The EXYNOS Problem. - Long-Term Galaxy Note20 Ultra Review By Kenneth Tanaka

It's been more than a month since I first unboxed and used the Enos Galaxy Note, 20 ultra I pre-ordered the thing in Indonesia, so no 5g, no snapdragon 8 gigs of ram instead of 12, but I got double the storage as a base model, and it costs 18 million rupiah here or about 1200 bucks converted to us dollars crazy amount of money to spend on just the phone in my opinion. But can I justify it somehow tldr, I'm in love with the hardware. The cameras kept on impressing me with its quality and the three years guaranteed updates are a breath of fresh air in the android world. But, despite all that, I don't think a lot of people should be buying the note 20 ultra, unless you really really really want the s pen. So, let's talk more good morning. Everyone Kenneth here and today I'll be talking about all the goods, the bad and the ugliest about the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra, and I was specifically talking about the Enos version here, which, let's be honest, this is the version that most people are going to be getting now before.

We start a little disclaimer note. All the things I'll say in this video is from me trying to utilize this phone as much as I can in my creative workflow as a creator, and this note 20 ultra is bought by myself- I'm not sponsored or paid by anyone, and I always give you my honest opinion. So if you want to support the channel, please consider using the affiliate links down description and, of course, hit the thumbs up subscribe. So you can see more of me talking about tech, okay, let's get straight to the point and talk about the ugly stuff. First and first, the camera bump is otherworldly huge, even with the case this phone still wobbles on a table, so I can never write on it peacefully with the s pen, which is crazy, but since the camera is just so good talk about later on, I can somehow forgive this next.

One is the price starting at 1300 bucks in the US. This phone is expensive, but I try to think of it as an investment. You buy a phone that can shoot edit publish, promote your content. All of that for 300 bucks and actually, if you've noticed a lot of my videos, have had note 20 ultra as a secondary camera there. For me, I love the quality out of it.

Now I don't edit videos in my phone, but it's got the power. If I wanted to do that, but of course we can't talk about power without talking about the Enos 990 chips inside now. To be fair, this chip performs well enough. I've never had any problem with launching apps switching between a lot of them. The eight gigs of ram is managed well, so the apps that I need are always open, and basically I can throw anything that I want pop-up screens hours of gaming at max settings, editing photos in Lightroom, recording tons of 4k videos.

It does that pretty well, because there are occasions where the processor seemed to struggle, for example, is the 120 hertz refresh rate screen, especially during the time I binged through the whole 400 plus episodes of god of high school. I noticed it stutters pretty consistently and that felt jarring, but I'm using Firefox here it may be the browser's fault, but I think I've experienced that even when scrolling through settings as well now about the thermals, I have a pretty interesting finding to tell you guys in my first week I wasn't using any case for this phone. Let me rephrase that I didn't have any case. I needed to wait a couple of weeks for my case to arrive so during that time I used it as it is, and oh boy it gets hot after a few minutes of taking photos and videos outdoors just for camera samples for this review. It got to the point where I just can't pocket it anymore.

The phone felt like a hot potato and this app called ACLU battery. I checked the temps are at 42 degrees Celsius, that's the battery, which got me really worried. So at that point I just got back into the car and decided to move on cool the thing off. I thought that's because it was a hot day right, but now the phone kept on heating up pretty consistently. If I tried to do anything with it even indoors on an air-conditioned room like this, not only the back side of the case is hot, but the heat dissipates to the entire screen, so it was hot to touch as well, but that's all fixed when my case arrived.

For some reason: the phone is much much much more comfortable to be held with the case on it never felt too hot. Even after gaming recording 4k videos, it's almost like the phone was designed to be used with a case in the first place, and now after weeks of using the phone with a case, I can comfortably say that heat is not much of an issue with the Enos node 20 ultra just get a phone case. Now. At this point I know you're, probably confused. I said that this was the ugly part, but why, in the end, I always found a fix to the problems I mentioned.

Well, that's because I haven't mentioned this real ugly part that my friend is because you miss out on the things only available on snapdragon chips, and I'm not saying the performance or the thermals or battery life. I don't have the snapdragon version, so I can't comment much on that, but it is something called ABT TWS I've explained it in this video, and basically it's a standard from Qualcomm that brings the quality of an AirPods to a lot of true wireless earbuds that can be as low as 20 bucks, so the earbuds that support it are everywhere, but the phone well not so much, I think only snapdragon 845 or above. But since you should be getting 865 plus here, you will get low latency for gaming, seamless, earbuds, switching great battery life out of the earbuds and great sound. So it's really a shame that this super expensive phone doesn't support it not to forget after, HD and optics adaptive are not supported as well. Now at this point, I'm not sure if the snapdragon ships support them or not, Samsung could have disabled them.

But as someone who reviewed a lot of true wealth earbuds, I know for a fact that apex TWS support is a big deal. So not supporting these better codecs are just a dealbreaker to me. That's actually it for the ugly part, and it may not be a big deal to you if you're not really into throughout earbuds, but honestly in a phone at this caliber there shouldn't be any ugly thing other than it's expensive, in my opinion, moving on to the bad stuff. Actually I wanted to talk about the thermals here, but we've talked about it. So, let's talk about the battery life.

Please don't tell me to turn off 120 hertz refresh rate. It's a nice feature to have, and Samsung has done a great job implementing adaptive refresh rate, so it only ramps up to 120 hertz when you're interacting with the screen and when you're not, it runs slower to save battery it's a great tech and all, but still if I use the phone more than just replying to messages, I barely get through a whole day without touching the magic 20 number. Now I have an app called ACLU battery to track battery usage at the start, I had seven hours of screen on time, but as I use the phone to record videos play games and things like that now I have five hours. Instead, this doesn't feel like an all-day battery at all. Speaking about charging, this phone only supports 25 watts so topping it up takes quite a while, and it gets slower when it's hot, so sometimes it would say one hour left to fall.

Then I kept on using the phone lightly and after one hour it is, you know like 20 more charged. So in the end, it just felt like a normal charging speed to me about one and one and a half hour wired from zero to full or two hours, if you're, using a fast wireless charger and twice that, if you're not using a fast wireless charger. Fortunately, the phone supports USB pd for fast charging, which is very handy because I can just use my MacBook charger to charge this phone, and it's pretty quick. Now. The next bad thing is big speed, but I think we all know that.

So, let's move on okay, it's the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor and to be specific, my problem is with the speed it's pretty dang slow, I've tweeted about this as well. During my first week of using the phone and until now I never get used to the location here, and even if I do, the phone would show no match first before finally, unlocking on my second attempt or third or fourth, it always felt like a chore to unlock the phone. Now setting up a face unlock to work in tandem with fingerprint and identifying me helps a little but face unlock is just 2d image recognition and I can't trust it too much. I just use it now because it's covet time- and I don't think any stranger will be touching my phone anytime soon and even so I turned off the faster recognition setting. I just want it to be as secure as possible, and I hate it when I see one of my payment app except face recognition as a way to unlock and bypass the pin input.

Fortunately, it's only this one app I've never seen anything other than that that accepts the face. It only accepts fingerprints and I recommend it stay that way. Okay, now we have finished talking about the bad things here. If you're willing to accept that, though, the rest of the things about this phone is really, really good, and we'll start with the biggest part of the phone, which is the screen. That's not a single doubt that this is the best display in the current market and possibly the best one in your house.

The colors are beautiful up to 1500, nits means HDR, stuff and YouTube and Netflix look fantastic, and also it gets really bright outside the camera. Cutout is tiny. It disappears in no time, but all things considered, it is still a beautiful screen to look at and because it uses gorilla, glass victim. It will stay that way for a long time to come, while the 120 hertz refresh rate, is not one that I can't live without. But this does you notice.

When reading at night you scroll and the text will be blurry, maybe you can call it ghosting in the note 20 ultra, it's still not perfect, but it's damn close. There is very little ghosting, it's very comfortable to read and scroll with at night, and this one thing is what I will really miss when I go back to my iPhone 10. One thing I definitely won't miss is the curved edges here. It makes videos and movies have that warped. Look at the edges, but it's not as severe as the others, and I especially hate it when I want to type I have to reach out to the other end.

With my thumb I will end up accidentally touching whatever is here, but these honestly are small problems that happens just every once in a while. So it's no big deal to me because ultimately, this is a great screen, no matter what you throw at it. Even if you want to do color, sensitive work, just set the picture profile to default, you'll be good to go now. Let's talk about the next great thing that keeps on impressing me, the more I use it, and it's the camera, and after seeing the teardown by fixity of the note 20 ultra, I know it really packs some crazy stuff under this huge bump. While I do miss taking portraits in two times zoom you have to crop in on the one time here having five times.

Optical zoom means that if you go to a concert or a cathedral or in classes anything where you have to sit far from the action, you can't take much better photos than any other phone, and I think this is now a real, useful zoom. Now, I'm not that big of a photographer myself, but I do appreciate great looking photos and if pictures from iPhones look flatter and easier to edit, the picture from Samsung looks ready to share it's vivid, colorful and especially with the scene. Analyzer thing it automatically adjusts the colors according to different scenarios. But now the best thing about this camera is also the worst thing about it. And I'm talking about the super narrow depth of field in this main shooter.

For the first time ever in a phone, I feel like I'm shooting at f 1.8, that's similar to real cameras. I mean the area, that's in focus are very narrow and there's also pretty heavy vignetting and distortion going on, which you can see the most when taking a shot of a document. Up close is really annoying, but I think it's just a physical limitation of the lens. That's why we have hefty camera lenses that can cost thousands and thousands of dollars easily. But when you start taking photos of anything else that are in document, it really feels like you, don't need any artificial portrait mode anymore, because just getting the subject reasonably close, like a meter away from the phone already brings in so much both, and I just love it every time.

Talking about the other lenses here, the ultra-wide angle takes better photos than iPhone 11 Pro. I know that for a fact, and you can even have night mode on that lens, in fact, on every lens, even on a periscope zoom, and for this lens I rarely use it, but when the situation calls for it, it's priceless, but I cannot say the same phrase for the front camera. This thing is just like everybody said: even with the beauty effect turned all the way off faces, just look pale and weird, I just hate it speaking about recording videos. I think it's widely agreed that iPhones are still king, but I can't deny the no 20 ultra gets, really, really close or actually even better in terms of depth of field. Prove me wrong.

I love the both when shooting b-rolls of a product with this phone, also with the pro video feature built into the camera app. It's just really easy to set up and dial in the settings that you want, there's just a lot of great stuff going on with the pro photo and pro video mode here. But what I appreciate the most is the ability to select the audio source. You can select to record with just the back microphone front, microphone or record, with only Bluetooth earbuds as a source or even with an USB mic. This seriously ups the quality of your recording to a whole new level, and I did the testing in my unboxing video already so make sure to check it out after this video.

It is great now there are some features here that I don't use. Obviously, first is the 8k recording and second, is the 108 megapixel mode it's fun to play with, but especially in 8k, you lose so much stuff like stabilization. It crops in like crazy and rolling shutter is awful and paired with the huge file sizes it makes it unusable for me and the same thing can be saved for the GoPro like super steady mode. Maybe it's useful when it's really shaky and really bright outside but indoors. It's just too much of a quality hit.

Videos become grainy and, most importantly, the normal stabilization is just enough for me so to wrap up the camera part here. I didn't have time to talk about every feature, but it takes some great photos and videos and Samsung did a good job in making the whole feature set easily accessible. Everything is always one or two tabs away, which I really appreciate just fix the colors of the front camera. Please. I only have one last part talking about the experience, and I tell you I love it now talking about one UI 2.5. I love how you know it focuses on one-handed usage, and you don't have to stretch to the far top of the phone as much as with other phones but specific to the note 20 ultra.

This is something that you don't notice until you try it out. It's the haptic feedback. It has a really nice and snappy like the feedback that vibrates the phone and ticks every time you take a photo toggle, something on and off. This is my favorite is when typing, and I especially love the edge panels feature here. I know it's not an exclusive feature to note 20, but having a quick shortcut to the apps that I use a lot or other stuff like calculator utility tools, you can download them.

It is really handy. Also, wireless decks are nice. When you want to do more than just mirroring your phone, I usually use it to show pictures browse websites to show to my family, but I still won't use it for office work because it's not really that responsive. I know that's largely because it's wireless, but even if I plug it in I have to pay for Microsoft Office and deal with the different feature sets of office mobile compared to the office that I'm used to nah. I think I'll skip.

And finally, let's address that big thing of what makes a note. It is the s pen for those of you, hoping that I would be a heavy s, pen user. I am sorry I tried, but I couldn't in the end. I just use it every once in a while jotting down quick notes, annotating stuff and yeah, not much else, I'm an Apple Pencil user. Ever since the time of its release, it's expensive, but I think it's worth it because it enables stuff that I can't do on either of my phone and my laptop, and what are those things? Actually, it is exactly the same thing that I just mentioned: taking notes for my lectures and annotating, PDFs or e-books, or whatever photos emails, but why I don't love the s pen, then I don't even have to recharge it, and it's free well, first, the screen of the phone, it's just too small to do anything meaningful.

It's huge for a phone, but it's nowhere close to the screen real estate of at least a 10-inch tablet, which I think is the perfect size for note-taking and the biggest defender is the curved edges. Here you can say just pinch. The canvas down and Samsung actually realized that in Samsung notes you can pinch the canvas there lock the zoom, and then I just don't touch the curve at all. But it's not ideal. The already limited screen is even smaller.

Now and it's a challenge for me to organize my notes. I have to keep on adding more and more page and a small lecture turned into a long scroll of notes. Second, these are mobile. Apps Samsung notes is good, won't complain on that, but if you start looking for other apps, it gets worse. I use OneNote good notes and notability in my iPad, but I can only try one note, since the others are iOS only and well it's just not a good experience.

Just like what I said before. The screen is just too small for me, but let me know if you do agree that apps matter just as much as the hardware. Third is actually no big deal to me, but I usually type on a keyboard with both my fingers and my pen like this, but when it detects the pen it completely disables finger touches, so I can't do it. The way I want- and the last thing is this s- pen is small. I know I won't be using this for long lectures but yeah.

It's understandable. You want to put this inside a phone right so nah. This is not the complaints just like it's just the nature of how it is overall. I think it's largely up to you whether this s pen is a valuable feature or not for most people, I think it'll be a nice to have that you can take photos remotely with jot down some quick notes and make precise annotation, but not much else, and despite the improvements over the latency, I don't think it's a great note-taking experience because of the limited screen space. Well, of course, if you happen to know a great app feel free to, let me know down in the comments below and help each other out and finally, as a conclusion, I still adore the design just as much as I first saw this note, 20 ultra and using it has been a great experience for the most part.

Yes, it gets quite warm when you're not using any case, and you don't have apex TWS. The curved edges are annoying when taking notes and the fingerprint sensor is slow for 2020 and sometimes the battery may be a problem. But if you look past that you are getting a phone that takes great pictures and paired with an USB microphone, it takes professional quality videos. Everything about it is as premium as it could be, plus a guaranteed three years of software updates from Samsung you're, getting quite a powerful phone here, and I think that's what Samsung intended this phone to be: it's not the best value for money, it's not even the best at anything, but it does everything very well. So that's pretty much it for the video.

Let me know by typing team tested by ken if you have stuck around until now. Thank you so much for watching. I know there won't be much people watching this video, but I just want to finish what I started, and this is finally my first ever full review of a phone, and I'm proud of it. I believe I still have a long way to make it a concise video. Maybe even I have to split these videos apart, but still I want to be as detailed as possible.

So please, let me know what I can do and how to be better. Don't forget to hit the thumbs up subscribe, I'm available on Instagram and Twitter. If you want to talk more and from now on, I'm going to return this phone back to my father and save up for an android phone of my own. What will it be until then? I'm Kenneth- and I will see you in the next one you.

Source : Kenneth Tanaka