Samsung galaxy note 20 ultra 5g colors

Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G in Mystic Bronze.

August 25 update below. This post was first published on August 23, 2020.

Samsung’s latest, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is out. I’ve been testing it for three weeks and it’s a pricey but powerful phone that is the highest point Samsung phones have yet reached. The design is classy, the performance is strong and in Samsung Notes it has the best app the company has built. Oh, and the camera is, almost all the time, exceptional. But does all that mean you should buy it?

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The first Note, released in 2012, you’ll remember, was so different from what had gone before that it was comical. Ridiculously large with its – can you believe this? – 5.3-inch display. This latest model has come a long way and offers compromise-free performance, sleek design and a compromise-free display measuring just 6.9 inches.

Samsung's slick-looking Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G.

August 25 update. There are some aspects of the new phone that I didn’t review, dear reader. One of those is the extensive drop test. Forgive me, I haven’t the heart for it. But I can report that now, YouTube channel PhoneBuff has put the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the iPhone 11 Pro Max together in a drop test. If you can bear to watch, the results are certainly informative.

The Samsung phone comes with Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus to protect it, which the manufacturer says is 25% better at drop performance than Gorilla Glass 6. It’s the first phone to feature this new glass. So, it can withstand a drop onto a rough surface of 2 meters, instead of the 1.6 meters claimed by the earlier version.

The drops were conducted from a carefully measured height (around waist height, I’d say) onto a rough, solid surface. In the first drop, on the phones’ back, damaged the Samsung somewhat, but extensive cracking on the iPhone. A corner drop damaged both phones but not by that much. But it was round three, where the phones were dropped on their faces that the difference was most striking. The iPhone glass was heavily damaged but the Samsung, remarkably was pretty much intact. Which was more than my nerves were as I was watching, let me tell you.

The drop tests go on and after 10 drops on its pretty face, the Samsung phone survived each drop without damaging, let alone destroying its front glass. It’s a pretty clear sign that, while no phone is really impervious to being dropped, that Samsung has really got its game together when it comes to making the Note 20 Ultra out of tough, resilient materials. It’s impressive.

Design: Unmistakably Samsung

The Note series has always had a business-like and opulent feel, and the Note 20 Ultra 5G is no exception. The display is impressively all-encompassing and the way it curves down the (steeply sloped) edges is attractive. The glass back mirrors the shape of the curve of the display in a pleasing design note. There’s a matte effect on the rear of the phone itself but the antenna band, S Pen and camera lens detailing enjoy a gloss finish.

The seam on the edge isn’t quite smooth enough to roll the handset through your fingers like a worry stone, though this may also be because of the size of the Note 20 Ultra.

However, the sloping edges back and front mean the phone can fit the hand without leaving it feeling too stretched. Even so, smaller hands will struggle with this phone.

The matte-finish back is made of glass on the Ultra, of course, but somehow because it’s not gloss it feels less premium, though still very different from the glasstic (glass and plastic) finish on Samsung’s other release which isn’t an “ultra”, the Galaxy Note 20.

The hefty camera island on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.

The biggest issue with design for me is the camera island. It is so protuberant and has such sharp edges it seems to dominate the back of the phone more than it should. If the phone is lying on its back, it jumps about when you’re tapping on the onscreen keyboard, for instance, which isn’t ideal. And when I held the phone, I found myself absent-mindedly scraping my thumb against the sharp edges and not really enjoying it.

It's sharp because the edge of Camera Island is lightly raised – a clever way to protect the camera lenses, but not great for hand-feel.

However, this is solved if the phone is placed in a case. Of course, this is such a beautiful phone that it seems a shame to cover it up, and the downside it that it makes it a little harder to ping the S Pen out of its hidey-hole. But Samsung’s silicone case is understated and effective, and gives great peace of mind.

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The small cut-out for the Selfie camera emphasizes that this phone is almost all screen on the front, with a very slim bezel – and no notch! – all of which looks attractive.

The S Pen has moved from the bottom right to the bottom left of the phone compared to every previous Note handset, presumably because of the camera island placement, but this was something it was easy to re-learn.

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra comes in three colors, Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black and Mystic White. There is nothing mystical about these hues, but all look good. The Bronze is the standout, and makes the shiny camera lens detailing look its best, but the white is gorgeous, too. The black is anonymous, dull and utilitarian (and will doubtless be the best-seller).

Samsung’s designers have created a handsome phone with a design that works well at this large scale. Apart from that camera bump.

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Display

As with previous devices with sloping edges, the way the screen tips off the edge is attractive and gives a classy, premium feel. As this is a Note, the steeper edge that increases writing space is a thoughtful touch.

As with any sloping screen there is the curious detail of how the edge looks as though it’s a different color from the main screen, when viewed from the side.

The faster refresh rate is immediately noticeable when you are scrolling through lists, for example, and is very attractive. I have found the battery life to be strong enough for me to leave Motion Smoothness set to adaptive with no worries about how much juice is left in the battery at the end of the day.

One of the standouts in this phone is that the refresh rate is variable, and the phone switches refresh rate subtly: all I have noticed is that the screen always looks smooth.

The increased brightness was also a great part of this display, especially since it seems to have been paired with greater efficiency, so doesn’t drain the battery excessively.

Games looked magnificent here, as did TV shows, and the holepunch camera barely registered when I was lost in the drama.

The fingerprint sensor is buried in the display itself, easily the best place for such a sensor, I’d say, and this works quickly and reliably.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and S Pen.

S Pen

The gleaming shiny finish on the S Pen is attractive and its familiar mechanic, that ejecting it launches appropriate features, is excellent.

But the big step forward is the lower latency, down to 9ms, which is a significant and noticeable difference and makes it feel very natural.

Try writing on a display where the line you draw follows sluggishly and late, and you’ll experience a real disconnect. To work, it needs to feel realistic. That tiny latency is enough. And Samsung has another trick up its sleeve – an audio effect that sounds like pen scraping across paper. Turn down the volume and the pen sound does not diminish, adding to the realism. Of course, you can turn it off or mute the phone, but it’s pretty cool, and the audio is improved over the effect on the Galaxy Note 10. Read more about this cool feature here.

The nature of the S Pen is that it has to be slim enough to fit into the body of the Note but thick enough to be manageable in use. Although the current manifestation is excellent for that, I still find it quite a fiddly object to hold – not when writing or drawing but when using air gestures or needing to press the button as well. Air gestures are where you are not making contact with the screen, for instance, pressing the S Pen’s button to advance a presentation to the next slide, using it to trigger the camera shutter button and so on. Some are highly useful, others less so.

Best of all is the integration with the new Samsung Notes app which is feature-packed and works very well, especially converting to text which had very few mistakes – even with my handwriting.

There’s a capability to record audio while writing notes which is very handy. I used this feature a lot years ago with the Livescribe dedicated smart pen and special paper – this makes it all a lot simpler and more portable.

Camera

Samsung cameras have really moved forward in the last couple of years, and especially in 2020. While there is unbelievably competition from camera hardware on Huawei phones and a combination of decent hardware and outstanding software on Apple phones, here what stands out are great lenses and sensors matched with straightforward software that is easy to use and routinely delivers strong results.

The maximum zoom on this phone is 50x – half that of the Galaxy S20 Ultra. This is better: 100x was almost completely unusable, though undeniably an eye-catching headline.

This is more sensible and makes for better results. While 50x images they don’t make for usable photos in the conventional sense, they have uses, such as reading the number on a distant bus, or the writing on a sign, more easily.

That’s all on the 12MP telephoto lens, but the main sensor remains at the remarkable 108MP found on the S20. It’s not designed for 108MP images, though you can do that. Rather, it uses what Samsung calls nona-binning, that is, nine adjacent pixel sites work as one to deliver a strong 12MP-equivalent result.

The focusing, aided by the laser autofocus, is very quick, noticeably so and a big step forward compared to the S20 Ultra. Low-light pictures were especially helped by this and Night mode was also extremely effective, looking warm without being over-brightened. Apple’s most recent night-time capabilities remain the best. Not because they are hyper-realistic or offer the most detail but because they live up to Apple’s aspiration to capture how the moment felt, rather than how it looked. This comes reasonably close in those terms and there is a clarity which is appealing. Night mode can take an extra few seconds to resolve the image, note.

I also liked the Scene Optimizer button and the way it predicted with strong accuracy what the nature of my photo was – though at times it was a little slow to settle on whether it was a pet or some other kind of shot, for instance and I sometimes found myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting for it to decide.

Video recording was tremendous and the facility to shoot in 8K, even if playback options are limited for now, was impressive. The video camera and the zoom for still photos were the two biggest upgrades for me in the camera system.

Overall, I found the camera came up with fantastic images nearly all the time – though when it didn’t, it was hard to work out why. These included images where the scene optimization seemed to mis-guess the subject or didn’t turn on in time, or things just looked a bit flat.

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Performance and battery

This is a very fast phone, which really never slows down, whatever you’re doing. U.S. customers are treated to the Qualcomm SD865+ processor which is especially capable, though the Exynos 990 on European phones is effective, too.

Gaming works at speed, even when the games are being streamed, and battery life is enough to give you peace of mind. I’m not a fan of Bixby, and my suspicion is Samsung is not developing it as much – it certainly isn’t promoting it as much this time round.

The arrival of Ultra Wide Band will become more important as more people have this feature, though it has a lot of potential and is a welcome addition.

The battery is big, at 4,500mAh, and will get you through the day, but is no match for the latest Huawei flagships, for instance. There’s a suggestion that the U.S. models with Qualcomm chip lasts longer, though no direct comparison has yet been made.

Verdict

The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is a real performer, doing everything it does as real speed, with never a slowdown or wobble. Its price will put some off - my fellow contributor Barry Collins thinks that spending over $1,000 on a smartphone is unnecessary and has found a far more affordable alternative - but there is an awful lot here to justify the sticker price.

In some ways, it’s hard to see where Samsung will take the phone next – the display is probably as good as it gets and though the cameras could benefit from some software improvements, the hardware is in great shape.

Mind you, if there’s a way to make the camera bump smaller, perhaps by leaving the lenses standing proud from a flatter panel, as Apple does, there could be a significant aesthetic gain. Of course, when it comes to the size that a focal length requires, there are limits in terms of the laws of physics, too.

Strong performance and decent battery life are key to this phone. While for many the S Pen is an extra feature and may not be necessary, there are other strides forward from the S20 Ultra to the Note 20 Ultra 5G that make the step-up worthwhile.

Follow me on Instagram by clicking here: davidphelantech and Twitter: @davidphelan2009

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