Summary

Samsung’s new flagship, the Galaxy S20 Ultra, tries to pack every single modern phone feature and the kitchen sink, and it mostly succeeds. It is Samsung’s most expensive smartphone yet (not counting the foldables) and for the first time, the starting price is actually higher than on arch-rival Apple’s top device, the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

There are a few camera kinks like a wonky autofocus in video and there are a few inconsistencies and smaller issues with the camera. Samsung has promised an update that would fix those camera issues, but while we are optimistic, we do feel like this phone has been rushed a bit. The interface is also starting to get a bit overwhelming with settings. Overall, though, the S20 Ultra will likely impress you, especially if you can stomach its $1,400 price.

Intro

Making a phone that truly stands out these days is a tough challenge: most smartphones already look great, cameras are better than ever, and even battery life has gotten quite good lately.

So what would you do if you were the one calling the shots at the biggest smartphone maker in the world?

How well has Samsung done its job? I have been using the Galaxy S20 Ultra for a week now, taking a bunch of photos and comparing it to the most popular rivals from Apple, Google and others. Read on to find out how the S20 Ultra performed.

But first, let’s start with a quick look at what you get inside the box with the Ultra:

Design

Samsung could have made this a little less boring

You might be quite intimidated when you read that the S20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch screen. “Wasn’t that as big as tablets back in the day?,” you may rightfully wonder. The answer is a bit complicated, but put shortly, no, the S20 Ultra is definitely not as big as tablets back in the day. The reason for this is the aspect ratio which used to be more squarish on older devices, and these days, the S20 Ultra has a much taller and also a much narrower display (it uses a 20:9 aspect ratio). In fact, the S20 Ultra is quite the tall phone, yet at the same time it’s even narrower than the 6.5″ iPhone 11 Pro Max which uses a different aspect ratio.

The materials Samsung uses are the familiar combination of toughened glass for the front and back, and polished, glossy aluminum for the middle frame of the device. Archrival Apple is using stainless steel for its Pro series of iPhones, and that materials feels a bit more lush, but the aluminum on the S20 Ultra helps keep the weight down and the Ultra weighs less than an iPhone 11 Pro Max.

There are two important changes in the S20 Ultra: the first one is that the Bixby button is gone (good riddance!), and the second one is much more unfortunate, and it’s the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack. Not a surprise considering current trends, but definitely a feature that some people are still missing on the latest smartphones.

Finally, this latest glass and metal concoction is also IP68 water and dust resistant, which is something that we have come to expect and it simply means that you should not worry about getting your phone a bit wet. At the same time, diving with it is definitely not a good idea, especially in salty water that would damage it, a reminder I feel obliged to put as another acquaintance of mine washed their water protected Galaxy phone in the sea only to find out its USB-C port was compromised. 

Display

Samsung at its best

We have already mentioned part of the screen specs, so here is the full breakdown: you get a big, 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED screen with a maximum resolution of 1440 x 3200 pixels. Most importantly, this is practically a flat screen. Gone are the times of those Galaxy phones with their displays tapered towards the edges. We find flat screen easier to use and even small conveniences like finding a proper glass screen protector are much easier with a flat screen.

The phone has a tiny punch hold camera centered at the top and bezels so tiny that… well, it makes using the phone without a case actually quite frustrating at times as just holding it you accidentally touch parts of the screen and trigger random actions. Slap a case on it, and this problem disappears, though.

The big new feature here, however, is something called a 120-Hertz refresh rate. If you are just as devoid of memories from your high school years as yours truly, let me remind you that a Hertz is a unit of measuring frequencies, and in this case, it means that the screen of the S20 Ultra refreshes 120 times per seconds, double that of your typical smartphone that runs at 60Hz. In reality, this means that the phone reacts to your touch with a sense of urgency and immediacy that you don’t quite feel on a 60Hz phone and everything appears to be running faster and smoother. The difference is really noticeable and you don’t have to be a geek to see it BUT and that’s a big one, it will also result in considerably higher power consumption. That is why Samsung gives you the option to go into the display setting and change it to the traditional 60Hz mode where you will get better battery life.

There are two things to know about the 120Hz option: first, it’s not available in the maximum Quad HD resolution and it only works in Full HD mode; and second, there is no in-between 90Hz option, which we find a bit strange as that would have been a nice balance between smoothness and not too high of a battery drain.

The rest is all about the colors and Samsung as a company that is also making AMOLED screens has absolutely mastered them. You have two color modes: a Vivid and a Natural one, which basically lets you choose between oversaturated, vivid colors (the default option) and more toned down colors (that is the option we prefer as we find the Vivid mode a bit too unrealistic).

Traditional staples of the Samsung display experience are all still present: you have the quite useful Always-on Display option that gives you a quick peek at notifications, you have the Edge lighting which lights up the edges of the screen with a pulsating color show (this is meant to replace the traditional notification LED light that is missing here), and you have the Edge screen with shortcuts.

Fingerprint Scanner and Security

Room for improvement

One of our biggest complaints with the S10 series and then the Note 10 series was the fingerprint scanner. Samsung used a fingerprint reader embedded under the screen and one of the ultrasonic kind, meaning that it uses sound waves to read the ridges and specific pattern of your finger to recognize it. This is different from most other Android phone makers that use an optical solution that uses light. Unfortunately, the S20 Ultra does not seem to have improved much from the Note series last year and the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner still feels like a hit-or-miss experience. Sure, it works most of the time, but we were having far more missed readings than on other phones.

One UI and Android

Mostly the familiar Samsung interface with a cool new feature

The feature is not supported on the S10 series yet, so we could only test it between the new Galaxy S20 Ultra and Z Flip. To illustrate the speeds you can expect to get, we tried sending a 1GB video from the S20 Ultra to the Z Flip, and it transferred in just 21 seconds, which works out to transfer speeds of nearly 50MB per second, impressively quick. QuickShare works even when the devices are not connected to a network or even Wi-Fi. What it does is create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network for every file transfer. While it worked great most of the time, it did not always work so fast, and on a couple of occasions we noticed slowdowns as the same transfer took nearly 40 seconds and once even two minutes, but most of the time, the speeds that you will get will be pretty incredible. We can only hope such a feature arrives on a much wider range of Android smartphones in the future.

Processor, RAM and Performance

Powerful, but some bugs with Google apps

The S20 Ultra like other Samsung flagship phones comes in two versions depending on your location: customers in the United States and a few other countries are getting the S20 Ultra powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 system chip, while the rest of the world is getting the phone with the Exynos 990 chip made by Samsung.

We happen to have the Exynos model and the performance between the two might differ slightly, so keep that in mind when reading about our battery tests and performance benchmarks.

In the daily grind, the phone definitely feels fast like you would expect for a 2020 flagship, but there are a few persisting issues. The first one is a weird jitter when scrolling in basically all Google-made apps. If you are using Chrome, YouTube or Gmail, expect to see a strange jitter as you swipe around. This has been an issue for years now with Samsung phones, and there doesn’t seem to be a fix in the works. In comparison, if you switch to using Samsung’s browser instead of Chrome, everything runs perfectly smooth and the jitter is not there, but there are just no worthy alternatives to apps like YouTube.

But let’s not be too nit-picky, and take a look at the rest of specs which are generous: you get either a 128GB storage/12GB RAM version or a 512GB storage/16GB RAM model (we got the latter) and you get expandable storage via microSD cards. This is an insane amount of RAM and it means that you can keep dozens of apps open in the background without any issue with the phone. Here are a few performance benchmarks that will give you more color about the speeds you will get on the Ultra:

As you can see, switching to the smoother 120Hz refresh rate means battery life is taking about a 20% hit. That is not a small decrease in battery life for a single feature, but considering the overall solid battery life, we think most users would still be better off using the smoother, futuristic experience that comes with a 120Hz screen. 

Charging Speeds

A full charge in under an hour

Both phones finished the 0 to 100% charge test in less than an hour, with the Ultra being just a minute or so faster.

The Ultra also supports the 45-watt super fast Samsung charger. You have to buy that one separately (it costs $50) and the main benefit will be seen when you charge the phone from a completely dead battery to about 75% battery level. Towards the end of the charge period, however, the speeds slow down and the 45-watt charger finishes topping up the phone in exactly the same amount of time as the 25-watt charger.

Sound and Loudspeaker Quality

Big and impressive sound

You might have missed the news, but last year something remarkable happened in loudspeakers: the Google Pixel 4 series. Google quietly brought a loudspeaker revolution with incredible quality that you are not used to hearing on a smartphone and in our blind test of about a dozen people everyone qualified the Pixel above all other flagships in terms of loudspeaker quality.

Needless to say, we were excited to see what Samsung brings today table and indeed the S20 Ultra is a huge improvement in the way its loudspeakers sound compared to any other Samsung phone in the past. We compared the loudspeaker on the S20 Ultra against the Note 10 Plus and it blows it out of the water easily. It also easily trumps the iPhone 11 Pro Max, with a richer sound with much crisper higher tonalities.