The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has the best display on any smartphone – that’s usually the case for new Samsung phones for about six months, until the company unseats itself with newer display tech. Cue the Galaxy S30. READ NEXT: Which smartphone has the best battery life? Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Performance and battery life While some of the Space Zoom 100x zoom features are a little pointless, if you’re only going up to 10x then the results are really quite good. You don’t this kind of zoom unless you have a periscope camera. You shouldn’t buy it if… You want the best flagship camera

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G- all carriers Cosmic Grey

Along with the rest of the S20 lineup, the S20 Ultra is also the first Galaxy phone to be powered by Samsung’s latest flagship Exynos 990 mobile chipset, or the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 equivalent if you happen to live outside the UK. It also comes with support for the 5G network as standard. However, adding 120Hz doesn’t come without some slight downsides. The biggest being its dramatic effect on battery life. Even though the S20 Ultra has a 5000mAh cell, enabling the smoother motion left me with a phone that only just about made it through the day, heavily cutting my screen-on time compared to 60Hz. This is likely the main reason why Samsung has decided against letting you keep the resolution at WQHD+ (3200 x 1440), with 120Hz instead restricted to FHD+ (2400 x 1080). Big doesn’t necessarily define the Note series anymore. Oh, the Note 20 Ultra is a massive phone in the hand, requiring two meaty paws to operate it – it's just no longer uniquely big. It shares the same 6.9-inch screen size with the S20 Ultra. For all these high-end internals, the S20 Ultra runs and performs like any other flagship Android. You can play any game from Google Play at the best settings without a hitch, lag in the UI is virtually non-existent and apps open instantly. Here’s where Samsung wins, even if images from its phones aren’t ‘the best’ when it comes to pixel-peeping: it has the easiest to use and most fun smartphone camera. That still counts for something.The best thing about all this camera stuff? Well, there’s a new shooting mode called “Single Take”, which uses all of the cameras simultaneously. Simply tap and hold the recording button, film some interesting stuff, and you will get a nice collage at the end of it, including wide-angle stills, boomerangs, slow-mo video and artsy monochrome images. Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Verdict Equally impressive as the phone’s performance and battery life is the simplicity and general responsiveness when it comes to the software. The S20 Ultra is running Android 10 with Samsung’s own One UI 2 launcher overlayed on the top. We first saw One UI make an appearance on last year’s Samsung flagships – which replaced the heavy-handed TouchWiz launcher of previous phones – but this new version brings a handful of subtle interface changes which improve the experience to different degrees.

S20 FE | S20 | S20+ | S20 Ultra 5G - Samsung ca Galaxy S20 FE | S20 | S20+ | S20 Ultra 5G - Samsung ca

If you’re not a fan of phones with large screens then the Galaxy S20 Ultra is not for you. It dwarfs other Samsung phones, even the historically big Note series, and almost makes the iPhone 11 Pro Max look compact – I didn’t think I would be saying that a few months ago. Instead of offering a more affordable alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S20 Plus, we’ve got a far pricier option in the form of the Galaxy S20 Ultra. During a period where consumers are holding on to their phones longer and spending less overall, this move seems somewhat odd. Oddly, what’s not on offer here is 45W wired charging, which is supported by last year’s Note 10 Plus, and this year’s S20, S20 Plus and S20 Ultra, via an adapter that Samsung sells separately. A few companies are even toying with 100W charging, but Samsung seems to be taking its time in rolling out truly fast charging. Samsung has already wowed us with a 6.9-inch 120Hz display on the S20 Ultra, but the compromise here is the same as with that phone: you have to choose between 120Hz in 1080p, or dropping to 60Hz to enjoy the QuadHD resolution.

This is a section where there could be some differences if you have the Qualcomm version of the Galaxy S20 Ultra or the Exynos one. There were huge gulfs in battery life between the models of both the S10 and Note 10, with the Snapdragon variant seemingly lasting a lot longer. All my thoughts here are from the European Exynos version. For this review, I have been using a European Galaxy S20 Ultra powered by the Exynos 990 and 12GB RAM. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Qualcomm edition varied in areas like battery life and benchmark scores as we’ve seen this previously with Samsung phones. Of course, the 108MP sensor isn’t the only camera at your disposal. There’s also a 12MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera, as well as the aforementioned 48MP (f/3.5) telephoto zoom lens and what Samsung calls a “DepthVision” sensor, which is just a silly name for your run-of-the-mill depth sensor. a bit like the 100x zoom, feels more like a feature Samsung hypes up rather than one the average consumer is going to really make use of. The footage, which is shot at 30fps, is very sharp – but you’ll need some form of 8K display to really see that come through. This is merely a small part of a story, however. The idea here isn’t to shoot at 108-megapixels, or even 48 megapixels for that matter, but to use all the data collected to create superior 12-megapixel snaps. For instance, the 108-megapixel camera will combine nine pixels into one much larger pixel, while the telephoto will do the same but with four pixels. This should, in theory, let far more light into the sensor and produce a brighter, sharper photo.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Samsung’s best phone yet Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Samsung’s best phone yet

Galaxy Fold and Z Flip notwithstanding, the S20 Ultra is Samsung’s most expensive smartphone to date. It’s not like we weren’t warned beforehand – the leaks made sure of that – but now that Samsung’s premium-tier flagship has been let loose, it’s safe to say that the rumours failed to soften the blow.Instead of waffling on for much longer, I’d like to close things out by simply saying that the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is the most impressive Android smartphone that’s ever been released. Not only is it remarkable in its approach to offering new features, but the entire experience is so well refined that Samsung barely places a foot wrong. I told you it was complicated. What this means is that Samsung is able to deliver higher levels of sustained performance, which roughly translates to superior processing speeds in our testing. As you can see, in the Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, the Galaxy S20 Ultra provided a 21% increase in multi-core performance when directly compared with last year’s Samsung flagships: the Galaxy S10 Plus and Note 10 Plus, which both used the Exynos 9820. The Note 20 Ultra consistently lasted us a full day on a single charge with normal use. It’s not Samsung’s longest-lasting phone, and that comes down to the curbed battery capacity compared to the S20 Ultra – 4,500mAh for the Note 20 Ultra vs 5,000mAh for the S20 Ultra. That said, we found it to have enough juice for most power users who gravitate to a Note. That move will likely annoy some, it did annoy me initially, as you’re essentially forced away from making the most of a display you’ve spent over a grand on. But, thankfully, at 1080p it remains a very sharp, colour accurate panel that sets a new standard for FHD screens.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G - idealo

We still found that some iPhone 11 Pro Max and Google Pixel 4 photos retained more detail in low-light situations, although Samsung seems to have improved its Night Mode over the last year, and side-by-side, no one is doing telephoto better than Samsung – unless you count Huawei’s non-Android phones.The sensor in the Xiaomi uses pixel binning to combine four pixels. This means that you capture 27MP images from the 108MP sensor, but when the pixels are combined you’re effectively getting four times the light-gathering per pixel. The Samsung version, on the other hand, combines nine pixels via a ‘nonabinning’ method. Combining these nine pixels gives you 12MP images from the 108MP sensor, but should result in 9x the light gathering. According to our display colourimeter, the S20 Ultra’s screen is pretty much faultless, aside from a slight discrepancy with oversaturated dark red tones. Contrast – as you’d expect from one of Samsung’s AMOLED screens – is a perfect infinity:1, and the screen is capable of getting plenty bright, peaking at 667cd/m2 with a torch shining directly on the ambient light sensor. You might have caught wind of a few pre-release camera problems, most notably when it comes to laggy focus-finding and poor viewfinder quality, but thankfully these issues seem to have been fixed in a recent OTA software update, which arrived on 1 March. Over the course of my week with the S20 Ultra my battery life experience has changed numerous times. With the 120Hz refresh rate on and two SIMs (one 5G) enabled I struggled to make it through from 8am to 10pm without getting nervous and topping things up before I left the office.