- Back in 2013, Samsung released a phone called
the Galaxy Mega.
And aptly named it was huge for the time.
Bigger even than the Galaxy Note.
Aimed at what then was a small niche of customers
who wanted giant screens in their pocket.
But today, every phone screen is of course mega,
but as impressive as that sounds,
a quick click on WikiDiff shows that
it just means very large.
When you really want to convey extreme,
fanatical and uncompromising in 2020,
well, you need to call something 'Ultra'
(upbeat music)
I've spent seven days using the Galaxy S20 Ultra,
on Verizon's network, from Brooklyn to The Boonies.
It's the biggest phone I've reviewed
since the monster iPhone 11 Pro Max.
And it needs every cubic millimeter
to pack in its glut of features.
It also includes enough 5G hardware
to work on a high, mid and low bands here in the States
so if you carrier offers it, the Ultra can pick it up.
Now my attitude about 5G is best summed up by
Admiral Chekov from Star Trek,
- Irrelevant!
Irrelevant!
- Yeah powerful speaker phone on this phone.
But hey if you have 5G coverage where you live,
it's nice that the Ultra has it.
Especially given the large file sizes
of the photos and videos you can shoot,
which I'll show you in a second.
First, let's talk about the practical benefits
you get out of the box.
Samsung has pared back those flashy waterfall curves
on the sides, which is good because
makes inadvertent taps with your thumb meat less likely.
And then my favorite part, the battery.
I think this is the largest battery
of any phone I've reviewed.
I stress tested it with a weekend drive
from upstate Roxbury back to Brooklyn,
a track of about 160 miles.
I used to turn by turn directions
for almost six straight hours.
With pit stops along the way to see roadside Rocket Ships,
lean on the occasional tugboat propeller,
and get to know the local wildlife RIP.
Add in two hours streaming podcasts over Bluetooth,
another two and a half hours rocking on Spotify,
and for an hour in the backwoods,
we had no cell service at all.
Despite that, I still had enough power
for 90 minutes of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
on the couch when I got home.
That's what I call heavy use, and the Ultra,
lives up to its name here.
Quick word on charging I've given Samsung guff
for including only a 25 watt plug in the box
instead of the 45 watt charger sold separately,
but thanks to Sasha Siegen at PC mag,
we now know that you should save your 50 bucks.
there's almost no benefit in speed
to the more expensive charger.
And now this is important.
For that battery test, I left the phone
in its default settings with the display resolution
limited to full HD and the refresh rate locked to 60 hertz.
Personally that's probably where I'd leave those settings.
I've never been great at noticing
super high resolution displays and even
the scrolling smoothness is subtle.
But when you're spending as much as this thing costs
for the kind of specs, this thing boasts,
leaving those toggles in the out of box setting just
I don't know it's kind of like buying a professional
racing bike and then bolting training wheels to it.
If you do run the phone at 120 hertz or quad-HD,
you'll see a battery handicap of between 20 and 30%.
According to my buddy Andrew Martinek and Andrew Central.
Alright, let's slap down some stones.
There's a reason it looks like someone taped it domino
to the back of a brick here.
This camera is the most ambitious optical upgrade
I've seen Samsung attempt.
I think the most important upgrade is night mode.
Finally, there's a Samsung phone you can use in a dim
mountain tavern or a moody theme hotel
and actually do those settings some justice.
Now, this night mode has the same hinky hangups as others,
it takes forever to capture so it doesn't work well
with moving subjects, and the processing
really over states the colors in the final product.
This needs to be tweaked.
But it's such a huge improvement over anything
Samsung's offered before.
And it also helps improve the output from cameras
other than the primary.
You all know I love using that ultra wide camera
and in zoom mode, just look at the added detail
on that blind label.
For shooting sharper, you've got a primary camera
weighing at 108 megapixels.
Capable of 8k video.
For contact, that's four times as sharp
as a 4k TV is capable of displaying.
You might think that means shooting video at 8k is
impractical and largely you're correct.
But having that much information in the frame
when you do shoot an 8k means you can crop in
much further without losing so much quality.
Same goes for the 108 megapixel still shots.
It can mix down nine pixels into one,
that kicks out a 12 megapixel final photo
with more detail than you could otherwise get.
Finally there's shooting far away.
The telephoto camera is another monster
48 megapixel camera mounted sideways alongside this prism,
and that allows for zoom levels I haven't seen
since I used a Huawei phone.
Now I think Samsung made a strategic mistake
painting 100X on this phone.
Well you can digitally punch in that far,
you don't want to.
But, zoom levels up to around 10X, very impressive
compared to the 2X or 3X telephoto shots
most phones produce.
Now the huge asterisk floating over this whole camera
situation is that it feels half baked.
Samsung effectively admitted as much
when it replied to some earlier reviewers
saying that an update was coming soon to quote,
improve the camera experience.
Now as this video was being cut,
I was informed that an update is already hitting ultra units
in Korea, thanks to Max Weinbach
for the shout out and letting me know.
I'll be tracking this closely so
follow me on Twitter for updates there.
(upbeat music)
Let's talk performance.
With a spec sheet like this,
you should basically expect perfection.
And I gotta say the ultra brings it.
Well 12 gigs might seem like a preposterous surplus of RAM.
Remember that this phone can stand in
for a desktop computer, using Samsung decks.
Plus you can now manually pin apps in memory
to force them to stay open so you don't lose work
when multitasking.
So for once, I'm grateful for the ram overload.
As I said before, the speakers are loud,
phone calls are great, really day to day.
The only frustrations I keep running into are the slow
and finicky fingerprint sensor, and that design.
Though it seems to me that when you build the biggest
and baddest phone on the block, some of that ambition
should be reflected in the ID.
Instead, the Ultra, seems like it wants to
blend into the background instead of stand out.
If you just said, well, you're gonna put a case on it
anyway, you've beaten me to my own sponsor spot.
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But it's also totally customizable to get some
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and thanks to dbrand, for sponsoring this video.
So, here's the S20 Ultra worth the asking price.
Well I'm not a fan of telling people
they shouldn't spend their money on something
if you really want the best Samsung can offer,
you'll probably enjoy this.
But to try to get a sense of the actual value,
let's take a look at last year's Samsung flagship.
The company wanted $999, for the entry level
Galaxy S10 Plus in 2019, and it wants $400 more
for the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
Now I don't really feel like I'm getting 40%
more smartphone here, unless I'm standing out of scale.
Some say, the better comparison is with
the Galaxy S10 plus 5G, which was 1300 dollars last year.
But this year, you don't even have the option
of buying a non 5G model.
So, maybe you start to understand why I said this
in my Galaxy Z flip review.
Personally, that war between the Galaxy Z flip
and the S20 Ultra, I might pick the Z flip.
That's the real (mumbles) this whole situation.
This isn't one of Samsung's crazy foldable devices.
Where the sheer ambition goes a long way
toward explaining a high price tag.
Instead, the ultra is an iteration on a product family,
that's now 10 years old.
And when you're asking people to pay $1400,
you've either got a nail every fundamental,
or you've got to bring something transformative.
But while this phone is super in some ways,
and even mega and others, the sum total falls
somewhat short of Ultra.
If you're down in the comments wondering why
I wasn't so hard on the iPhone 11,
allow me to suggest that you actually
watch my iPhone 11 Pro Max review,
which is available at the Mr Mobile on YouTube.
And if you liked that video, please,
subscribe to my channel so I can keep producing reviews
like this one.
It was made possible thanks to a review sample
provided by Samsung but I don't produce paid reviews,
Samsung was not given editorial input
or copy approval rights, which means
they're seeing this video for the first time
right alongside you.
Nevertheless, I'm continuing to ask Samsung for comment,
and clarification on all these issues,
as the company responds, I'll drop those responses
in the description and or the comments.
Some of the footage in this video is courtesy
my friends at Android Central.
Please go visit them and check out there S20
and S20 Ultra reviews.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
And stay mobile, my friends.
(upbeat music)