesn't so better stabilization of the clarity of the image but higher levels of zoom.

That's one of the core things and, as you can see, the colors are spot-on when it comes to artificial objects, excellent focus here. I feel that the problems with the close-up focus from the s20 ultra have been fixed, but not totally, as you can see by these shots here of this uh metal acorn. Some of them are blurry because we got too close. But if you keep your distance, I would say that these results are better than the s20 ultra. One thing that I will advise you are never let the AI take pictures of flowers.

It creates some weird effects. It sees them like food and creates a weird blur that actually do not need when taking photos of flowers so calibration and details are spot on not much to complain happy with the zoom colors details and every once in a while. If you're capturing vegetation be advised that you may encounter some over exposure, particularly with ultrawide camera, okay, so selfies once again very happy with what's happening here. I actually knew that from last year. The note 20 excuse me, the note 10 plus, was a bit of a beast, and the s20 series was also rather good.

I love the texture of the skin, of the beard of the eyes and the hair lots of details happening here. It captures the proper amount of light and both is of course applied perfectly, not a big fan of the effects I've seen rival companies offering more effects. Samsung has been stuck with the same effects for about a year, so maybe they need to revamp that, but the way it cuts me from the background is satisfying. So this selfie camera is definitely solid. Okay, so this is it when it comes to the photos during the daytime, it's superior to the s20 ultra in zoom, stabilization and close-ups, and now let's talk about the videos, okay, so I will definitely use the MX player app to show you the AIDS uh.

We have a total of, let's see, 17 videos quite a few of them. Once again, I apologize for not being able to test the phone during the nighttime. I was only able to use it for about three or four days didn't get around to it. Okay, so first things. First, I want to show you how we did when it comes to destabilization tests, so this is it.

This is the stabilization test, we're descending a set of stairs, and I'm happy to inform you that the phone delivers. So there's no flicker here, there's no loss of the focus. So, as expected, the predecessor was fine. The s20 series was fine, so stabilization is a-okay, I'm also pretty impressed by the colors. This is actually taken with single take, and it generated more samples than one okay.

So this here from what I remember, should be a 4k 60 frames per second video with a ton of details, excellent shadows, perfect focus and very, very nice, colors and textures. Frankly, this is the best in class filming this year. I've seen so far and the selfie filming at 4k was good enough to start a vlogging career. This is taken by a phone. So if you put this on a large screen or a 4k TV, you will definitely not believe this.

What was taken by a phone? That's the sensation. You get the stabilization as you can see, it's basically perfect and if you thought that the selfie camera was good here check it out when you activate the cool pro effects, I'm talking about the selfie focus the live focus, video options. Now I'm blurring the background, and I'm actually applying more options. This was available last year as well. It keeps blowing my mind with its quality, so vloggers will definitely have once again a reason to buy the phone.

I've also taken 8k videos, the screen doesn't do them. Justice, 8k and 24p cinematic and everything is perfect. To be honest, it's flawless, I love the textures. I love the colors. I love the details if you're buying this phone you're buying it for the video alone and now also for the audio, because the microphones have definitely been revamped.

The fastest focus available, as you can see, focus on the foreground focus on the background very fast and very efficiently. Okay, I didn't think I forgot anything um, there's a video in here. That's a 8k one, and I'm not sure that this player can process it anyway. I think it's this one here. It's more cinematic, and it's a huge amount of detail, and maybe pro vloggers will cut and crop from the 8k video and enjoy the experience so perfect.

That's the word for the video capture have zero flaws to complain about okay, we proceed further once again apologizing for the lack of low light shots and the connectivity is also pretty well covered, starting off with this USB port. Here USB 3.2 in case anybody was wondering the phone has Wi-Fi six and also 5g and also 4g. It also has 4g versions. If you don't want to buy the 5d1 GPS, NFC, Bluetooth, 5.0 and something new here, there's something new called USB. It's a new type of transfer.

You just point your phone to another handset point to share when you start sharing content or data, it shows you the people available to share, and it can send gigabytes of files instantly with this new ultra-wideband technology from Samsung. The calls were loud and clear, and we also did a bunch of speed tests and prepared to be blown away, because I put my uplink archer 11000 routers to the test and check this out.708 mega per second downloads 472 mega per second uploads, that's Wi-Fi six! In a nutshell, the 4g was rather poor, didn't have 5g in my area, 53.9 over 16.2, download and upload. These aren't as impressive of the Wi-Fi six, but basically should be able to download the game like that cells in a second on this headset. Okay, so that's it. Connectivity wises then talk about the software, which is probably the biggest innovation that the phone brings aside from the periscope camera.

Okay, so uh you, one UI 2.5 applied on top of android 10. Basically, there is nothing truly hugely new compared to one UI 2.1. The interface is exactly the same. We have the 2-day view here. Bixby is still your assistant.

This is the multitasking, and you can also do split screen. If you want to that's only one example, we still have an interface focused on one hand, usage. We still have widgets, which are white and transparent. We still have a dark mode which applies system, white, okay. So that's it! That's one! You are in a nutshell, but there is novelty.

Okay, so let's take it one by one. Okay, so forgot to mention the edge panel here in case anybody was in using it. So we have linked to windows using link to windows. Now you can totally make a seamless transition to your PC. You can stop emailing photos to yourself.

You can manage your phone notification. Furthermore, you basically will not have to pick up the phone. Furthermore, you can see everything happening on your phone on your PC, that's linked to windows. It's an integration with OneNote one drive synced up to your PC. Basically, that's the core of it and uh gaming wise.

You should get 100 Xbox games running on this handset from September 15 with Xbox game pass ultimate and another change is the decks. The decks don't require a dock anymore. You just need to do it wirelessly, so you press here and, as you can see, you can mirror your phone wirelessly to a TV set, no more wires needed. So that's pretty cool. Okay, so um, let's see what else the s pen, so the s pen is now bronze, mystic bronze, just like the handset.

As you can see here and to be honest, it doesn't come with much innovation aside from latency, so the experience now is akin to pen on paper. So if I write here hi guys, it's exactly like me writing on paper with the accompanying sound. How are you okay? So if you don't feel that this is straight enough, you have an option here that will straighten up your text, and you can also convert it to digital text. As I did, and another innovation aside from straightening, you can save your file as a PDF Samsung note, file, PowerPoint and actually convert them from one to another, PDF to PowerPoint PowerPoint to PDF. You can annotate on PDFs and one of the cool features that I liked the most about the new features from the s pen.

You can now integrate an audio note. Furthermore, you can record audio and write notes if you're a student and put an audio bookmark. So if you press a word, it takes you to that part of the audio and that's pretty cool for me. Okay. So, basically, aside from that, all the other options you see here were available last year as well screen right.

Basically, you take a screenshot, and you start writing on it. There is also live message which basically animates a message AR doodle, which allows you to fool around, and basically I can draw all sorts of things around my head with all sorts of colors. I can draw ears, I can draw eyes, I can draw a mustache here and fool around. It was cool last year, but now it's getting dated fast and there are also new gestures, so the most the easiest way to access them is to go to the settings you're going to have a tutorial, and I feel that this time they actually got down the gestures last year they were a bit hit or miss this time, they're actually better applied. So these are the five new gestures.

If you want to go back to another window, you keep this button pressed, and you do something like this. Okay, so that one worked okay home, you can go home like this. I actually triggered the reasons by mistake. So this is it, this is home, and it actually worked. Fine and there's also one like this.

You can scribble, and this is the feature you saw before, which allows you to screen right. So these are the gestures that are sum total of 11 of them. You can actually customize some of them uh, so you can relate them to apps and features you can go here. You can have your air actions, and you can choose what happens when you press the s pen buttons in the apps below there's a lot to customize. If you really want to, if you hold down the pen button, you can do all of these things.

It's an accurate pen, and it's got new gestures, but overall I don't feel a huge jump from last year. That's the conclusion. You should remember okay, so I showed you the gestures. The latest is now 9 milliseconds, the note 20, the simple one has 26 milliseconds the previous models had 48 milliseconds okay, so we got this down as well. Aside from that, you can see here the pre-installed apps.

You got your Spotify Netflix. You got your Facebook and galaxy store. Furthermore, you got your Samsung SmartThings Samsung Patreon, pre-installed, Samsung health pan up, and I think that's about it and I think we've also reached the end of the review. There's also the game launcher, but you know that from previous versions. Okay, so I think it's time we accessed our website's website.

Excuse me and showed you the verdict. Okay, so uh the verdict usually involves pros and cons on the pro side. It's definitely a pretty looking phone. I love the mystic bronze hue. It's also very comfy for how huge it is.

I'm talking, obviously about the large diagonal. It's got the best filming on the market. I can guarantee that it's got the best stylus on the market. Uh exquisite reds in photo captures ip60 certification, Wi-Fi 6, 5g, solid zoom and maybe even more solid than the s20 water up to 5x uh, pretty nice, Microsoft, integration and the solid screen crayfish battery. I would say and solid set of speakers now on the con side.

There's the throttling of the CPU there's the overheating, which happened not once the fa. The charging isn't very fast for me and the s-pen features aren't revolutionary they're going to come to the note 10 plus from last year, with an update, I'm pretty, pretty sure about that. Okay, so you just saw another advantage of the phone which I unwillingly showed you. The fingerprint scanner is now more accurate and faster than the s20 ultra in the note 10 plus. So that's a pro back to the cons once again, hot throttling, no fast charge s pen features could come with an update to previous models.

Uh also, the close-up problems are still there, not as huge as this 20 ultra. But if you get really close, you'll be underwhelmed, it's a very pricey phone at 1400 dollars and the battery compared to the rivals is no good. I mentioned in the pro section, because it's okay for 120 hertz, but otherwise nope, and also you're, only going to have 120 hertz refresh rate on the full HD resolution, not the quad HD one. So there's that, okay, so I think we covered everything um, maybe mentioning the audio recording as a plus the omnidirectional thingy, and the fact that one UI didn't have a bump as a con. In the end, I can advise you to definitely keep your Galaxy Note.10, plus this year, you're not missing out on anything. However, if you're planning on getting the s20 ultra, I would actually go ahead and buy this one.

It solves some problems of the s20 ultra, it's easier to handle it's comfier. It's got slightly better battery slightly better close-up focus slightly less overheating, a much better fingerprint scanner and a better stabilized zoom. So if you're choosing between the s20 water and this one choose the one with the s, pen, and you're, going to get the best filming on the market, best s, pen, the best stylus on the market and probably the best audio recording you can perform right now and with the audio recording and the filming in mind, this is the best phone that a journalist can buy, maybe also a vlogger. This is from gsnow. com.

I know it's been a quite fast review, two or three days. I wanted to test the low light, maybe in the future. So this is it from us. Keep your note.10 plus bye, bye.

Source : GSMDome