Samsung galaxy s 20 ultra 2020

this is the Samsung galaxy s 20 Ultra and it is samsung's attack of the numbers. so this is it this huge phone here is a Samsung's highest and most expensive flagship phone ever and there's a lot of word Samsung could have chosen to use here they could have gone plus or max they could have gone pro but they went ultra ultra ultra extremist radical yeah I think that's actually pretty accurate so if the question is how can you possibly justify a new phone that expensive Samsung's answer is by throwing all the hardware at you all the specs every single big number they can possibly think of that going into this phone it looks on paper like a great idea how could phone with snapdragon 865, 16 gigs of ram 512 gigs of ufs 3.0 a hundred and eight megapixels a hundred X zoom 8k five thousand milliamp hours 120 Hertz 1440p 5g how could this phone be anything other than the best well I'll tell you but let's start with the design though just because I think it's actually the least ultra thing about this phone and it's pretty simple actually it's a massive phone glass sandwich with a gigantic recognizable double camera bump expandable storage at the top speaker at the bottom r.i.p headphone jack you know on one hand it kind of blends in with the smartphones of today especially in Samsung's lineup but on the other hand there's no mistaking it actually, remember when the smartphone displays we're getting bigger and bigger and then they first crossed over five inches like average and then they sort of evened out a 5.3 inch and people thought it was kind of getting crazy and then Samsung because who else came out with the Galaxy mega that's really a phone that came out with and named that had a 6.3-inch display it was just hilarious like no one else would try that but this phone was the size of a tablet with the form factor of a phone it really was the megaphone yet. here we are now today with galaxy s 20 ultra bigger than any galaxy mega or any galaxy note even has ever been with a 6.9-inch display it's huge for me it still fits in my pocket and it's usable for me but it might not be for everyone clearly, giant phones aren't for everyone.

I gotta say though for an ultra phone the color options of glossy black glossy gray area a bit underwhelming of course, channel sponsor D brand will gladly step up and customize a look on the back and you can get as wild as this robot camo skin but don't let that be a cop-out Samsung I'm hoping for a little more variety next time till then I'll the link that skin below one thing you do get from a huge phone though is a huge display so just to give you the numbers 6.9 inch diagonal 120 Hertz 1440p and stop me if you've heard this before but Samsung has once again made the best display in any smartphone best brightness colors contrast the best viewing angles of any smartphone display I've ever seen I feel like I'm starting to sound like display mate it's the highest a plus I've ever given just you'll know it when you see it and it's not just the high-end spec in big numbers they've also flattened out the edges of the display so it doesn't spill over the sides anymore and I appreciate that from a usability perspective and I hope they keep that trend up throughout the rest of their lineup love that and if I have any gripes really it's that the ultrasonic fingerprint reader underneath the screen is basically the same as last year there's no real substantial improvements and that's fine it's still a decently fast and responsive one and once you learn where it is with muscle memory its kind of quick but I was hoping these would get bigger and faster from generation to generation and that hasn't happened yet now it is worth noting you don't get all the big numbers straight out the box this phone is actually, 1080p 60 Hertz out the box pretty basic and you can either notch it up to 120 Hertz or 1440p but not both at the same time personally I'm picking 120 Hertz every single time I was waiting for or asking for the high refresh rate from Samsung and we finally got it and it's great the difference between 60 Hertz and 120 Hertz in like a 90% of what you're doing on your phone which is scrolling it's fantastic and then the display also has a 240 Hertz touch sensor refresh so no matter what the resolution you're in it keeps it feeling snappy and responsive as expected which is just what we've seen in this gaming phones that came before it.

now do I wish they would let us use this phone at 120 Hertz 1440p full resolution at the same time yeah I wish they would allow it right now that's disabled I originally thought it might be a snapdragon 865 limitation but it turns out it's not they just don't enable it because of they probably think it would crush battery but I say if you're paying fourteen hundred bucks for this phone and you know what you're getting yourself into you can still put it at 60 Hertz 1080p out the box but let us enable it if we really want to maybe they can enable that with a software update and you know just put a little disclaimer hey you turn these both on it'll crush your battery but you paid for the phone so you get to turn it on alright. so let's talk about that battery 5000 milliamp hours on the s20 ultra and this is one of those specs that usually translates pretty well from paper to real life the bigger the battery the better and this one's getting too big thumbs up from me we know five thousand milliamp hours is huge but I was just a tiny bit worried about how well it would do power a giant bright six-point nine inches 120 Hertz display turns out it's perfectly fine I've been getting consistently six-plus hours of screen on time at the end of every day easy with battery to spare heavy stuff gaming a lot of navigation while driving and I've never killed it in a single day so I don't even worry about it.

anymore to be honest I was thinking that I was gonna have to take a few extra days of testing to flip it down to sixty Hertz and see how much the battery that saves me but yeah I don't have to this is an all-day phone at 120 Hertz which is dope but alright let's just face it the big numbers that you guys are probably most curious about and how well they translate is around the back of this phone and that's the cameras so that's that hundred and eight megapixels that's 8k video and that's even printed on the back of this phone the 100x spaced zoom but as we've hopefully learned by now numbers on the spec sheet for cameras don't always translate super well to real-world performance I've seen about a million 64 megapixel cameras that are worse than the 12-megapixel cameras in the pixel and the iPhone so for me seeing how hard Samsung was leaning into this camera upgrade for the s20 ultra my real question at the beginning of this was hey can Samsung actually make the best camera in any smartphone I have a lot of thoughts about this camera so right off the bat I'm gonna say this is better in some ways their previous cameras but worse in other ways actually so it's still fall solidly in third place for me I still prefer photos from the pixel and the iPhone more often than images coming from Samsung but that doesn't mean the numbers mean nothing by default this the main camera is doing binning that kicks out a 12 megapixel photo and it is the sharpest most detailed 12 megapixel photo out there which I love that's one of the things that's my favorite about it and these are classic Samsung bright and colorful usually bring up shadows and smoothing out faces the whole thing that hasn't changed there's also the ultra-wide camera which is the softest of the three cameras but I'm still glad it's there it's giving us that first-person the fun perspective and it even has Samsung's much improved night mode in ultra-wide which some others just straight-up don't do and then there is, of course, the full 108 megapixel mode that can be toggled on and yes that did produce a bit more the detail which is useful especially.

if you're planning on zooming in and cropping after you take that big photo but for the difference in file size and the inconvenience of always having to turn it on I ended up not really feeling like I needed it most of the time I was happy with the 12-megapixel shots but if you pay a little bit more attention to that main camera especially with close-up subjects there's a little bit more to notice there so keep this in mind the main hundred eight-megapixel camera is massive like it's physically much larger than most other smartphones camera sensors and for the most part it's a general rule the larger the sensor the better you're letting in more light you get bigger pixels it's just a typical good thing to have a larger sensor and that's fine but for those of us familiar with large sensor photography and video larger sensors have a look like that's when you start to get this naturally blurry foreground and background and this shallow depth of field, in this case, the sensor on this phone is so big and that dual aperture the feature that they've shipped in a couple previous Samsung flagships is now gone.

so it is wide open at F 1.8 all the time these things combine to make a razor thin plane of focus and so things that aren't in that plane of focus by even a couple of inches or so when I took photos of closer up subjects which I do I guess more than normal but enough to notice this you would not only see that the background was naturally blurred without portrait mode but really only part of the subject is actually in focus and you can see the rest is falling out of focus but in this smeared fringe bad looking bokeh normally this isn't such a weird thing because with a big high-quality sensor and glass that's just the background falling naturally out of focus but on these tiny smartphone optics the bokeh just isn't quite as beautiful and you really do start to notice the fringing and unnatural looking blurred background now and I also think that this may have contributed to the autofocus issues you may have heard about on the s20 ultra autofocus on this phone for me has been unusually jumpy and kind of unpredictable and actually missed focus a few times especially with the closed focus and closed subjects and I just haven't had a flagship phone have issues like that in a long time and I was trying to figure out why I think the razor-thin plane of focus from not having dual aperture mode and probably some not perfectly optimized software has made autofocus on the s20 ultra feel kind of buggy now Samsung has already promised some software updates that should fix these issues and I believe they can probably mitigate a lot of this autofocus issues with software but at the end of the day you can't beat the physics of having a larger sensor and not-so-great optics so I think that fringing and that very sharp fall-off of the razor fin depth of field will continue okay galaxy s 20 ultra will also shoot 8k video that's a new feature these snapdragon 865 phones are getting and that should be right up my alley so of course I go to test it and I am very impressed with the images.

you can get off a smartphone sensor the stills you can take from the video at 33 megapixels there's some test Clips out there I've shot some of my own just for kicks and it's fun but it's not just simply a higher resolution version of the already pretty good 4k video there's like a laundry list of trade-offs here number one 8k is locked at 24 frames per second max can't go above that and since we all know 30fps is a correct framerate that's just a limitation of the snapdragon a 65 it just can't quite cranked out 30fps number two it punches in a lot so at 4k a normal video mode it could shoot pretty wide without binning for 8k but they use an 8k window in the middle of the sensor so when you switch to 8k mode you see it punch in a ton which really limits what you can frame with it number three focus tracking turns off with 8k video again this is a limitation of the processing you get with the snapdragon 865 but it was already pretty bad without dual pixel autofocus to begin with so now it's let's be real really really bad for me is if you don't have a clear or far enough away subject it's gonna be hunting all the time and that's really distracting it just doesn't look good on video then number four because of how much data is being processed the amount of time it takes to process from the top line to the bottom on that chip it takes a little bit of time and that creates rolling shutter and to me it's super obvious and any footage where you're moving or turning at all just turns into jelly I've never seen rolling shutter this bad in smartphone video in my life and then five the file sizes it's a K video it's going to be huge it's about ten megabytes per second so if you take a 60-second video you're looking at about 600 megabytes which is kind of a pain to upload so all that combines so 8k video on this phone it's great it's really cool for like sitting still and maybe capturing some slow-moving or not so much turning subjects in high resolution and if you look around that's what most people are shooting their test clips of but other then that as soon as you start to move around or have to chase focus at all I'll pass I think I'll have another year or two of measly 4k video on my smartphone and be fine I didn't think I'd be the one saying that but that's the truth oh and you almost let me forget to mention the zoom the thing that's printed on the back of the phone the 100x base zoom comes from the 48 megapixel periscope camera sitting in the side of this phone okay just because you have 100x zoom doesn't mean should use 100x zoom all the time so my typical smartphone photo-taking behavior is I almost never zoom I zoom with my feet or I just switch to the ultra-wide but the s20 ultra having this periscope zoom has made it easier than ever to just like punch in on subjects further away and take crisp photos that's definitely true this phone takes these sharpest images at 30x zoom I've ever seen from a phone next to Wow way really impressive stuff everybody really wants to focus on the 100x like when you zoom all the way in and it's a cool demo but photos clearly don't look good at a hundred X you're not supposed to zoom all the way into a hundred every time honestly, you'd have better luck just taking a 30x zoom photo and cropping in later no seriously just zoom in later it's basically the same thing but then there's of course just people trashing the hundred X zoom because hey you don't need a hundred X it looks bad why they even put this on the phone but here's the thing if you're trashing the hundred X zoom because it looks bad at 100x and you don't think people need it but ignoring the 30x that's like trashing a new speaker that comes out that goes up to a hundred decibels because it sounds bad at a hundred decibels and no one needs it that loud but you're forgetting that speaker will sound better at 50 decibels because it's in the middle of its range than the others that are maxing out at 50 so there you go we can appreciate the good tech. when it's there I didn't mean to turn this whole video into a camera review but hey it's one of the most important parts of the phone so the more you know the better so as far as numbers go the 108-megapixel number it's there but it's not quite there but it helps the 100x number it's not really there all the time even though it is I guess printed there all the time and the 8k the number I actually recommend against using it so despite all this hype Samsung I think is kind of in the same the place they left off last year with their camera in third place and maybe a software update away from closing the gap but third place and then the rest of this phone is really Samsung doing Samsung things if you use the Galaxy S before you won't be shocked by anything here one UI and it's one-handed optimizations are more important than ever because of how big this phone is but really it's still the super familiar throw in everything but the kitchen sink strategy there's a ton there are a million features on this phone.

the one new feature I found really interesting was the ability to pin apps to the massive amount of RAM so in the multitasker, if you tap the icon at the top you can keep the app open for quick launching that loads it up into the RAM permanently and I messed around with this a bit, I tried it with Spotify tried it with the camera app tried it with my tasks app that I launched all the time I didn't really see much of a big difference in battery so that's nice and the app really is truly forever open in the background ready to launch instantly so having that much more RAM on the phone is quite useful also I feel obligated to mention yes this is a 5g phone but you shouldn't buy this phone just for the 5g I'm on 18 T I haven't had a single second of 5g experience on this phone but you know if you're on t-mobile or any of the mid band or millimeter wave using carriers your mileage may vary so the strategy of throwing all the numbers at the phone did it work well I think it mostly worked I mean this is an excellent phone best-in-class in several ways the display being the most incredible one and with the battery falling right in step behind it but as we've learned the numbers aren't everything and the question a lot of people seem to like asking do you need it and no of course not most people will do great with a phone half this the price you don't need this phone but as a fan of tech I am happy when stuff at the highest end is pushing things forward and it's at the bleeding edge and for a lot of that stuff I do like the s20 ultra a lot and some people who use their phone a lot won't have a big problem spending a lot extra on it now shouldn't a $1400 phone be pretty much perfect out the box yeah probably and this clearly isn't perfect but there's a lot of really great things about it and this is the phone I will be pocketing personally until further notice and I guess crossing my fingers for some software updates along the way that's been it thanks for the visit.
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