Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Review: Fast, sleek, gorgeous, and expensive By Engadget

The, first time I tried out a Galaxy Note: 20 ultra I wrote that it seemed a lot like a galaxy s20 ultra with a stylus and a bit of a makeover and look. I was kind of wrong about that turns out.45 minutes with two phones, a watch and a tablet isn't much time for thoughtful analysis. Who would have guessed now that I've lived with the note 20 ultra for over a week, though my brain keeps circling back to two key points: number one. The note 20 ultra makes the s20 ultra irrelevant. This thing is faster: it's sleeker, it's prettier, it's more technically impressive, and it's even slightly cheaper. If you want a big Samsung phone, this is where your search should start and with that said, number two most people still do not need to buy this phone, which is not a knock against the ultra at all.

But here's the thing powerful phones are getting cheaper and cheaper phones are getting better like a lot better. Now I like the ultra a lot, but it starts at thirteen hundred dollars. There are excellent smartphones that cost a lot less. So the note only makes sense if you need the best of the best and an s pen. Those points might sound simple, but there's plenty to unpack here, and I want to start with how well the Galaxy Note 20 ultra works as a phone.

If it wasn't already obvious just about everything about the note.20 ultra is big. It has an enormous 6.9 inch, dynamic, AMOLED 2x display that screen means it has a big body which people with small hands are almost certainly going to struggle to hold. There is no small note model this year, unfortunately, but that's a story for another time. This thing also has a huge camera hump which, by the way, isn't covered by the same super tough gorilla, glass, Vitus that protects the screen, and I learned that the hard way since it tipped over during a photo shoot down here and cracked immediately. So lesson learned.

Kids treat this thing incredibly carefully to Samsung's credit, though this is a giant phone that doesn't always feel like one. They shaved a few grams and a few fractions of a millimeter here and there. So it's slightly sleeker and lighter than the s20 ultra look we're talking a difference in weight of about two nickels, but every gram counts in a device that you're going to unlock dozens of times a day. This nearly bezel. The screen also has a 21 9 aspect ratios, which makes it a little easier to hang on to than you might think, and speaking of that screen, Samsung smartphone display dominance continues not that anyone really expected that to change this hdr10 plus certified screen produces really deep blacks and vivid colors right out of the box and people who really care can dive into the settings and tune the screen just the way they like it.

You can also dial this display up to a maximum resolution of 3088 by 1440, but trust me you're, probably going to want to leave it running at the default 2316 by 1080, so you can take advantage of the screen's adaptive refresh rate rather than keep it cranked up all the time. The note 20 ultra uses a new kind of display back plane that can change the refresh rate, depending on what you're doing, if you're, playing a supported game or scrolling through your recent apps you'll, get that classic buttery smooth 120 hertz. But if you're, I don't know looking at a photo, you just took the refresh rate can dip as low as 10 hertz. In other words, this screen is pretty and smart and is easy on the battery. So, what's not to like the rest of the hardware here feels pretty familiar.

This body is squarish compared to the s20 series, which makes it feel kind of like a real notepad, which I really like. The phone is still rated ip68 for water and dust resistance too, and the fit and finish is as good as you'd expect from a phone that costs. This much Samsung has made a few key changes here, though, for one Samsung one with sort of frosty, matte glass finish on the back, and it doesn't just feel great. It also prevents the phone from getting too greasy or grimy looking there's also a new ultra-wide band radio inside that doesn't do a lot right now. You can share files with other USB devices just by pointing at them.

But since I didn't have another note, 20 ultra to test, I couldn't try, it Samsung does say: you'll, be able to use that USB to unlock your car and even your front door in short order. So I guess there's that to look forward to, but we'll just have to see now that might be the most exotic component in this phone, but don't sleep on the snapdragon, 865 plus chipsets. The note 20 is just one of a few smartphones right now using this slightly updated silicon, which, coincidentally, makes it one of the most powerful android phones out there right now, unlike the standard 865 you'll find in most other premium, android phones. This chipset has one CPU core that runs quite a bit faster than the others. It actually clocks in at over three gigahertz, and it also features some pretty impressive GPU improvements too.

That all sounds great, and you can definitely spot the difference if you're looking at benchmark test results, but the difference in performance between the note 20 ultra and devices using the regular snapdragon 865. Well, it's all very subtle, especially since the standard 865 was already more than powerful enough for most people. What the note 20 ultra really offers here is just a little more performance headroom to grow into as android and apps and machine learning models inside android and apps get more complex. There's enough horsepower here that all of Samsung's bolt-on software bits feel funny fast, but to be clear, some of this software still needs some polish, for whatever reason the Samsung keyboard just like fails to load. Sometimes I've had to launch whatever app.

I was trying to type in a few times to get the keyboard to show up and Samsung's daily, which is a sort of google feed. Knockoff that lives to the left of your home screen always has one big animated ad in it. It's usually for Yahtzee Samsung you're, already asking people to pay thirteen hundred dollars for this phone. Please do not shove more ads. In my face, at least, you won't have to worry about battery life during days of heavy use, which includes frantic multitasking and camera testing and a lot of processes running in the background.

The note 20 ultra stuck it out for well over 12 hours before needing a charge, and that is with the screen set to its adaptive refresh rate mode, mind you Samsung's, clever, screen tech might not give the Galaxy Note 20 ultra two-day battery life, but it does get pretty close sometimes and at the very least you can fall asleep. Knowing you'll probably have enough juice to get you through most of the following morning and the cameras I mean, look they're great when they want to be. Some of them have been harvested straight from the s20 ultra like this 12 megapixel ultrawide camera and this whopper of 108 megapixel wide camera. Samsung made some surprising changes here, though, like choosing a 12 megapixel telephoto camera with a 5x optical zoom range and ditching, the s20 ultra's depth sensor in favor of a laser autofocus module on paper. Those changes mean the note.20 ultra doesn't look as ambitious, but believe me, this more measured approach delivers that 108 megapixel camera is the star of the show and most of the photos I shot with it came through with gorgeous colors and solid levels of detail. In a lot of cases, I would say it outshout my usual go to the iPhone 11 Pro max, though I have to say the Google Pixel 4 still gives the note 20 ultra a run for its money.

Low light performance is surprisingly good here too, especially now that there's a dedicated laser autofocus system, there's no more hunting and seeking for focus. I also have to point out Samsung's scene. Optimizer is perfect at switching to night mode when it's appropriate and in my experience it's almost twice as fast here as the night mode on the galaxy s20 ultra so yeah. The main camera is a really capable all-around player, but here's the thing I never felt like. I was consistently getting the best out of it for every beautifully rendered outdoor photo.

There's a flat unappealing food pick for every correctly and nicely exposed night shot. There is a muddy underexposed. Mess more often than not the note 20 ultra produces the kind of eye-catching images you want to see, but you have to be prepared for the occasional disappointment. Meanwhile, the ultra white camera and the telephoto camera play their roles nicely enough. I'm not much of a landscape person, but I actually found myself really enjoying this ultra-wide.

These things hardly ever produce photos as nice as a phone's main camera, but Samsung did a great job closing the gap. Here. I would take this ultra white over the iPhones any day. The note 20 ultra telephoto camerae turned out to be a pleasant surprise too. They went with a lower resolution sensor, but its 5x optical zoom range really feels like the sweet spot.

It gives me plenty of distance without having to find a different vantage point, and you can digital zoom for a lot of the stuff in between and space. Zoom is back, which is still space zoom, which is to say that when you're pushed into that full 50x, your photos are gonna. Look like oil paintings. There has not been a single occasion where I took a 50x photo and felt great about it because, just like before this is more of a liquid, we can do feature than anything. You'd want to use regularly so yeah by all measures.

The note 20 ultra is a very powerful, well-rounded machine. Nothing else in Samsung's flagship, heavy lineup touches it, and it'll outgun, most other android phones. You can buy right now. The thing is the note.20 ultra offers mostly subtle upgrades, and these are great, don't get me wrong, but you can get phones that are, I don't know, 95 percent as impressive for hundreds of dollars less, which brings us back to the big thing here: the s pen. This thing hasn't changed since last year, though Samsung did move it to the other side of the phone, which feels a little weird, but whatever what has changed is how quickly this note responds to the s pen.

There is no lag between the moment. You start writing and the moment you see your strokes take shape on screen. Now I never had much issue with latency in earlier models, but I can tell right now the update is going to mean a lot to avid notetakers and especially artists is everyone gonna notice, probably not, but I'm still glad Samsung put in the work. What's more important here are the new features and refinements that Samsung built around the s pen, the biggest change, comes in the form of so-called anywhere actions. Once you whip out the s-pen you can draw in the air like a magic wand to control the phone which might sound familiar to long-time note fans and with good reason.

Last year, Samsung debuted the very similar app actions, and those are here too, but any more actions take the concept a step further. Rather than limit gestures to controlling specific apps. You can use them at any point anywhere by default, they're tied to navigation controls like opening the recent apps view or returning to the home screen, which at first all seemed a little pointless because a quick, tap or a swipe on the screen does the same thing. But then I realized you can map different actions and app shortcuts to those gestures instead and my eyes opened. It took a little trial and error to figure out what actions and apps I wanted.

The quickest access to, but assigning them to the gestures, was really simple. What wasn't as easy was getting the note to recognize these things even after a week, the phone still can't always tell the difference between this right to left, move to launch one app and the up and down gesture that opens another. I mean these are very simple things. I don't understand what the disconnect is when these anywhere actions work, they are surprisingly helpful and when they don't, I want to flick the s pen across the room. What else? Well, you can also use the Samsung notes app to record audio while you jot down notes- and this feature is a lot cooler than it sounds- the controls will take some getting used to, but the ability to tap a word and hear whatever it was in the conversation or the lecture that prompted you to write.

It is really slick closely guys centers of the greater northern Virginia area. The rest of Samsung's additions are tweaks that I'm honestly surprised the note didn't have already you can finally import PDFs into the notes, app and mark them up with the s pen. You can automatically straighten slanted writing with the tap of a button and the edits that you make with the s pen on the note are automatically synced to other devices running the Samsung notes, app plus all the other good stuff here screen off memo which allows you to just start writing and save that smart select. So you can select bits on the screen and turn them into gives. The s pen was always really full-featured, and it's even more so now and then there's the updated wireless DEX feature which isn't specifically an s pen thing, but I wanted to try using the s pen as a mouse.

So here it is Samsung says the feature works with any Miracast naval display, but it works best with Samsung, smart TVs from 2019 or sooner, and I don't have either of those things. So I did what any sane person would do. I bought a cheap, Miracast dongle from Amazon for like 30 bucks, and I plugged it into a HDMI port and gave it a shot setting. It up was as simple as it gets, and I got a proper desktop on my TV in moments, but interacting with it was not great, you can use the note 20 ultra as a trackpad, but there was so much latency that I never felt like. I was in direct control of the cursor.

You can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the note 20 ultra to use index mode and honestly having a computer-like experience without any wires is pretty amazing, but with this kind of setup at least, I will never bother again. Maybe you people with nicer TVs will have more luck. Not all of these additions may seem thrilling, and some of them definitely need some fine-tuning. But when you consider how good the s pen and its features already were the bits that do work well here start to seem like icing on the cake. Of course, the flip side of that argument is also true.

If you never saw much value in the s pen, I'm not sure anything, Samsung added this time around is going to change your mind with all that said, the Galaxy Note 20 ultra feels a lot like a phone for the one percent, and I'm not just saying that, because it's expensive though it is it's because the things the note 20 ultra chooses to excel at won't matter to a lot of people. If you want a Samsung phone with a big screen and great performance, I'm sure you could find a great deal on a galaxy s.20 plus, if you just want something fast, just buy an OnePlus 8 pro, but Samsung is counting on the fact that some people out there still get really worked up by huge displays and high performance everything's and yes, even smarter ways to take notes. If that is you, and that might be a pretty big, if this thing is an absolute must-buy. Thank you for joining me for our review of the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra. I love this thing.

I don't know that I would necessarily buy one because in a lot of ways, it just feels like too much phone for me and that's a weird thing for me to admit. But here I am, if you had feedback about this review, the way we handled it or the throne itself, please leave a comment down below or email me at v8 gadget. com. Thank you again for watching. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to come, hang out with us for a bit, and we'll see you the next time you review something you.

Source : Engadget