- I know this title concept
has been done to death
but I have actually never done it
because I believe that if a product
pretty much does what it says on the box
there is someone out
there who will love it.
Otherwise, why would they make it?
And there's a lot that
I have found to like
about the Samsung Galaxy S20
Ultra over the last two weeks.
Not gonna skip over that stuff
but the truth of the matter
is I'm gonna be shelving this phone
as soon as I am done filming this video.
Let's talk about why.
Today's video is brought to you by iFixit.
iFixit's Mahi Driver Kit includes
their quarter inch
aluminum screwdriver handle
as a magnetic bit socket, neural grip,
and swivel top, plus 48 driver bits.
Check it out at the link
in the video description.
(upbeat music)
My immediate impression
of the S20 Ultra 5G
were mostly positive.
It's generally chunkier
than the iPhone 11 Pro Max
despite being a little bit lighter.
But it is superbly balanced
as all things should be.
And the slimmer 20 by nine display
makes it easier for me to
wrap my fingers around it.
The materials are also
great and remind me more
of an iPhone 10 or 11
series than anything else
that I've held today.
But with all the right
Samsung flare added to it.
The bezels are much thinner than Apple's.
And I think Samsung has finally perfected
both the curve of the edge of the display
and the width of their
bezels so that distortion
and reflections around the
edges of onscreen content
are nonexistent and I almost
never manage to accidentally
activate the touchscreen with my palm
while I was reaching across it.
Even the hole punch display,
which I still hate and would immediately
trade for a popup selfie camera
like OnePlus' Pro Series,
is obviously better than Apple's.
Now very dated looking forehead nudge.
I did miss having the earpiece
a little bit lower down.
I find it more comfortable
to hold against my ear.
But if the mandated Samsung
is maximum screen coverage,
I'd prefer a proper grill
even if it's a weirdly
positioned one to a vibrating screen
like on the LG G8.
Even though I normally use
my AirPods Pros these days,
when I do wanna listen
out loud like in the bath
it makes a big difference
for watching movies
and videos on the go to
have an amplified earpiece
speaker that doesn't vibrate your phone.
As a quick aside by the way guys,
I get a lot of flack for
constantly bringing up
the movie watching experience
in my phone reviews.
And I'm finally at the point where
I'm just not gonna take it anymore.
I've gotta defend that.
Look guys.
Not everyone has the income,
or the lifestyle to
allow them to settle down
for two hours at time on the couch
with their big screen
HDR TV and watch a movie.
So yeah, the phone is small and there's
gonna be directors and
filmmakers out there
that are giving me a hard time
for watching their movies on it
but given how awesome
phones screens have gotten,
this one in particular,
I don't think it's much of stretch to say
that a Galaxy S20 Ultra is
probably going to be the best
HDR display in the house
of most of the people
who end up buying one.
The white point of the natural mode
is a little warm for my preference
but after a short adjustment,
the S20 Ultra screen looks great
under basically any conditions.
At night in bed all the way
to under direct sunlight.
So yeah, if your close
up vision is still good
I see nothing wrong with
throwing on a pair of,
like, Drop + THX Panda's,
and firing up a movie
on your phone.
I had no difficulty even
streaming my heaviest
BluRay rips from my plex server over wifi,
and the good news about the
screen gets even better,
120 Hertz support is basically
the icing on the cake here.
Sweet, delicious, long awaited icing.
It was actually kind of
funny seeing the reviewers
who obviously mostly
use main stream phones,
heralding 120 Hertz as the next big thing.
Guys, it was the last big thing.
To be clear, it's great,
but here's some kid back in 2011,
explaining how it improves the smoothness
of game animations and makes
your device feel snappier
and more responsive,
but hey, at least we
finally got there, right?
So gamers and performance
enthusiasts, rejoice.
I have seen some complaints
about poor battery life,
particularly with 120 Hertz enabled
and especially on the Exynos models,
as well as about the lack of support
for high refresh rate at
the native resolution,
but Samsung's Flachy plus
mode didn't bother me at all,
and I managed to get
through the last two weeks
with everything enabled.
No dark mode, everything at 120 Hertz,
always on display, and that
includes one really long day
with over seven hours
of screen time, love it.
The only thing I ended up
not loving about the screen
is the in screen ultrasonic
fingerprint sensor.
It's much better than
when it first launched
on the S10 series and most people
probably won't notice or care,
but when it comes to
raw, quick draw speed,
Apple's Face ID
and competing fingerprint
unlocks, are still a hair faster.
Something people are
noticing and caring about
is the significant
differences this time around
between the Exynos and Snapdragon versions
of the S20 Ultra.
I have seen outlier results for both,
with users reporting more than
10 hours of screen on time,
with various optimizations,
but for the most part, the
ones who are complaining
about really bad battery
life are only Exynos users.
As for how to explain the difference,
Andrei Frumusanu's preliminary reporting
on anandtech.com seems to
contain some strong clues.
Users who predominantly watch video,
which uses efficient fixed
function decoding hardware,
or who browse the web might see just
a 10% deficit while users who occasionally
run heavier apps, could
fall behind by 25% or more
due to Exynos's inferior power efficiency.
Now I get it, there's a
reason everyone does it,
but cost saving and supply
chain management rationales
behind dual sourcing parts
for a high volume product like this
make a lot of sense but the issue is
that they have to be
built to the same spec,
and right now, with the
state that things are in,
if I'm a customer who's
in an Exynos region,
this kind of battery life performance
makes Samsung's entire
S20 lineup a no go for me
right out of the gate and
downright embarrassing honestly,
when you consider Samsung's
all day battery marketing.
As for the camera, it's cool.
No, it's super cool.
It's still a Samsung camera so the colors
might lean a little a
little on the cooler side,
especially side by side against an iPhone,
which tends to lean warmer,
and their over sharpening is ever present,
but at reasonable zoom levels,
like 5X, there is no
doubt that you're gonna
end up with images that
contain a lot more detail
than if you were just
trying to use software
to punch in on a 2X
zoom shot on an iPhone.
Combined with the 12 megapixel wide angle,
you've got a lot of shooting options
and I think most people
are gonna find something
to love about it.
I do wish they hadn't quite
hyped it up as hard though.
Video recording quality
is still way behind Apple,
and some of the touted features,
like the 100X zoom and 8K recording
are honestly useless as anything
other than a party trick.
The 100X zoom adds so much processing
that I would rather move
my face closer to my phone
and let my brain do the guess work,
and the 8K video recording
mode isn't so much bad,
it gets fine, it's just
entirely unnecessary.
With the sensor and the processing power
that can be crammed into a cellphone
you're just better off
with decently encoded
4K than with 8K.
And as for Samsung's assertion
that you can pull 33 megapixel stills
out of their 8K video, that is laughable.
Even the example they show on the website
looks like hot garbage
because of the motion blur
that's inherent in video capture.
Why would anybody do that?
Especially when the camera app support
just taking a still while
you're recording video.
I also didn't find myself
using the 108MP mode at all.
Under ideal circumstances
in direct sunlight
it might be worth switching to.
But you better hope there's
absolutely no shadows
in your shot because its
dynamic range is much worse
compared to when you
allow all of the cameras
to work together even though
both modes support HDR.
On to software.
Samsung's Android skin
has improved so much
that people rarely complain about it.
And in fact when we did our recent video
highlighting the top new
features of Android 11,
the comments section
got absolutely flooded
with people who apparently
didn't realize that
yes, I get it, those
features are already built in
to your Samsung phone,
but they are not yet part of
the Stock Android experience.
I've actually even been
uncharacteristically happy
with the software support that I've gotten
on my daily driver Note 9,
which is coming up on two years old now.
However, notifications
have been and continued
to be a problem for me.
Samsung in general needs to expose
notification order controls either via
allowing app priorities
to be manually tuned
or by enabling an option
to just put everything in
in reverse chronological order
because I am constantly
getting pings on my phone
that are for like, my garage door opening,
and I need to scroll all the way down
through a list of messages
people have sent me
to find out what buzzed my phone.
Not to mention that most
of the notifications
don't have a timestamp
on them for some reason.
Also, nothing that I did
made my Microsoft Teams
notifications come through
on the S20 Ultra.
Now, this could easily
be Microsoft's fault
since Teams is a hot
pile of steaming garbage.
But it does mean that
I'm gonna have to dump
this phone immediately no
matter how much I like it
because I use that for work.
Bottom line then.
The S20 Ultra is great in a lot of ways.
The quality of the materials,
the specs, the performance, all topnotch.
And I'm not usually one
to complain about a price.
Customer for anything remember?
But the thing is it starts at $1400.
That is $300 more than the base model
and just $50 less
than the top spec iPhone 11 Pro Max
with four times the storage.
That would be fine if
it was utterly flawless
or if it had some space age new technology
that needed an early adopter subsidy.
Remember guys, I defended the Fold.
But it's not, and it doesn't.
At this price, where literally
anything else is in play,
if you want a head turner, get a Fold.
If you want a status
symbol, buy an iPhone.
If you wanna take pictures
get a Pixel or an iPhone.
If you shoot a lot of
video, get an iPhone.
If you actually work for your money,
here's the thing,
I didn't notice a significant
day to day difference
in experience between this
and my old daily driver,
Note 9, if however you're a rich kid,
and you wanna play with the zoom,
something I can pretty much guarantee
you'll get bored of within a few days,
hey for you though, there's the S20 Ultra.
And it's brought to you by
dbrand, dbrand is making me say this.
The dbrand grip is super grippy,
you will never drop your phone again.
Even if you're me haha, see
that'll show you dbrand,
what where'd it go?
It includes military
grade impact protection,
absorbing technology,
it's ultra low profile,
and at just two millimeters thick,
it's got super tactile buttons,
with their spree polymer,
and full compatibility
with dbrand's skins.
Hey, check this out dbrand,
I improved your skin,
I put a Linus Tech Tip
sticker on top of it,
so check out dbrand.com/LinusDropTips,
we're gonna have that linked below,
so check out their line up.
If you want my impressions
of the Z Flip by the way,
check out our Short Circuit channel,
where I unboxed it, I am not
gonna do a full review on here
'cause I didn't wanna
use it for that long,
so I sent it back to dbrand
as soon as I was done,
I'm gonna link that video down below,
make sure you subscribe by the way.
