Review – Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: The showcase smartphone

This is Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone. It packs the latest hardware with cutting-edge camera technology. This is a crazy smartphone that people demanded Samsung to make. With great technology comes with a great price. At RM4,999, many jaws were dropped. It is to be expected as you’ll have to pay the price for such cutting-edge technology.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra packs unprecedented technologies. So, is this ultra flagship worth the price?

Unboxing

The unboxing experience on its own is rather simple. As for its content, we do get an expected amount of accessories for a flagship smartphone:

• The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra
• A TPU case
• 25W charger
• USB-C to USB-C cable
• Wired USB-C AKG earphones

Design

Samsung actually changed quite a lot in terms of design language for the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It is a rather thick smartphone with an even bigger camera bump. While it’s not as slim as before, Samsung packed in a lot of hardware into this phone. We’re talking about a periscope lens for zooming, a massive sensor for its 108MP main camera, and also a massive 5,000mAh battery.

However, it’s still sad to see that the audio jack disappearing. At least Samsung did include a USB-C earphone, but I do wish that Samsung included a USB-C to audio jack with a built-in DAC. As many of you might have already know, Samsung phones do not work with the simple USB to audio jack passthrough cables.

I can’t shake off the feeling that Samsung played it too safe with the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The only colors available are the Cosmic Black and Cosmic Grey, which we have here. What happened to other colors like the Prism Green which I am so proud of showing it off to my friends and family?

Anyway, the phone itself does feel nice to hold despite being thicker than usual even with the included TPU case installed. I highly recommend you to use the included TPU case since you can scratch up the camera glass since the phone is propped up against the edge of the camera bump.

Connectivity & Ports

The Galaxy S20 Ultra is only available in the 5G variant, which is a part of why the price is so high. Originally I thought why does Samsung Malaysia force us to buy a 5G smartphone?  But then I realized that this phone is engineered to be on the cutting edge of technology. Buying it now means you can futureproof for a few years into the future.

Popping out the SIM tray reveals that you can slot in either SIM 1 + SIM 2 combo or SIM 1 + microSD card combo. I’ll prefer the latter since the phone only comes with 128GB of internal storage. It’s sufficient for most cases but definitely not if you want to take more pictures or videos – especially in 8K.

Moreover, the Galaxy S20 Ultra also supports eSIM. You can technically already have SIM 1 + microSD + eSIM. There’s no reason to use double physical SIM cards, honestly.

Display

Alright so here’s the deal. One of the biggest “leap” in smartphone technology of yesteryear is in terms of the display. Not the pixel count, color accuracy, or pixel matrix – but in refresh rate. I think it was OnePlus who started the trend of high refresh rate smartphones and they also eventually recommended not to use anything higher than 60Hz most of the time.

Anyway, the Samsung Galaxy S20 series – yes, all 3 smartphones – come with 120Hz displays. It is now called the Dynamic AMOLED 2X, and the 2X here supposedly stands for 2X the refresh rate from its standard 60Hz. It caused my eyebrows to rise on its own when I saw Samsung skipped from 60Hz directly to 120Hz, skipping 90Hz entirely.

At this point in time, we all know about the battery drainage issue that comes with high refresh rate displays on a battery-powered device. Laptops have that issue. Now, even smartphones have this issue as well – which we’ll get into later.

The new Galaxy S20 series of smartphones also have tinier curves around the edges of the screen. It no longer bends to the side but instead it now only curves a little into the frame of the phone. While I’m impartial about curved screens or not, this flatter display does make it easier to apply tempered glass screen protectors.

Cameras

Here’s a big part of the new Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. It now comes with a total of 4 rear-facing cameras. 3 out of the 4 cameras are usable to take pictures, whereby the 3D TOF camera is helpful to get depth data much more accurately than the usual depth sensor. Also, it allows us to scan 3D objects.

• Quadruple rear-facing cameras
  • Main: 108MP f/1.8; PDAF, OIS
  • Periscope: 48MP f/3.5; PDAF, OIS, 10x hybrid optical zoom
  • Ultra-wide: 12MP f/2.2
  • 3D TOF camera
• 40MP f/2.2 selfie camera with PDAF

Now, time for some pictures. We won’t get much into detail as you can watch our partner’s site here for the camera review and all the full-sized 108MP image shots.

108MP main camera

With an upgraded sensor, this camera is not fooling around. It can take pictures with incredibly high levels of detail and still looks fantastic. For me, I am a fan of textures and beautiful sceneries – so I took a bunch of pictures in 108MP mode and I was blown away by the images this camera produces.

The colors are a little oversaturated with the high contrast level, but I think it still produces an image that’s nice to see overall.

This is also the first smartphone that can take 108MP pictures with HDR enabled. It can also take 108MP pictures in night mode too!

Telephoto camera

The second upgrade on the camera is the telephoto camera. It’s now using a periscope lens that provides a continuous zoom (as opposed to discrete) zoom level. Combined with AI, Samsung defined what computational photography is supposed to be.

It should be noted that generally, all pictures still look very usable and clear at 30x zoom. As for 100x zoom, most subjects will become a blob of colors. However, thanks to the power of AI, taking pictures of texts at 100x zoom is amazingly readable.

Ultra-wide angle camera

While Samsung never talked much about the ultra-wide angle camera, they did change the lens as well. It is now using a lens with 120° FOV as opposed to the 123° FOV from the Galaxy S10 series, but Samsung also managed to keep the distortion at a minimum. I didn’t even realize that the images were taken with the ultra-wide angle camera at first.

Video

The new Galaxy S20 Ultra can now take videos at 8K 24fps, 4K 60fps, or 1080p 240Hz. It’s amazing that a smartphone of this size can take such videos and 8K TVs are still rare in today’s standard.  The only 8K TV that we’ve tried was also from Samsung.

The new Galaxy S20 Ultra also comes with an upgraded Super Steady mode which combines OIS and EIS while using the ultra-wide angle camera. This creates a gimbal-like motion that’s buttery smooth, but because of the ultra-wide angle camera lacks autofocusing, the videos do turn out blurry and pixelated at times.

Software – Android 10 with Samsung One UI 2.1

Not much has changed since the original version of One UI 2.0. I still love Samsung’s One UI as it is the most user-friendly in terms of user experience and how everything is laid out. The Edge Panel and Samsung Pay features are still the way they are.

Performance & Gaming

As usual, the Samsung Galaxy S20 series of smartphones come with the latest slew of hardware. We now have:

• 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with Infinity-O notch
  • Up to 3200×1440 @ 60Hz or 2400×1080 @ 120Hz
• Exynos 990 chipset
  • 2x Exynos M5 @ 2.73GHz
  • 2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.5GHz
  • 4x Cortex-A55 @ 2.0GHz
• 12GB LPDDR5 RAM
• 128GB of UFS 3.0 internal storage (expandable via microSD)
• 5,000mAh battery
  • Supports up to 45W, 25W charger included

In terms of benchmarks, it’s obvious that the Galaxy S20 Ultra topping all the charts.

We have to neglect the VRMark benchmark because the score scales according to the display’s frame rate. It’s a broken mess, but we can take the average frame rate instead.

Battery & Charger

This smartphone packs in a large 5,000mAh battery and it can last for a very long time when using it at 1080p 60Hz mode. However, when we turned it up to 120Hz, the chipset essentially needs to pump out twice the graphic performance to produce the 120 frames per second. That affected the battery life quite a lot, but that 5,000mAh can still take it like a champ.

Charger

As for the charger, Samsung did say the Galaxy S20 Ultra can support 45W charger but it only comes with a 25W charger. It’s plentiful since the phone does charge completely in an hour or so. Considering that this is a 5,000mAh battery, that’s a lot of juice even with just a few minutes of charging.

Final Words

All in all, the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is the best of the best smartphone you can buy right now. If you ask me, in the month of March 2020, I think the Galaxy S20 Ultra is overkill. But… it might not be that overkill in a year’s time. Smartphone technology progresses very quickly and Galaxy S20 Ultra is able to last for a few years.

For the price of RM4,999, you do get a large battery, 120Hz display, and a magnificent set of cameras. Let’s not forget that it also runs on Samsung’s One UI and comes with Samsung’s ecosystem of apps and services which are useful for our personal daily uses. It’s an ultra-premium flagship device that you can put it in your pocket, too.