Apple Fanboy Switches to Samsung S24 Ultra: The TRUTH After 1 Week

this is the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra and while it looks the same as its predecessor when you dig into this phone it's quite different the s24 ultra most notably adds a bunch of new AI features but beyond that there's updates to the chipset the display the camera and a host of other things and today I'm going to dive into as much of that as I can what's great about this phone what could be improved and everything in between so if you're thinking about picking up the s24 ultra or maybe you're just curious about what my experience has been like stick around and let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Erikson here lately I've been trying to get my hands on every major flagship phone that comes out whether that be Android or iOS and out of everything that's come out over the last year or so this is one that I was really excited for I ordered the s24 ultra as soon as it was announced because the ultra has become the cream of the crop when it comes to Android phones in my opinion you get all the latest and greatest features in a really well-built phone although it does not come cheap starting at $12.99 USD this year which is a $100 bump from last year that might seem a bit excessive on the surface at a glance this doesn't look all that different from last year's model but like I said there's quite a few updates to the ultra and I don't want to waste any more time cuz there's a lot to get into so let's just hop right into things starting with the design the ultra is using titanium in its housing this year which I'm assuming is in response to the iPhone switching to it in the fall that hasn't had any real effect on the weight of the device with it only being 2 G lighter than the s23 ultra but it does give things a different look along the sides and edges is where you'll see that titanium finish with the back being matte glass the color that I have here is titanium gray and I chose that because it matches my iPhone 15 Pro color which I've really liked so far now I don't have the biggest hands so I'm often using this two-handed and I find myself holding this differently than smaller phones that I rest on my my pinky finger this I'm also just grabbing onto the sides which is a bit more comfortable but at 232 G it's still a fairly heavy device if that's something that you're concerned with both the glass on the front and the back are made of the new gorilla glass armor that's supposed to have four times better scratch protection than its competitors I'm not exactly sure what that equates to in the real world in the short time that I've had it there aren't any visible marks but they also claim that it'll reduce Reflections by up to 75% and you can definitely notice the reduced glare the bezels on that front panel are also extremely small this year which makes this phone just a hair smaller in physical size versus the s23 ultra and unlike the s23 ultra that had a curved Edge display the s24 ultra is completely flat personally I like having a flat panel a lot better than a curved one especially if I'm touching on the edges of my display using navigation controls and I've got a case on or if I'm using the S Pen where it'll occasionally fall off the edge you still have a 6.8 in Dynamic AMOLED 2x screen but this goes all the way up to 2600 in Peak brightness so it's incredibly bright realistically the only time that's going to be of value or noticeable is if you're outside when it's light and sunny and when you combine that with the anti-reflective surface it almost looks as good as it does in doors there's also some changes to the design internally on the s24 ultra with an all new Vapor chamber that's supposed to be twice as large as last year's model that cools the internals more effectively where excess heat won't throttle performance as much and there were some notable gains in performance as well inside here you've got the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chipset and the specific configuration that I have here is the 512 gig storage option with 12 gigs of RAM it's run everything buttery smooth and in my own tests it's improved about 18% in single core performance 35 in multi-core and a whopping 71% in GPU performance over the s23 ultra that spike in GPU performance is something that we we've seen in a whole bunch of devices this year and has a lot to do with the introduction of rate tracing in these chips depending on the game or app you're using you may or may not notice a difference depending on how it's optimized but regardless this still runs everything that you throw at it and it stays relatively cool even with very resource heavy tasks even if you don't play games or do anything graphically intensive there's still elements of things like the camera system that will definitely need a lot of power the camera array here isn't a whole lot different than last year you still have the 200 megapixel main sensor 12 megapixel Ultra wide and 10 megapixel 3x telephoto but Samsung opted to go with a 50 megap 5x telephoto instead of the 10 megapixel 10x1 that was in here before as far as photos go this produces images that for the most part are on par with the iPhone 15 Pro or the Google pixel 8 pro this year is a little different in that Samsung took advantage of smart HDR which essentially brings out a lot of the highlights and contrast in your image other phon phes have done similar things in the past but the big difference here is that they'll retain all that detail when you upload them to social media specifically Instagram if I'm not mistaken which is a nice touch because I think Android phones have always kind of had this reputation of photos looking better on device and worse when he throw them up on social media the dynamic range has been generally really good in my photos the autofocus is fast and shutter speed is good but there are still occasions where I feel just a touch of leg most of the time it's fine but occasionally it will throw out a dud every once in a while in terms of responsiveness it's still going to shoot pixel Bend 12 megapixel images on the main sensor by default which I think is what most people should probably stick to it would have been cool if they would have taken a 24 megapixel image like the expert raw camera option has and maybe combine a 12 and a 48 or 50 megapixel shot so you get the best of both worlds in terms of detail and light information but 12 is still totally fine the 50 and 200 options are there but the shutter is much slower and you really need to take those in ideal conditions to get good shots so it's pretty rare that I would ever personally use them when it comes to the ultra wide that takes decent photos around the edges you lose a little bit of sharpness and there can be quite a bit of distortion which is pretty common for Ultra wides but for landscape shots outd doors and where you just want to get creative with perspectives it holds up really well at 3x Zoom I'd say things look all right nothing spectacular but the 5X telephoto in my opinion does a fantastic job a lot of times these higher zoom lenses on phones can come out really grainy or soft just due to how they're engineered but I've been really impressed with the quality there also with that being a 50 megapixel sensor this year it makes it possible to record 8K video you'll notice that instead of just having a single lens option when you've got 8K selected on the video tab you can now switch between 1X and 5x and you can record 4K at 120 frames per second on the main sensor which which is where the added chip performance really helps some higher-end mirrorless cameras can't even record in 4k 120 so just the fact that that's an option there is really nice to have the video coming off the s24 ultra is decent I noticed a bit of color shift and sharpness difference when I switch between lenses so just something to be aware of this seems to affect some people more than others and it really seems to depend on what setting you're recording in I still think it's better than the pixel 8 Pro but it would be nice if wasn't so abrupt or noticeable at times you can also simulate 120 frames per second slow motion on a 30fps clip with AI by holding down on a clip in the gallery app which works reasonably well and there are a number of AI features in this Gallery app mostly related to photos there's simple things like the remaster effect that shows up for every image that basically Auto adjusts your image to make it look better with brighter colors and exposure levels and with photos where there's a clear subject like a person or a pet there's an add background blur option where you can add a bokeh effect to the image which works just as good as portrait mode sometimes if you have something with a lot of texture in the background it'll have a tough time picking out the subject but otherwise it does a really good job of separating them from the background I can also remove Reflections if they're present in the photo that works pretty good most of the time and if you want to do something a little more powerful you can head over to the edit Tab and go to this little gradient button that'll take you into the generative AI tool which seems to either work really good or really bad I can adjust the Horizon of an image in here and rather than it cropping in as I rotate like it does in this standard edit tool it'll actually fill in the rest of the image and it usually looks great most of the time other features like moving things around where you just circle or press down on something in the photo and move it can be absolutely wild and look amazing but I thought if you've got something that's sitting at an angle or that really leans into a perspective view where there's excessive Shadows it tends to struggle on top of that there's a magic eraser tool similar to what pixel phones have again works great on simple things like removing power lines from the sky but when you start to get into a complex Scene It can look very strange but what I like about all of this stuff in this tool is anything that you do in here results in a little Watermark being added to the image to let people know that it's been edited with AI and there's also some extra metadata added behind the scenes as well I know that stuff is really easy to strip out but it's a start outside of the camera there's some really interesting software features as well uh the voice recorder app will adds summaries and transcriptions not only in your native language but I believe it will convert in up to 13 different languages as part of Samsung's new interpreter feature that can translate this along with live text or speech within the native Samsung apps I tried this with a friend of mine using Chinese and it's not perfect it seems to get about 80 to 90% of the translation correct but it's enough that if you're traveling and you don't speak the language people should understand what you mean you can also summarize web pages within the Samsung web browser but my favorite new feature this year is called Circle to search where you can hold down on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen and you get this little popup where you can either Google search or you can Circle something on the screen and Google Lens will search whatever it is that you've circled it's great for learning more about whatever you have highlighted on your screen and I've already used this to find out what some products are in images and buy a few things it does a fantastic job but occasionally you will have to play around with the crop a little bit to get a good result but super handy feature nonetheless you can also create AI generated wallpapers and the always on display will now show your wallpaper on the background if you wanted to similar to iOS just be aware that if you do have that enabled it does suck back the battery a little faster with about 6 to 7% drain over the course of a day speaking of the battery that's got a 5,000 m hour capacity and has reasonable battery life it gets me through a full day of moderate use no problem and I think I can get between 12 and 13 hour screen on time with average use I usually plug the s24 ultra in Via USBC when I get up in the morning and it'll charge about 60% of the battery in a half hour or from 0 to 100 in just over an hour if I'm charging at the full 45 Watts if you've watched this channel before you'll know that I actually prefer to charge wirelessly which OB honestly a little disappointed with it's a bit of a let down that there's no ch2 supported wireless charging and it also means that if you want to use anything mangave supported you'll need a case like I've got here but beyond that I find the phone itself gets quite warm and I'm just not sure if I want to heat up my device that much every day so I'll be sticking with wired charging on this phone I've also found wireless connectivity to be a mixed bag as well the ultra is the only model in the s24 Series this year to offer Wi-Fi 7 and while I don't have a Wi-Fi 7 modem I I do have Wi-Fi 6E and I've had a lot of trouble staying connected to the 6 GHz band it always seems to want to drop down to the 5 gig band after I've been connected for a few minutes which is unfortunate considering Wi-Fi 6E is much faster where I get speeds of 73 megabits per second down and 451 up on a 1 GB internet connection with Wi-Fi 6 I only get 315 down and 79 up which is a substantial difference that's fine for the most part and just using it around the house you likely wouldn't notice too much if you're dealing with large files or big transfers that could potentially take a lot longer but I'm not sure how much you're doing that on a mobile phone but when it comes to Bluetooth that's a whole other Story the s24 ultra comes with Bluetooth 5.3 which is pretty standard but what blew me away was the range I've been using it with my nothing ear 2s around the house and last weekend I had them popped in listening to a podcast as I was cleaning and I kind of forgot that they were paired to my phone and where it was my phone was in the basement and normally when that's the case I'll go up a floor and they might start cutting out towards the doors that lead outside or if I go up another floor upstairs they usually cut out altogether but I haven't experienced any signal drops in the usual places I was wearing my ear tws outside in the driveway with the ultra still in my basement and it was clear as day which never happens and even going up two floors in the house there's still absolutely no issues which I don't think I've ever had happen with a phone if I'm being honest things like that the outstanding performance design display software all those things make this a phenomenal phone and Samsung says that they're going to give you seven years of updates with it as well so this should last you a super long time if you wanted to there are a couple of things here and there that aren't perfect but I don't think that I've ever found a product without flaws and if you're wondering if it's worth the whopping $12.99 USD price tag I think that really depends if you want something with all the bells and whistles and you're planning on keeping it for a long time time it's definitely worth considering but if you're okay with sacrificing some things like the S Pen the 5x telephoto lens and shooting in 4k at 120 frames per second the s24 plus is another great option that contains most of what's packed in here and it's about $300 cheaper I know there's a lot to this phone and I didn't get to everything I could probably talk about this thing for another hour if I wanted to but I wanted to dig into the most important aspects in my opinion for folks considering buying the s24 ultra I hope you found this ful or enjoyable if you did feel free to hit that like button if you want to see more Tech related content or go to a beach and watch the sunset and then take 100 Zoom photos of the Moon Please Subscribe thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next upload

Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 166,825

Keywords: samsung s24 ultra, samsung s24 ultra review, galaxy s24 ultra, samsung galaxy s24 ultra, s24 ultra, s24 ultra review, galaxy s24 ultra review, samsung galaxy s24 ultra review, s24 ultra vs s23 ultra, samsung s24 ultra vs s23 ultra, samsung galaxy s24 ultra vs s23 ultra, galaxy s24 ultra vs s23 ultra, best android phone 2024, best android phone, best android phones 2024, best smartphone, best phone 2024, best phones 2024, best smartphone 2024

Id: pr0ToV_dKbw

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024