Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Review: Righting S20 Ultra's Wrongs By ben's gadget reviews

Hey everybody, I hope you guys- are all healthy and safe. This is my review of the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra now. Let's say you don't have a lot of time to. Let's say you want me to summarize the review in just two sentences. If I were to do that, I would just say this: the Galaxy Note 20 ultra it's basically a Gaussian s20 ultra except the focusing issues have been fixed, and you get an s pen, stylus other than that. These two are very, very similar devices.

Very, very similar performance. I mean yeah, it's true, you have a snapdragon 865 plus in here that's more powerful than the snapdragon 865, but the performance are hardly noticeable in real life use. Now, that's not a bad thing, because the a65 is already a very powerful soc and the same can be said for the a65 plus, basically, whatever you want to run you'll be able to run on this phone, including recording, 8k video. Let's go over the hardware really quick. This is the new mystic bronze, mystic, copper color.

That Samsung is marketing and I like it. This is a really nice looking design. I think it's a major upgrade over the s20 ultra first, because I like that the display is curved. Now this is a minority opinion, a lot of people like that. That's what the ultra went with a flatter display, but to me that phone lost the symmetry that we have known, Samsung Galaxy phones, for this is back the front and the back are symmetrical meaning.

You can roll this phone in your hands like this, and you can't really tell which side is the front which size the back, except for the fact that now the back, it's like matte glass. So we have a triple camera system here yeah. This is a huge camera bump. But again I like this. It feels like Samsung made this bump big now on purpose and built the design around a large bump, whereas on the s20 ultra, I felt like that giant camera bump was just kind of tacked onto the phone's body.

This feels like there's a purpose behind this bump. So up here you have a 12, megapixel, ultra-wide angle, camera right here. It's a 108 megapixel sensor, that's the camera that gave the s20 ultra those focusing issues, because the sensor are so large that the depth of field focus area is a little narrower and to fix that Samsung has added a laser autofocus sensor right here and that does the job. The focusing on this now is lightning quick, just like on previous Samsung phones before the s20 ultra finally down here you have a 12 megapixel, periscope, zoom lens. It allows you to get 5x, lossless, zoom and up to 50x digital zoom.

So, yes, Samsung has also backtracked from that 100x zoom from the s20 ultra, because Samsung realized it's gimmicky and at 100x it's pretty damn blurry. To be honest.50X on this phone is still a little blurry. As you can see, the zoom camera is definitely not as good as what's seen in the Huawei p40 pro plus, which has an extra fold in the periscope but still you're, getting spotless, 10x, even 20x images, and if you want to go up to 50x, it's still pretty useful in a pinch, because you can read street signs across the street. You know stuff like that. There are a lot of people who dismiss um the need for such a zoom.

You know you see them on comment, section or twitter saying oh, why would you want to zoom more than 2x? I think you're a little narrow-minded for someone like me, I like to zoom 10x all the time, for example, earlier today in Hong Kong, I spotted this butcher. You know he looked pretty damn cool like staying the posing in front of his meat, and I wanted to get a picture of him. So what I did was, I just turned on 5xzoom and then 10xzoom, and I got these two shots that turned out pretty nice, and you know I think it's a pretty stylish shot that I can post on Instagram. If I didn't have a periscope zoom camera on my phone, I would probably have to walk a little closer just to get a decent, 2x zoom, and he would see that I'm taking a picture of him, and he'll probably get mad at me now around the front. It looks very similar to last year's note 10 there's this around the front.

This looks very similar to the note 10. It's a 6.9 inch, quad HD OLED display absolutely a stunning screen to look at with very minimal bezels and a tiny hole punch up top that you really only notice when you open a white background, but new this year it's a 120 hertz refresh rate, but it also it's an improvement over the s20 ultra's 120, because now you know that phone you either have to stick with 120 or 60. This phone now has an intelligent variable, refresh rate. So that means, if you, if you're, using something that will take advantage of the 120 like when you're swiping around in the UI, then you get 120 hertz, but when you're doing something that does not require 120 like you're, looking at a still picture or watching a 30 frames per second YouTube. Video you'll intelligently drop to 60 hertz, or maybe even 30 hertz, to match what the screen needs and that will save your battery because you're not always running at 120 hertz, and that has made a big jump in the battery life.

The s20 ultra's battery life did not impress me that much, even though it had a 5 000 William cell now, this phone has a smaller battery 4500 William hour, but I've been getting all day battery 13 hours out and about- and I would finish the day with still like 20 battery life less now. Of course, this is a flagship of flagship, so you have all the stuff that you'd expect like wireless charging, water resistance and stereo speakers that are really damn loud and also SD cards, support up to one terabyte of storage out of the box. You're getting a 256 or 512 gigs of storage with 12 gigs of ram. Now, of course, it wouldn't be a note. Without the s pen, the s pen has been moved from the right side to the left side this year and for the most part it performs the same as before, except one major improvement and the other improvement is kind of gimmicky.

The first improvement is that the latency between the s pen tip and the screen has been drastically lowered. So now, there's virtually no lag between what you're, drawing with your hand and what is showing up on the screen. That's a major improvement in a mix drawing or taking notes just feels a lot more natural. The second new feature is now the even more shortcut gestures. I mean Samsung already introduced this with the note 9 two years ago, meaning you can control the phone with the s pen via Bluetooth.

So one of my favorite use features is you hold on to the s pen button to launch the camera once you're in the camera app you can switch between the selfie lens or the main camera cycle through different modes and even take a picture by just pressing on the s pen. That's very useful, Samsung added more this year, which is these really weird uh gestures that allow you to like to draw a circle like that to like maybe um go into app overview. You see, I just did that right now, but to be honest, it is very hard to get right. You first get the phone. Furthermore, you know there's like a demo for you to test.

I basically was stuck on it for like 10 minutes, and I couldn't figure it out and even to this day, I find it very hard to figure out all these gestures and, to be honest, why do you need all this nonsense? If you're doing this, this close to the phone, you might as well just reach your finger over and just tap it on the screen? Okay, as I said this one is sterile speaker, so you know what we have to. Do we have to test that stereo speaker sound, so sound coming off down here and also in the front? It's a very nice speaker, you see, I cannot cover it at all, all right now, let's look at the cameras. Okay, I'm just gonna, give you the short version right away. For the most part, the camera performance overall are virtually identical to the Samsung Galaxy s20 ultra's cameras, except the focusing issue, has been fixed. So that means that you can expect this camera to be very, very good.

Most of the time, especially during the day, you get some really stunning, nice looking photos with really dialed up contrast that just looks really photogenic and almost like. There's a filter applied to it already that you can put on Instagram and at night it also pulls in a lot of light, but to the point that it over exposes city lights in Hong Kong quite regularly. So, once again, in terms of nighttime photography, I still find that this falls short of the Huawei p40 pro plus, but I do think it is better than what the iPhone 11 Pro max can do, and also the Google Pixel 4. So I would say that the note 20 ultra, just like the s20 ultra camera system. You know it's a nice second or third place for me, but it is not the first place that still goes to the Huawei p40 pro plus.

I'm also really liking the wide angle camera it's wider than usual, but Samsung has fixed the barrel distortion you're, just getting a lot of details, even though wide angle, cameras, you know traditionally loses a lot of details and struggles with dynamic range, but that is not the case right here now. What's new to the camera mode this year, is this new pro video mode? So, as you can see, there's a lot more controls than you would find in your typical camera viewfinder. Now, if you look at the lower left-hand corner it's a bar for audio levels, that's because the note 20 ultra has multiple mics that can um take multi-directional audio. So if you tap on this little button here, you'll see that right now by default, it's an army. So that means it's recording sound from all direction.

But you pick front now. This will prioritize my voice because I am in front of the camera. So this is using the mic. That's forward-facing and just picking sound from me, and ideally not so much sound from in front of me. But then, if you tap on this, then now you're picking up sound from in front of that person, and you also have options for USB mic and Bluetooth mic too, but I don't have those plugged in okay testing the microphone.

So now the sound is coming from the front. Now I'm going to set it so the sound's coming from the back. So now it's picking up that sound, so the bus might have been pretty loud. Now it's the back now switch back to the front, switch back to the front, switch back to the front, switch back to this side now, so now we're picking up sound from out there and right here focus now this is cool. You can control focus right here, so you can do something artistic like this.

Like uh, you know begin recording with this little blur. Both effect right here like this and then kind of bring the scene into focus like a little cinematic vibe, and you have focus peaking right here. The green bars show you, where is in focus, it's stuff that you would know of you, you shoot with a real video camera. So this is a really nice layout. That gives you a lot of control over shooting videos, but video stabilization is perfect.

Now, there's actually two ways to shoot. You can shoot the main camera. That's just standard video. You get the best video quality, but then video stabilization is totally just is and as is pretty good, but not like flawless. But then you turn on super stable mode.

Then you will shoot with the ultra-wide angle, camera which is wider, but then the software will crop in, and you'll get a lot more stable videos. But when you shoot with this camera, because you know this lower pixel count, so you lose a little of details and especially in low light situation, it's not going to look as pleasing. Now. Is this the best video camera phone around? I can't say for sure I think the iPhone 11 Pro max still has a little better stabilization. The Huawei p40 pro plus has a little better stabilization too, but you factor in the fact that you have you can control your microphone audio inputs like which direction you can shoot in 21 by nine, and you can shoot in 8k, and you can do manual focus all that which the iPhone cannot do.

Then I think this might be in contention or a major contender for the best video camera around now I haven't talked about the selfie camera much, but that's just because I'm not that much of a selfie person, but I don't think you have any complaints whatsoever. This camera. It's very fast to focus, and you can even tap on this icon to get a wider field of vision, but of course, there's only one selfie camera right here, so that means when you're shooting in this mode. It's just cropped in a little, but resolution looks perfect. Now I do think my face.

You know Korean phones, just like Chinese phones. They always apply these artificial beauty filters that make you look a little more fake than with an iPhone, but some people like that. I think, for the most part, no complaints about this selfie camera. So that's about it. For my review of the Galaxy Note 20 ultra now, can I say that this phone is a truly cutting edge, bleeding edge phone that blew me away? No, because the Huawei p4 pro plus still has arguably better hardware, and, to be honest, this is not even Samsung's top phone Samsung's top phone is the upcoming galaxy phone 2.

That's the phone that Samsung will be walking around showing to everybody puffing the chest up: belay yeah! This is why, with Samsung, we made this that nobody else can do. That's the phone that Samsung's truly apex device. This is more like a plain and safe refinement over the already excellent galaxy s20 ultra and the Galaxy Note 10 plus now. There are many very good reasons to own this phone, though, because there are people that really like having a stylist, I'm not one of those I find the style is very fun to have. You know I like drawing mustaches on people, and I like controlling the phone, sometimes with styles, but I don't need it.

It's not a must-have for me, but there are a lot of people to whom this is a must-have, and you're one of those people. What other options do you have is either the note 10 plus or the note 20 ultra now this one's a little expensive, it's over 1 200 1 300, depending on where you are, but that's the price of all flagship. Nowadays, if you know you're on the market for value- and we just don't want to spend that much money, then go get an OnePlus word go get a Xiaomi, me 10. If you already know you want a flagship, then these prices are kind of expected. Nowadays, I actually think considering how much a phone does for us from a day-to-day basis and contains cutting edge.

Tech like this screen is better than the screen on most of our TVs. This phone has more processing power than most of our laptops, so I think considering all that 1200 is not unreasonable. So once again, that's my review of the note 20 ultra. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to my channel or follow me on Instagram. I have a lot more stuff coming up, including on the Xiaomi mi 10 ultra and a couple of devices from Arno too so stuff's coming non-stop man.

I'm going to have a lot more videos coming up. So please subscribe to my channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks for watching stay, healthy and stay safe.

Source : ben's gadget reviews