Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review: Why Buy Anything Else?

- Alright, you have $1,300 to spend on an Android phone in 2024. Why would you buy another phone? No, seriously, why would you buy another phone? This S 24 Ultra has taken the best of all other

ultra

-high-end phones and put them together in one place, so everything you could possibly value has been taken to the max. And there are several cherries on top, scattered everywhere. This phone sets the tone for 2024. (soft, upbeat music) So the formula for Samsung's Ultra phones has evolved a bit over the years. At first, it was just the most numbers, the most megapixels, the most zoom and all that.

Then it added the S Pen and it became a little more refined and replaced the Note. Now that's all. It's all in one place. It's the best hardware and the best software I can think of, all in one phone. So on the outside, as I said in my first impressions, this phone looks almost the same as last year's, but if you think this phone is almost the same as last year's, it turns out you are missing a lot. So the more you use this phone, the more you look for its weaknesses, the more impressive it becomes.

So maybe what? You're a screen snob, right? You like looking at pixels, maybe you were thinking of getting one of the

ultra

-high-end Oppo or Xiaomi phones just for an amazing screen. Very good, look no further. Literally one of the best screens of any phone. The S24 Ultra has a class-leading 6.8-inch quad HD AMOLED display and it's incredible. These ultra phones have had 120Hz LTPO for a while and have also been this really sharp quad HD for a while. But now, on top of that, there are two new things: one is that it is completely flat and the second is that it is much brighter.

So there's been this whole new batch of over 2500 nit phones in the last few months that I've seen. I think this is the most beautiful one I have seen so far. So now it maxes out at 2600 nits, which is amazing outdoors or anywhere. But it also gets extremely dark at night, without any of the strange banding I've seen on other phones. And they flattened the screen completely and took it all the way to the corners with some of the thinnest bezels we've seen across the board. Additionally, there is also this new anti-reflective coating on this Gorilla Glass Armor that makes a noticeable difference with certain light hitting it at off-axis angles.

And then there's an incredibly fast ultrasonic fingerprint reader underneath to top it off. And you know, maybe I wish the touch lens was a little bigger, but that's it. Honestly, if you're a screen snob, it doesn't get any better than this one here. This is the phone you should get. Well, what if your main concern is battery life? Well, you can always get the Energizer phone we saw at CES at the same time, but as far as reasonably sized flagship phones go, it doesn't get any better than this. Once again, they're keeping a 5,000mAh battery in one of the best-performing battery phones of the last two years, despite making it slimmer and keeping the S Pen.

So you might as well get this one. You still have 45 watt wired charging, you still have 25 watt wireless charging, and just the battery life, I was able to have long days with no issues, with six more hours of screen on time. I was able to keep it going for two full days, that is, at 1440p, 120Hz, and using high brightness. So yeah, why get

anything

else

? So, okay, what if the main thing you care about is performance? Well, we're seeing all these phones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 starting to come out and they look really good. Excellent high-end performance, there are efficiency gains everywhere, plus this phone combines it with 12 gigs of RAM and is a multitasking champ.

And if you're into a stylus, I know you're not considering any other phones, the S Pen is basically the only high-end stylus still found in mainstream smartphones. It's really good for taking notes, drawing, highlighting and all that. But if you're like me and rarely use it, there's still gaming performance and everyday performance. There's the newly added speed tracking plus a 90% larger vapor chamber to cool the phone for much longer. Turns out it's an A plus. Now you can always get a gaming phone and squeeze five to 10% more frames out of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with a huge cooling setup, and that's great, but you also have to accept all the sacrifices that come with such games . phone about this.

And do you really want those extra frames that much? It depends on who you ask. Well, cameras, there are plenty of other phones you can buy if your $1,300 goes specifically toward the best cameras. You know the Pixel just won the blind camera test. Sony has the best manual mode, as do other excellent camera systems. But here's a way to simplify it: I think when evaluating smartphone cameras, there are basically two ways to

review

them. There is the usefulness, the real technical evaluation and the aesthetics, the art, the subjectivity part. And I think in terms of usability, like on paper and specs, this camera has it all.

As you've seen this camera array before, there are four cameras on the back of this phone. Turns out they're basically the same cameras as last year's S23 Ultra except for one. There's a main camera, an ultra-wide-angle camera, and a pair of two different telephoto cameras. The main camera is still the ridiculous 200 megapixel sensor with the same pros and cons. It is consistent and versatile across the board. It has a great dynamic range. It's a fast shooter with fast autofocus and it also always drops to 12 megapixels and you should almost never switch it to 200 megapixel mode unless you have incredible lighting.

It has an ultra-wide camera with a bit of distortion near the edges, but it's actually significantly wider than the main camera, so it's a lot of fun to shoot with. Although the auto macro mode seems rubbish and you should turn it off every time you change your images from this to this, pro tip. And then it has a mid-range 3X telephoto camera that activates smoothly and matches the colors and exposure of the main camera very well. And the only new hardware this year is that they have gone from a 10-megapixel 10X camera to a 50-megapixel 5X camera.

Technically, the optical zoom range is shorter, but I would say that with the additional resolution, it is actually more powerful. It means all photos in the gap between 5X and 10X look sharper than last year. And then you can literally put the 10X photos side by side from the S23 Ultra and S24 Ultra and the new cropped 5X actually looks better. Plus, you can still zoom all the way in and shoot at 100X if you still want to take ultra-stable shots of distant objects like the moon. But basically what I'm saying is from a utility standpoint, this camera system checks every box.

Has it all. Then from there you get to the more subjective aesthetic differences that you can always lean one way or the other. I think looking at these photos, they still have a slightly more Samsung process look, a little more contrast, a little higher exposure, a little brighter colors, that's still happening with these photos. So, you could still be convinced to go for the Pixel or even the iPhone, but if you just want to be able to tick all the boxes, why look anywhere

else

? Honestly, the changes you notice most aside from the actual quality of the camera are like the features that use it.

Just like the S24 Ultra records all HDR by default now, it's actually in Google's new ultra HDR format. So when you have specular highlights or large dynamic range differences in a photo, it will tastefully enhance those things for a more dramatic image on the phone's screen, similar to what the Pixel and iPhone already do. And this ranges from capturing the photo to viewing it in the gallery, and then one step further, to publishing it on social networks. So Samsung has worked with Instagram and Snapchat for native quality photo and video upload channels because, at the end of the day, once you take the photo, what do you plan to do with it 99% of the time?

Share it. And I think this is important to a lot of people, one of the reasons I've used an iPhone for years is that one of the things you can always count on is that photos and videos in third-party apps will look just as good. as if they were captured on the main camera. And now you can say that's true about this phone's photos and videos, at least on Instagram and Snapchat. Alright, maybe you're a software expert, maybe the first thing on your list when buying a new smartphone is wanting the smartest smartphone. It should have all the software and AI features.

And honestly, you should have a nice long roadmap ahead of timely software updates. It sounds like I'm describing a Pixel, but it turns out that this phone now has lots and lots of useful AI features built in that are really good, they make a significant difference in everyday use. Now, the funny thing about all this is that many of these features are created in partnership with Google, as you will see. And I can't help but still think that it seems like Samsung needs Google to have all these features on its phone to compete, especially against the iPhone.

But then Google, now their own phones are a little less competitive, but it's probably worth the trade-off because now they're technically helping to compete against the iPhone. It's a strange thing where they need each other. I think it's fascinating and probably worth having its own separate video, maybe let me know with a comment or subscribe if you want to see it. But that's the whole background, all of this. So we were talking about photos a second ago, the moment you finish taking a photo and open it in Samsung's Gallery app, there are a ton of useful AI-powered things you can do with it.

And it's all based on the type of scene it automatically detects you've shot. So a lot of photos end up with a remaster button that you click and then it can add some contrast and brighten things up a little bit as needed and gives you a solid before and after. But if your photo has glass or a window, it will show you a Clear Reflections button and then you can literally go in and circle the reflections that you want to get rid of and it will generatively fill in what should actually be on the glass. And it works quite well.

Now with this photo, I didn't take it in portrait mode, but it recognizes that there is a subject and therefore will offer to add background blur. And even without much additional depth information, it analyzes the subject and allows me to add a little or a lot of background blur with a pretty good crop, in my opinion, to just create a portrait mode taken out of thin air. . But if you ever really want to go crazy, there's a completely separate Magic Editor that feels exactly like what we just got with the Pixel minus the restrictions - I've never been told it can't do something.

So you open any photo, press the Edit button and then this little blue green button with the stars appears, that's Samsung's new Magic Editor. And once you're here, you can go crazy. You can move the subject around a photo and have a generative fill in the background. Or you can have it completely remove elements from the foreground or background of a photo, such as photobombers or just unnecessary random objects. I actually found this super helpful. But it's probably actually my favorite, underrated. You know how usually when you need to tilt a photo, like fixing the horizon, you end up cropping and losing part of the outside of the photo?

You can still do that, but with this Magic Editor, you can open it up and tilt the horizon to whatever angle you want, and instead of cropping, it will literally generatively fill in the outside of the photo, which works great because normally the outside of the photo It is the least important part of the photo. You can get away with generative padding. And by the way, literally all of this also works with photos you download to your phone, not just photos you take with the camera, but photos you get on the go, like the Pixel. Now I also find it funny that if you use Magic Editor to modify a photo on this phone, it will add a little watermark in the bottom corner with these little stars so you know that this photo was manipulated by AI, which is nice. , that's a very responsible thing to do, especially if you're going to upload this to social media.

But you can also immediately erase that watermark with a built-in object removal tool in Samsung's Photo Editor app. There's a nice little section in the settings where Samsung has hidden all of this phone's AI features. It's called Advanced Intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence. However, it is still AI. That's where you get things like the live phone call translation feature or the new appVoice recorder, which gets much better speaker tags, summaries and transcripts. The Samsung browser will now make summaries of web pages. This may all sound very familiar to you, but in my opinion, the best new feature is Circle to Search.

Now, Google Lens has been around for a long time and, in my opinion, is one of Google's most underrated products. So people may have already known that you could basically do this, but it would require several steps. Circle to search, it's just one step. It's so much faster, it's pretty impressive. You literally just hold down the home button or the gesture bar at the bottom and then circle or tap

anything

on your screen that you want to Google and it immediately Googles on top of what you were doing without leaving that application and it is like that. useful.

Simply put, even in the week I've been using this phone, I've searched for images, parts of photos before, it almost always works, as does uploading them to Google Lens. I have looked for objects right in front of me through the camera viewfinder. I've looked for random landmarks. You can also search for text and even add text to your search. And I was constantly impressed with how fast it is and basically works as expected every time. The only disturbing part is that sometimes selecting text gets a little weird. Using the S Pen can solve this a bit for more precise selection.

But yeah, once you do that, it's a lot faster than if you were using Google Lens, having to take a screenshot and then upload it through Lens and then maybe having to crop it and all that. This is just fast. Now true OGs will know that there used to be a feature on Pixels called Now on Tap. It was exactly the same, you would hold down the home button and it would just Google whatever was on your screen and help you, but that was all on your screen and they ended up wrapping it in Google Assistant.

This is much faster and more selective. Furthermore, Pixels will also get this feature very soon. But then, bonus points, if you really love software, Samsung is now promising seven years of security updates and seven generations of major software updates on this phone, on this S24 line. I guess seven generations of software updates is basically seven years. That means this phone will be updated in 2031. I love it. So we know that the common wisdom was that if you wanted four, five, six years or more of software updates or if you wanted every little software and AI feature, you basically had to go with iPhone or Pixel.

But now that this phone also has it, why buy anything else? But speaking of the iPhone, they are also aimed at them. Now I know what I said at the beginning of this video, a $1,300 Android phone, so I know the iPhone 15 Pro Max was never really on the table, but if we're honest, Samsung has never been shy about competing directly against the iPhone, So why not grab some of the best stuff from there too? They weren't being subtle about it. So they have this shiny new titanium color with titanium rails on the S24 Ultra, just like the iPhone.

They've flattened the screen and sides and made more square corners across the line, just like the iPhone. They have moved to a maximum telephoto lens of 5X as I mentioned before, also like the iPhone. They also have this new always on display that not only shows the time but shows your entire wallpaper now, like it's half awake like the iPhone. Fortunately, you can also turn it off and save battery life, like on the iPhone. You can now also long-press to select an object in a photo, which automatically crops it and turns it into a sticker that you can use in other apps, like the iPhone.

And now there are even these new lock screen widgets that look exactly like iPhones, like copy my homework, but don't even worry if they know you copied it. These two will continue to copy each other until the end of time, none of this is a surprise, it's just that at the end of the day we are technically winning because they are slowly making each other a little better. But at the end of the day, S24 Ultra, I really feel like it feels like a top slab phone. And there are also a lot of things I didn't even mention with this phone.

The tactile sensation is really nice, I didn't even get there. There are now AI generated wallpapers, a whole section for them, if you like that. And it's nice that the AI ​​stuff is mostly hidden so you never have to use it if you don't want to, but if you notice it and it's useful to you, bam, turn it on, would you? be your favorite feature. Really, the only things I miss, specifically about the Pixel, are call control and playback. So really the best argument for not buying this $1,300 phone is the fact that it's a $1,300 phone. And the truth is that you can get 98% of the phone for much less money.

You can see it in Samsung's own line. Samsung's own S24 Plus has a 4,900 mAh battery instead of 5,000. It has a 6.7-inch screen instead of 6.8 and offers a $300 discount on the S Pen and one of the telephoto cameras. And you know you can get the regular S24, again, for a lot less money with almost the same amount of phone. So you don't have to spend $1,300 on a phone. But if you're going to do it and put the word Ultra in the name and store as many things on one phone as you can, this is the one you should get.

This has it all; It's reliable, it's fast, it does everything, it ticks all the boxes and it sounds great. It feels like an advertisement when I say all these positive things about the phone, but it's not. So far this video is sponsored by Ridge. The Ridge Wallet is iconic right now. They are minimalist and modern wallets, like the opposite of old school wallets. It has the patented dual-track design that expands to hold one to 12 cards while being as slim as possible. And at this point, there are over 30 different colors and styles, including carbon fiber, burnt titanium, and forged embers.

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Tell them I sent you. Anyway, that's it for the S24 Ultra. Thanks for watching. See you next time, peace. (soft and happy music)