For my Samsung Note 20 Ultra Review, I have really pushed the boat out, so I’ve loaded it up with applications, I’ve tested, its thermals, it’s battery, even accidentally, it’s strength. I’ve taken 435 photos with this camera. So here’s what I think….
Samsung Note 20 Ultra Review – First Impressions
I still remember picking the phone up for the first time just a few weeks ago and thinking they’ve done it. This is how an Ultra phone should feel, Wow, what a beast, better than the Samsung Note 10 Plus, but then they did jump from 10 to 20! Well even now that the dust has settled, every time I take this out of my pocket, I’m internally nodding my head thinking, yeah, this feels right, but for how long?
It could do with being a bit less slippery, you know I am going to drop this master piece sooner rather than later and I know a Samsung Note 20 Ultra Screen repair will cost me a small fortune. Maybe the slipperiness is by design??? The camera is huge and does get in the way a bit when trying to game, but I’m nitpicking. For me, it’s almost perfect, and I do not say that about a lot of things. With this phone, the size feels just right. I wouldn’t make it bigger because it only just fits in my hand, but I also wouldn’t make it smaller, because when you’ve used a screen like this, you don’t want to go back. The thickness feels just right, and though it might not look like it the way it is surprisingly evenly distributed, the bezels have practically disappeared.
Samsung Note 20 Ultra – S-Pen and Screen
The S Pen has finally achieved its original objective of feeling truly like pen on paper, although I am still confused as to why. They shift it to the left of the phone, and the screen is so bright that I couldn’t even find a lighting condition in which it wasn’t clearly visible. This display genuinely is a masterpiece. You set a good wallpaper on this phone and it feels like you’re holding an edgeless digital tapestry. Interacting with the screen is a joy too, because Samsung’s haptics are amazing. Plus, it comes with some of the best news that Samsung has ever announced with a new phone that these phones are going to get three years of guaranteed software updates compared to the Samsung S20 Ultra earlier this year. They’ve toned down their marketing, they’ve toned down their claims, they’ve toned down their price while at the same time actually delivering more value. So what I’m trying to say here is that this feels like, and I don’t use this term lightly, a perfect Samsung phone.
Awesome Samsung Note 20 Ultra Cameras
Samsung Note 20 Ultra review, let’s look at the Cameras. Now, admittedly, it is tough to get excited about a camera that’s almost the same as the one on a phone I ditched a few months ago. But this has one important perk over the Samsung S20 Ultra Camera in that the Samsung Note 20 Ultra Camera feels lighter, faster shutter speed, quicker, less janky zooming, and way faster focusing thanks to the new laser autofocus module. Not perfect focusing still, but far better. Plus, the phone itself is just physically less heavy, so that contributes to this feeling of lightness. The selfies are good too, aided further by the fact that you can now hold your phone further away than normal and still take a Photo by using the S Pen. So these are actually some of the wider selfies you can get right now. It’s still not as reliable as the iPhone 11 Pro Max Camera when you’re taking portraits, for example, but 98% of the time that I’ve taken this phone out to capture something, I’ve been at least satisfied with the result. The 2% of times where I did have a problem were often just because of how this 108 megapixel sensor produces images, because it has a very narrow plane of focus. I found myself a few times taking photos of things that are closer up, thinking I’d got it completely in focus when actually a part of it is ever so slightly out of focus. It’s a camera system that while I’m sure it could be better and one where I’m sure they will find ways to improve it in the future, I’ve got very little to complain about. In fact, probably my biggest complaint is just the fact that it doesn’t seem to know when to switch to the telephoto camera. What I mean is when you’re zooming into things, it should switch as soon as you pass five times zoom to maintain quality, but sometimes I’ve had to get to 11 time zoom before the phone finally realises ohh yeah, we should probably change lenses now. Also, massively underrated feature is the new Samsung Depths. This went from first needing a specialised doc just to work to then needing just a cable to now needing nothing. And it’s probably one of the use cases that truly shows the power of the phone. Being able to show your photo album while playing a YouTube video and doing five other things at the same time really is quite cool.
Samsung Note 20 Ultra Review – It’s Note Perfect
There are things I don’t like, and pretty much all of those things are just Samsung being Samsung, Like how they choose to add these sharp corners on the Note phones to distinguish them from the S phones, it does make the phone a bit more square, but then you get better screen protection. It is virtually impossible to protect a curved screen and not lose the function of the whole screen, that is why we do so many Samsung screen repairs. I like how the camera does take amazing photos, but how it insists on smoothing out faces when taking portrait mode shots. Like the fact that Samsung software seems intent on making you swallow every single Samsung service available. And it just bundles in so much junk, so much low quality content, which can’t be good for battery life either. The Game Launcher has these game recommendations and they’re straight out of 2014 with a lot of them not even being available in my country, Even for Samsung’s Internet browser, why are half the recommendations in what I can only assume is Korean? Also, Samsung have just made their phones quite confusing. In some regions this is a 4G phone, in others it’s a 5G phone. In some regions you get the Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset, literally the best that Android has to offer. But in other regions you get the Exynos 990, which is about as good as the Snapdragon from last year. For some people the base model will have 256 gigs of storage, great, but in others you’ll get 128. I even found out that if you live in some regions like Pakistan or if you go for the LTE variant, the Samsung Note 20 Ultra starts at 8 gigabytes of RAM. In 2020 you can get a phone with light in its name that has 8 gigabytes of RAM. This lineup is so confusing that if you want to know how good the Note 20 Ultra actually is, then you’ve almost got to make sure that you only read articles that are coming from the country that you’re planning on buying the phone in. Otherwise you’re kind of looking at a different phone.
Battery Life, Could It Be Better?
In the UK the Samsung Note 20 Ultra is sold with the Exynos chip. This chip is not particularly battery efficient day-to-day. I did feel like it was lasting a little longer than my Samsung S20 Ultra Battery did, but just to make sure, for this Samsung Note 20 Ultra Review, I did do a side by side with a brand new Note 20 Ultra. I set both phones to equal brightness and just cycle through applications. And I mean the note was ahead, but very slightly, literally one percentage point. So the battery life is good, not great. But then again, from what I’ve seen from Samsung Note 20 Ultra Review in the US, the Note 20 Ultra over there can last up to an hour more of screen on time. The charging speed is fine, but does slow to a crawl as the battery is nearly full. So the takeaway of all of this is really quite simple. Here’s the Note versus most of its competition and actually right off the bat we can get rid of the Samsung S20 Ultra just because of how this is similar but better. The Oppo Find X2 Pro is actually pretty similar spec wise and does charge way faster than the Note, but I would decide with Samsung mostly because of the screen on this bad boy. I would get rid of the ROG phone as well because the Notes cameras are better and the form factor way nicer. But this is actually quite a close one because I really appreciate the mega battery on the ROG. In fact the Notes cameras are also far more reliable than Sony Experia one too. So let’s drop that and we can also remove the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro. As for the time being it’s a China only model and the Huawei P40 Pro Plus for most users because of the lack of Google Apps. do that leaves us with the OnePlus 8 Pro, a great pro level phone for less. The iPhone 11 Pro Max if iOS is your platform of choice is a great choice. Although it might make sense at the stage to wait for the iPhone 12 series coming soon and the Samsung Note 20 Ultra as my phone of choice right now. If budget isn’t an issue. Providing you’re OK with the fact that this is very much a Samsung experience, the way it takes photos, the software, the slight extra Exynos battery drain, then this really is Samsung’s pinnacle, the culmination of years of redesigns and problem fixes. It does make me dream about what this phone could have been had we had clean Google Pixel software and Google’s image processing algorithm. But we have what we have. And actually I’m kind of curious, where do you go from here? What is Samsung going to bring us next, will there be a Samsung Note 21 Ultra or will they combine the Samsung Note Ultra in to the Samsung S21 Ultra? I also wonder how the fast charging is going to affect battery life, will the batteries last as long? We know that the formula for batteries is tried & tested, so what are the going to do to get more power into the battery quicker? Will the batteries last as long or will we need a Samsung Note 20 Ultra Battery replacement early? I hope you enjoyed my Samsung Note 20 Ultra review, apologies for the little rant, thanks for reading & don’t forget to leave a comment…
