Second Opinion #86: Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Review

Ryan reviews the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: the most expensive mainline phone ever from Samsung and a merely OK camera -- why not!

Ryan reviews the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: the most expensive mainline phone ever from Samsung and a merely OK camera -- why not!

Listen to the Note 10+ review from roughly 6 months ago!
Pricing

$1399 base price, there’s another config for another $200
Preorder trade-in with an S10+ brought that down to $799 (-$600)

Specs

For full specs, read GSM Arena
CPU

SD 865
Allegedly the Snapdragon 865 is tied together with the 5G modem, so the cost of the entire device is increased

RAM

12GB; matching Note 10+
Higher config has 16GB total though

Storage

128GB base
Higher config has 512GB though
A real shame this “Ultra” tier didn’t have 256GB to match the Note 10+ out of box experience
SD Card slot still present though

Display

Size

6.9’’ !
20:9 aspect ratio

It’s really tall
Unlike the old Nexus 6 Moto, it’s not too wide

Special features

2020 screen process
120hz refresh rate. 240hz input rate
1440p is exclusive of 120hz at release time though

aybe a future update enables it at battery life loss

Physicals

Look and feel, build quality

Footprint
Weight

Battery

5000 mah; the biggest ever!

Charging

Allegedly 45w compatible again, but not included, and who cares

Ports
Speakers

Initially impressions would say they’re worse than the Note 10+’s speakers

Buttons

Alas, the Note 10+ had perfect button placement on the leftside, S20U moved to the right
No bixby button – Samsung has learned

5G

Of no consequence to me at this time
It’s identical to LTE in everyday experience
S20U has the mmWave modem so if T-Mobile somehow pulled a Verizon it could be ultra fast in the park with line of sight

Camera

3 real back cameras (time of flight / depth sensor also but not a real camera)
How is it

It’s remarkably average
Initial impressions were concerning

Any subject movement (a dog, for example) would cause blur
The depth of field of the primary camera made taking typical shots difficult
The default settings leave a lot to be desired (scene optimization)
JPEG

Special modes

100X zoom!

An example of practical zoom
5x zoom ends up “grainy” and looking digital, because the optical zoom kicks in at 10x
You can see an Ian from 5 rows away

108mp

The pixel binning (can you say HTC ULTRA PIXELS?) is back and it’s still mediocre sometimes

Night Mode

Night Mode has been available on previous Samsung phones, but it’s still remarkably good

40mp selfie camera

Cool, I guess? 

Verdict

Don’t buy this for the camera, I’d say
The S10+ or the Note 10+ had sometimes better cameras

The S10+/Note10+ lines shared cameras and the camera “modules” line had been used in other Samsung devices over time; you could think that this is a first gen-use of a module-line and the software hasn’t caught up yet

The ultra-wide camera module is 12mp – give me more on that one – I love ultra-wide shots and I rarely zoom
I find predicting which of the cameras the phone will use in a given mode too confusing to even try to understand
Physical camera bump, alignment is weird and an ergonomic disaster

Software

OS

We’ll get Android 11 on this phone next February or so when the next S-model comes out

Kind of Samsung’s fault, kind of Google’s fault

The thirdparty launcher support for the new gestures is still forthcoming allegedly in One UI 2.5 – unfortunately

Updates

A camera update came 3-weeks into ownership
It fixed some camera issues but there’s still work to be done

Hoping there are many more meaningful updates

Performance

No jitter or lag for me

Final thoughts

Don’t buy this at full price
It’s a big, heavy phone, consider the S20+ instead
Let’s conclude with a funny story

I’ve been buying phones YoY since 2016 and I bought the Pixel XL 1 with extra-storage at the time, and somehow it came out to ~$950
S20U is $1399 but with a trade-in, it was still cheaper

Attributions

Free Music Archive: Beat Doctor – Organic (electric edit)

Connect With The Nexus

Support us on Patreon
Discuss this episode on our Subreddit

Copyright

Second Opinion is released under a Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International license. Feel free to use any or all of it as long as you link back to https://thenexus.tv/so86.

Listen to more at The Nexus and follow us on Twitter and Google+ for our latest episodes and news.