Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review - The Refined S23 Ultra
Hi all Chris here and I've got the Galaxy s24 Ultra I've been using it for quite a few days now and just full on since I've got it and this is a follow-up video to my Hands-On in Las Vegas so as you probably know there are some big improvements to the screen so it's brighter it's now a flat screen it's got gorilla glass armor less reflective more scratch resistant too which is of course welcomed we've got the same battery capacity 5,000 Mah hours up to 45 W charging with it the S Pen and I'll be covering the cam cameras battery life and all that wasn't in that Hands-On in Las Vegas to let you know a lot more about this here the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra with its Galaxy Ai and is it enough to entice s23 Ultra owners to upgrade to this latest model here now the unboxing experience here is rather short because this is all that is included so we have our type c to type c cable SIM tray tool and a quick start guide that's it no charger is included or case and what is different now taking a look at them at their build design well not a lot it's two grams lighter now we have a titanium frame and no more rounded edges on the back of it which is still Gorilla Glass it does feel a little bit B but you don't notice that difference in the weight we're talking about 2 G here and you can't really distinguish that difference at all build quality is excellent It's still ip68 and you'll see along the top we've got a minor change there an extra microphone compared to the s23 ultra with our s24 Ultra s down at the bottom and the same location does support two nano SIM so no micro SD card support we've got our Spen still that's the same as last year you notice a slight difference to the loudspeaker it's now just this little slot there it almost looks like an SD card slot but of course it is not and we still have Android auto of course video out and Samsung decks with it you can see the microphone down here too in the same location and the antenna Lines no changes there volume buttons and power button located on the right hand side in the same place you can easily get your thumb to that power button and the big difference with the cameras is we now have that five times periscopic camera 50 megapixel so that is five times optical zoom it's electronic and optically stabilized as well we have the 200 map camera again our three times camera which is 10 megapixels that is from the previous Model 12 megap Ultra wide no changes to those there at all the big change is our screen so still 6.8 in it's a quite HD display but it's now brighter with our s24 Ultra this panel can now output 2600 nits versus the 1750 we have with the s23 ultra which I've got here on the right of the screen now it's less reflective it's covered with gorilla glass armor and those Reflections are apparently 75% less and just looking at them now with some reflection of the background there it does look a little bit clearer to me and you can see the Slimmer bezels too as well on the right again that of course is the s23 ultra and the bezels do look a little bit larger we have the curve to the screen here on the edges which I do like it makes it feel comfortable in hand not that it's uh uncomfortable the s24 ultra it still feels very good and you just get those Slimmer bezel so it's got a sleeker look to it it looks I think slightly nicer and in hand feels better with that titanium frame so the screen is incredibly clear it's very bright it's response to touch really well we've got a oneui 6.1 here based off Android 14 and the UA is really smooth I don't notice any lag at all I've got 12 GB of RAM in fact all models have the 12 GB of RAM and my model here that Samsung sent out to meet does have 256 GB of ufs 4.0 storage which is incredibly quick as
you'll see later on with my benchmarks now under settings we have all typical options here that you do see with Samsung and most Android phone so the Adaptive brightness that's there of course I'm just using it at the moment to test it out and I found that it does work quite well I don't find the screen to be overly bright or too dim it seems to adjust with that ambient light sensor really well now the screen resolution by default is on Full HD Plus and I've put this onto QHD plus do you see a difference well when you're looking at the screen really close yes on QHD you notice it's a little sharper but at normal viewing distances the full HD Plus isn't actually a bad resolution you don't really notice that you won't see any pixels no matter what resolution you're using out of those two so you see we do have options for our mode which I do have the screen mode here in Vivid that's by default and you can put it on to natural and in Vivid you can adjust the white balance there and there's further tweaks you can apply to the display so it's an excellent looking display touch gestures they're working fine no issues there it really is a topnotch panel here from Samsung now if you don't like the cutout there with the camera which is 12 megapixels same as last year well you can hide that if you want you can have the black bar at the top but I don't see really anyone doing that because this is a very minimal little cut out there it's not that large and I don't find it really offensive it doesn't get in the way at all so as I mentioned it is running one UI and this is version 6.1 now that comes with the Galaxy s24 Ultra and the performance of it is excellent very smooth I've had no issues no bugs and this is the first firmware so there will be of course updates and they will fix any bugs if there are any there and improve upon the performance but it is really good really responsive and it seems to be running at 120 frames per second I don't notice any lag with it now battery life this is the fixed test that I do which is PC Mark and why I do this is because it's a fixed test that just keeps looping I set the same brightness the same settings with all the other phones and you can compare all of them in all of my phone reviews and you see here we got 12 hours 42 minutes now this is about 1 hour better than what I got with the Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra so battery life has improved now I ran this with Quad HD and it is by default their full HD Plus resolution so if you run that you will get slightly better battery time but it seems to be around about 8 hours of on screen time if you run the default full HD Plus of course at Quad HD it will be a little less so the charge time that is 67 minutes with a 45 wat charger that I did use to test it out so This falls behind a little bit of what we're getting from some other flagships there are flagships out there that have 120 W charging and they can charge in about 22 minutes or so so this is one area that I really wished that Samsung could improve upon was the charging speeds but they kept it the same as the previous model internal storage so as ufs 4.0 extremely quick here look at this we're getting over 4,000 sequential reads rights have over 3,000 and random access that is over 1,000 megabytes per second so really quick that is impressive to see how quick the storage is so here we have Anu now this is of course now with the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 it's the OC version and with this here the score is slightly faster than that of what we got with the previous model and of course I do have my Galaxy s23 Ultra here and you can see the differences between them that it's not really a lot now we're getting a boost there in the CPU GPU across the board there and that is similar so a little disappointing here I was expecting a bit more I was expecting close to say 2 million points here uh but it is not really noticeable the performance between both of them they seem to be about the same when you're in the UI gaming and everything there's not too much of a a difference there so I just show you twoo this which is a wildlife extreme stress test which does test out the throttling and you can see the result that I got here the stability with the s24 ultra drops down to 55.1% where it's 80 with the Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra so it doesn't throttle as much the s23 we get a lot more throttling with the s24 here now this be in mind is on the first firmware so this could change and will likely uh I would say be improved upon with some firmware updates here you can see that the best Loop score there is very high getting well over uh 4,800 compared to the almost 3,800 there with the s23 ultra and then the lowest score here is actually lower on the s24 ultra which is interesting to see that the performance there wind running for long periods does drop right down as expected now to the touch thermals it got up to well 44° here until the touch it gets up to about 42 so you do feel it getting a little hot when you push it really hard with a test like this and you'll see that the wide Vine level one SE of course it does have this so Netflix Amazon Prime video that is all going to be in full HD Disney plus all of those streaming services we have a level three here too with camera API so if you want to test out gcam ports or open camera any third party camera application is going to work with the Galaxy s24 Ultra so we still have our S Pen and I find it a fantastic stylist the latency is pretty much almost instant very low and you can see it Clips away into the same location so it's changed slightly the design of it it's a little bit more squared off and when you press in you hear a nice little click and it pops out just that little rear of it so you can pull it right out and get it out and very easy to do so so you have the same options as we had before with the Spen smart select screen right and I'm just going to create a note here just to quickly show you what it is like now the latency I find to be very good really quick here you can see when you write it's basically instantaneous especially here with a note app and it's a really good feature here to have and excuse my bad writing just going to quickly scribble down here Tech tablets so it's as it was before they don't really me need to make any major changes to this there are some more refinements with one UI 6.1 to it with a few little additions but overall it's just as good as it was before fantastic stylus experience onto gaming performance now this is Gen CH impact and I've got it set to the maximum settings so that is highest and 60 frames per second and I've noticed that the gaming performance feels and looks pretty much exactly the same of what I remember when just using my Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra you really don't see too much of a difference between the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 and the Gen 2 here now the game runs really smooth really well on these highest settings you don't notice really any lags any issues frame bits or any problems and The Thermals aren't as bad as when running that synthetic Benchmark that I showed you so 3D Mark stress test that got it really quite warm but gaming like this I notic that the phone gets a little warm but nowhere near as hot and the performance seems to be exactly the same you notice sometimes a little bit of a diff dip off in the frame rate but overall it's very steady really playable and looks absolutely fantastic on this 6.8 in screen really is a stunning game then we have Samsung's Galaxy AI so this is a very useful feature right now I'm just in a text message so I'm going to send a text off to someone I've selected it I can press the AI button here and change the writing style if I wanted to make the say a little bit more professional than what I just wrote it would give me some options so you can see there's the original text hi David it's Chris where are we meeting tomorrow there's the professional option which is basically fluffed it out a little bit there there's casual social polite there too and other options you can put even some emojis in there that it's done too to add that now this is uh very useful for just translating texts as well so you can use this with different languages and you can have it two-way conversation now this AO is going to work with the translations not just in text message but also calls and it can do it too in your WhatsApp and Messenger application so basically where where you have a text input you can use this and change it and here I'm going to show you how to translate some text that I'm going to do so I'm just sending another message here and I want to just select all of that and I can now tap to translate this so it's going to translate it translate it from English into Spanish and I can just get it to replace that so this is Handy and again it's a two-way thing too as well so if this person replies in Spanish it will then send you that to and translate it into English so very handy and I'll show you another one of the AI features too so this image for example which is I know it's the Oakland Sky Tower but imagine I don't know what tower this is and I want to identify it while I can hold down here this is of course the gestures that I have enabled but if I keep holding that then enables me to Circle something and it will identify it so if I do this here it's going to use its Ai and find out what that is so it managed to find here okay Oakland Sky Tower tickets and tours Oakland Sky Tower so it did identify that so it's very handy for the image identification I think that would be a useful feature for something like maybe you want to identify some fruit that you don't know what it is or maybe an insect while it's going to be able to use that with Galaxy Ai and tell you what it is and what about our speakers so no changes compared to the previous model we've got the downward firing speaker and then our earpiece we have another one they sound very loud there's a little bit of Base to them some treble and mids to give you sample now at 100% volume just to give you an idea of what the speakers sound like in the Samsung Galaxy s24 [Laughter] [Applause] Ultra over to our cameras now with our Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra so front-facing camera no changes here compared to last year 12 megapixels can shoot 4K 30 4K 60 frames per second audio bit rate is 256 kobit per second and what I've noticed is the wind filtering seems to be a little bit better with this model perhaps they made some Hardware changes to those microphones aw some Hardware filters in there but I do notice that it doesn't seem to pick up that wind as much as it did before and it is quite windy right now yet you can hear me quite clearly but yes a little bit of that wind noise let's take a a look at those rear cameras now the ultra wide the same again so 12 megapixels we've got electronic image stabilization and I'm shooting here out at a place called maray Tha in the distance that's why hickey Island handing around it dos look very good this quality no dropped frames this is now the main camera which has Optical and electronic image stabilization 200 megapixels we got our three times and you can swap over to all of these cameras at 4K 30 or even 4K 60 frames per second and now this is the change the new camera Al periscopic five times very steady good stabilization I'm just going to move slightly here and then I can go now to 10 times wouldn't really go over 10 times video once you do I'll just show you I'll just tap here and go to the 20 preset you can see it's got a lot of noise now and grain so it degrades the quality back to five times now have a look at a there we go SE go three times and then the one times again so this is 4K 30 that I'm shooting at to match my timeline so what about our cameras is it a big upgrade that zoom camera well with video I noticed the quality is a little sharper however the electronic or Optical image stabilization doesn't seem to be quite as good as the 10 times Optical camera we have with the s23 ultra the previous model also does handle bright flowers B capturing more details not so much saturation less clipping so clearly to me there are some updates required we are on the first firmware remember with this phone Zoom photos both of them right now at 10 times I noticed there's a different color science to the s24 ultra that it has more saturation look at the green grass here it's a little bit overdone it's more natural with the s23 ultra when you zoom in this is now 200% prop you can see that the sensor has less noise than the s23 ultra so in that regard there in that area it is better the s24 ultra zoom camera but it depends on the situation great to see that Samsung has toned down on the oversharpening with our main camera so you can see the difference here between the s23 ultra at first glance it might look better but when you crop in this is a 200% crop you can see clearly that the s23 ultra is oversharpened overdone a little bit I do prefer here the s24 ultra so that's a welcome change there from Samsung with the night charts the s24 ultra I have noticed is marginally better than its predecessor you can see a little bit more detail with this shot here the grass has a bit more detail a little clearer around where that shed is and you notice when I crop it here to 200% but if you want to see all of the changes make sure you check out the sidebyside comparison with the s24 ultra versus the s23 ultra because there are some very interesting results there it's quite mixed as you'll see so all up this is an excellent phone and it's a very minor upgrade over the s23 ultra so far in my time using it it just feels like a refined s23 Ultra and it's not a huge leap ahead sure we do get the flatter screen the brighter screen with that gorilla glass armor the latest version so it's less reflective 40% more scratch resistant which is great and well they claim 75% less Reflections on this and I've noticed that it does fair a little bit better and being flat it does feel nice the rear is now flat there's no curve to it so in hand does it feel better than the s23 ultra I think it does because mostly because of the titanium around the outside of it has a good feel to it just feels higher quality compared to the more smoother finish of the the steel frame the alloy frame that we had before the titanium just makes it feel that a little bit more premium Now the Spen great to have no changes there it's the same as before they didn't really need to do anything with it it's got that ultra low latency it works really well those pressure sensitive levels and I find myself using it a lot for just minor notes and things and I know a lot of people don't really take advantage of it but if you're say an architect a designer an artist then you're going to love that and this will be the flagship to go for for the S Pen and all the built-in features so the charging rate I really feel like Samsung should have done something more there 45 watts is fine yes it charges in just over an hour but if you look at the competition out there with other Android flagships we're getting charge times of under 25 minutes and most of those will charge well under an hour so they're slipping they're falling behind a little bit there on the charge rate but I still find 45 is good and of course the charge is not in the box there we don't have a 3.5 mm headphone
jack and no micro SD those sadly have gone forever but I would have loved to seen their comeback Samsung could have surprised us with a 3.5 M mm headphone jack micro support but sadly not there with it so the changes to the five times zoom camera while going from 10 times to five times now it is slightly better it's a marginally better camera we can now shoot 8K video with that zoom camera which is a welcome change there in addition and I've noticed that the wind filtering with the s24 ultra is a lot better than the s23 ultra they made some changes there it's probably down to Hardware with the microphones maybe a little bit of wind filtering built into it now or perhaps just software but it is a noticeable difference there the battery life being slightly better than the s23 ultra as well is another welcome tweet and overall it's a tweak refined version of the s23 ultra is it enough to entice s23 Ultra us users to upgrade to the s24 ultra I really don't think it is but if you do have say the s22 S21 or below then this is going to be a big upgrade for you if you're a few Generations back then really it is a no-brainer to upgrade to the s24 ultra with all its built-in features amazing build quality it's an all-rounded phone and it's probably going to be like my s23 Ultra one of my favorites for the year I can see with just what is on offer here with the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra so thanks a lot for watching this early review of it and do check out my camera comparisons between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and this phone versus the older s23 Ultra it's really interesting if you want to know exactly how much it has improved those Zoom cameras as well video whatnot all covered there I'll see you in the next one bye for now
2024-01-29 02:53
