Samsung Galaxy S20 review: better than the Ultra

- Alright. Are you ready? Are you ready? Let's do it. Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20 Plus

review

. (upbeat music) Let's set the stage here. I think it's very easy to take the Galaxy S line of phones for granted. Samsung sells a lot of them, more than any other Android phone in the US, so I know it's not hip or cool to say I like Galaxy phones S, but I generally really like Galaxy S phones. Sure, Pixel phones tend to have

better

cameras, and OnePlus gets a lot of attention and they also tend to cost less, but there's something really familiar about the Galaxy S line.

It's like the phone Android default, and in some ways Samsung's most important job with the S20 and S20 Plus was making sure they didn't ruin a good thing. For example, I just

review

ed the S20 Ultra, this phone's older brother, and I think Samsung went overboard with the S20 Ultra. However, these phones try to do a little less than the Ultra, so I think they end up accomplishing more. There are three important news about the Galaxy S20 that you should know. The first is the new camera system, the second is that they support 5G and the third, it has a nicer screen with a 120Hz refresh rate.

There are also a lot of little things, like they got rid of the connector for headphones. They also added a ton of Samsung features to the software, but before we get into that, let's not take the design for granted. It looks a lot like how all Galaxy phones have looked for a few years now. There's curved glass on the back and metal rails and a screen that has almost no bezels, but seriously, compare this phone to any other Android phone on the market, your Pixels, your OnePluses or even your Huawei, and I think the S20 is simply

better

.

In fact, I think it's better than the iPhone 11 Pro, just from a hardware perspective. Also the small one comes in pink, which is the best color option. The camera module on the back is this large oblong rectangle on the side. The screen is only interrupted by a small hole for the selfie camera instead of having a big notch or a front or whatever. It uses an in-display fingerprint sensor which I must admit is a little slower than other biometric methods, but it works fine for me. Now this starts at $1000 and the Plus version is $1200, so I know you can get most of these features for cheaper on other Android phones, but the Galaxy S line generally feels more like a package deal. complete.

Samsung is charging a lot of money for this phone and for that money, you deserve to get a really nice item and yes, Samsung delivers. Don't take it for granted. Okay, enough gushing. Let's talk about the camera, which is the first big news that you should know about. Well, actually with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, I had to go into this long, complicated story about how megapixel cameras work, but with the S20 and S20 Plus, it's much easier, overall. So the main camera is a more traditional 12 megapixel and so is the wide angle camera. The telephoto lens, however, is 64 megapixels.

Samsung says it needs all those megapixels to improve the zoom of its telephoto lens and that really works. You can get a better shot with a three or four X zoom than with an iPhone or even a Pixel. It's still not great, but it's a step forward. Now in theory it can also go up to 30X but it looks really bad and definitely loses out to the S20 Ultra at that zoom but the S20 Ultra is $400 more and I really don't think it's worth getting decent shots at 30X zoom . . Now I was really hard on the Galaxy S20 Ultra because of the autofocus issues and how it did weird things on faces.

However, the regular S20 is better for those things, but it's not perfect. Focusing has improved and perhaps that's because it uses that more traditional 12-megapixel sensor that uses a more traditional dual-pixel autofocus method. It still looks a little out of focus in the video, but it's not terrible. Now as for faces, I think this phone is a little cooler than the Ultra with sharpening and smoothing, but it still does it more than I would like, it's a Samsung phone, so it wants to soften faces . However, you should never activate Bixby scene detection if you want the white balance to be good.

What kills me is that if you turn on Pro mode on these cameras, everything looks great and if you use the selfie camera and turn off all the smoothing there, everything looks great. Basically, I feel like if Samsung got out of its own way with the camera, the entire camera system would be there with the iPhone 11 Pro and Pixel 4, but as it stands now, it's still a third place finish. Overall, I like this one better than the Pixel 4 because you get an

ultra

-wide format and much better video performance. Alright. There are a few other features to talk about.

So you can take 64 megapixel photos with this, but even if you do it in very bright light, when I cropped, I didn't see enough clean detail to make it worth it. I think the night mode is pretty good, it's on par with the iPhone and almost on par with the Pixel, better than I expected. And the video quality, of course, is very good, it is Samsung quality video. It's not on par with the iPhone Pro, though. Oh, if you were thinking you wanted to get the S20 Plus instead of the smaller S20 because it has that time-of-flight depth-view camera, honestly, don't bother.

I didn't see any improvement in portrait photos thanks to that extra lens. The second thing to know is that these phones support 5G and to be honest, I haven't had a chance to really test 5G because I'm here in San Francisco where I don't have 5G networks to test with the carriers I have. I tried 5G on the Ultra in New York and it was great, but I still think you shouldn't buy this phone just because it supports 5G, I just don't think 5G networks are available yet. One thing you should know is that the Plus model supports the millimeter wave version of 5G, while the smaller S20 does not, but unless you like standing on a particular corner to download videos, who cares about millimeter waves .

Now, one of the reasons you might want to get the S20 Plus in addition to the larger screen is the battery life. I mainly tested the smaller S20 which has a 4000 milliamp battery and after everything calmed down from the initial setup I got around five hours of screen time with the high refresh rate on. Brennan tested the S20 Plus which has a 4,500 milliamp battery and got a bit more. I think either can get you through a day and both really put the Pixel 4 to shame in longevity, but neither is stellar. As for the performance, I want to say that it is great.

The only Android phone that is faster than these phones is probably the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. There's plenty of RAM and the Snapdragon 865 processor, it looks like the real deal. Still, Samsung is doing Samsung things with software, I could complain about this all day, but instead of doing that, I actually want to tell you what I do to corral Samsung's worst tendencies. First of all, I clean up quick settings, then I install this app called Side Actions that lets you reprogram the power and volume buttons to do the things you actually want to do, like start, you know, Google Assistant and set up Bixby.

Then I install this app called Edge Calendars, which is amazing, it lets you swipe to see your calendars right away. I turn off Samsung Daily and also move the brightness slider to the top to make it easier to access. Oh, there's one more setting I turn on every time with the Galaxy S20, the 120Hz display. I don't know if I'll ever buy a phone again that doesn't have a high refresh rate display, it's just so much better. The animations are better, the scrolling is better, it just feels better. There's a trade-off for battery life, though: It's worse if you have high refresh rate turned on and Samsung simply locks in 120Hz, it doesn't try to vary it.

So on the small, if you definitely need it to last all day, you might want to set it back to 60Hz. Samsung also reduces the screen resolution when you're at 120Hz, but I think that trade-off is worth it on both sizes. phone. Again, it greatly improves the phone experience. And of course, the screen is a typical Samsung screen, which means it's great. I think Samsung's default colors are a little too bold, but you can set them to natural and then it just looks good. Anyway, that's all. That's the third thing you should know about the S20.

The screen is impressive. And I don't think you should ever spend $1000 on a phone without a high refresh rate display. Samsung decided to call it Galaxy S20 instead of Galaxy S11 because it has those three things. The new camera system, support for 5G and the high refresh rate screen. But I think the camera is just a minor evolutionary improvement over the S10. The zoom is really good, but otherwise it acts fundamentally like the Samsung cameras I'm used to. Good, but not the best. I think 5G is a failure because there really isn't support in most cities, and while I love the 120Hz refresh rate display, I understand it's nice to have, it's not a real functional improvement.

So yes. In my opinion, this is more of an S11 than an S20. It's not a completely new generation, but with such good fundamentals, I'll take it. Call it what you want Samsung. Hey, thanks so much for watching, we moved pretty quickly through some of the features of this phone, but we went into a lot more detail in the Galaxy S20 Ultra review, so you should check it out.