Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review: Why Buy Anything Else?

- All right, you have $1,300 to spend on an Android slab phone in 2024. Why would you get any other phone? No, seriously, why would you get any other phone? This S 24 Ultra has taken the best things from every other ultra high-end phone and stuffed them into one place, so anything that you could possibly value, it has pushed to the max. And there's just multiple cherries on top, just sprinkled all over the place. This phone sets the tone for 2024. (soft upbeat music) So the formula for Samsung's

Ultra phones has evolved a little bit over the years. At first, it was just the most numbers, the biggest megapixel count, the most zoom and all that. Then it added the S Pen and got a little more refined and it replaced the Note. Now it's just everything. It's just everything in one place. It's all the best hardware, all the best software I can think of all in one phone. So on the outside, like I said in my early impressions, this phone looks almost the same as last year's phone, but if you th

ink this phone is almost the same as last year's phone, turns out you're missing a lot. So the more you use this phone, the more you look for weaknesses, the more impressive it gets. So maybe what? You're a screen snob, right? You like to pixel peep, maybe you were thinking about getting one of the ultra high-end Oppo or Xiaomi phones just for an amazing screen. All right, well, look no further. Literally one of the best screens than any phone. S24 Ultra has dropped in a class leading 6.8 inch q

uad HD AMOLED display and it is awesome. These ultra phones have had 120Hz LTPO for a while and they've been this really sharp quad HD for a while now too. But now on top of that, two new things, one is it's completely flat and two is its much brighter. So there's been this whole new batch of like 2,500 plus nit phones in the past couple months that I've seen. This I think is the best looking one that I've seen so far. So now it's up to a max 2,600 nits, which is awesome outdoors or anywhere. Bu

t it also gets extremely dim at night too, without any of the weird banding I've seen in some other phones. And they flattened the display completely and brought the display right up to the very corners with some of the thinnest bezels we've seen all the way around. Plus there's also this new anti-reflective coating on this Gorilla Glass Armor that makes a noticeable difference with certain light hitting it at off axis angles. And then there is a crazy fast ultrasonic fingerprint reader undernea

th to top it all off. And you know, maybe I wish the touch target was a little bit bigger, but that's about it. Honestly, if you're a screen snob, it doesn't really get better than this one right here. This is the phone you should get. Okay, so what if your primary concern is battery life? Well, you could always get the Energizer phone that we saw at CES at one time, but as far as reasonably sized flagship slab phones go, it doesn't get much better than this. Again, they're keeping a 5,000mAh ba

ttery in one of the best performing battery phones from the past two years, despite making it thinner and keeping the S Pen. So you might as well get this one. Still got 45 watt wired charging, you still have 25 watt wireless charging and just battery life-wise, I was able to have long days with no problems, with six hours plus screen on time. I was able to baby it into getting two full days, that's at 1440p, at 120Hz and with high brightness use. So yeah, Why get anything else? So okay, what if

then it's just performance is the main thing that you care about. Okay, so we're seeing all these phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 starting to come out and they're looking really good. Great high-end performance, there's efficiency gains all over the place, plus this phone pairs it with 12 gigs of RAM and it is a multitasking champ. And if it's a stylus you're into, I already know you aren't really considering any other phone, the S Pen is basically the only high-end stylus still going in sla

b smartphones. It's really good for note-taking, drawing, highlighting, all that stuff. But if you're like me and you hardly ever use that, there's still the gaming performance and the everyday performance. There's the newly added rate tracing plus a 90% larger vapor chamber to cool the phone for much longer stuff. Turns out it's an A plus. Now you could always get a gaming phone and squeeze five to 10% more frames out of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with some huge badass cooling setup, and that's great

, but then you also have to accept all of the sacrifices that come with said gaming phone over this. And do you really want those extra frames that bad? Depends on who you ask. Okay, cameras, there's a lot of other phones out there that you could buy if your 1,300 bucks specifically has to go to the best cameras. You know the Pixel just won the blind camera test. Sony has the best manual mode, like there's other great camera systems. But here's a way to simplify it, I think in evaluating smartph

one cameras, there's basically two ways to review them. There's the utility, the actual technical evaluation, and the aesthetics, the art of it, the subjectivity part. And I think utility-wise, like on paper, specs-wise, this camera's got it all. Like you've seen this camera array before, there's four cameras on the back of this phone. Turns out, they're basically the same cameras as last year's S23 Ultra except for one. So there's a primary camera, an ultra wide and a pair of two different tele

photo cameras. The primary camera is still the ridiculous 200 megapixel sensor with all the same pros and cons. It's consistent and versatile across the board. It has great dynamic range. It's a quick shooter with quick auto focus and it's also always bending down to 12 megapixels and you should almost never switch it to the 200 megapixel mode unless you have incredible lighting. It has an ultra wide with a bit of distortion near the edges, but it's actually meaningfully wider than the primary c

amera, so it's really fun to shoot with. Even though the automatic macro mode from it looks like trash and you should just turn it off anytime it turns your pictures from this to this, pro tip. And then it has a medium range, 3X telephoto camera that kicks in smoothly and matches the colors and exposure from the main camera really well. And so the one new thing in hardware this year is they've gone from a 10 megapixel, 10X camera to a 50 megapixel 5X camera. So technically, shorter optical zoom

range, but I would say with the extra resolution, it is actually more powerful. It means all the photos in the gap between 5X and 10X look sharper than last year. And then you can literally put the 10X photos side by side from the S23 Ultra and the S24 Ultra and the new 5X cropped in actually looks better. Plus you can still zoom all the way in and shoot at a 100X if you still wanna take ultra stable pictures of far away objects like the moon. But basically what I'm saying is utility-wise, this

camera system checks every single box. It has everything. So from there you get into the more subjective aesthetic differences which you could always lean one way or the other. I think, I mean, looking at these photos, they're still very much Samsung's slightly extra process-looking, a little bit extra contrasty, a little bit higher exposure, a little brighter colors, that still happens with these photos. So you could still convince yourself to lean Pixel or even iPhone, but if you just wanna be

able to check every single box, why look anywhere else? Honestly, the changes that you notice more aside from the actual camera quality are just like features using it. Like the S24 Ultra shoots everything HDR by default now, it's actually in Google's new ultra HDR format. So when you have specular highlights or big dynamic range differences in a photo, it will tastefully crank up that stuff for a more dramatic looking picture on the phone screen, similar to what Pixel and iPhone already do. An

d this passes through all the way from capturing the photo to viewing it in the gallery, and then one more step, to actually publishing it on social media. So Samsung has worked with Instagram and Snapchat for native quality photo and video uploading pipelines because at the end of the day, once you take the photo, what are you 99% of the time planning to do with it? Share it. And I think this is important for a lot of people, one of the reasons I have carried an iPhone for years is one of the t

hings you can always count on is the photos and videos in third party apps are going to look just as good as if they were captured in the main camera. And now you can actually say that that is true now about photos and videos from this phone, at least in Instagram and Snapchat. All right, maybe you're a software person, maybe the top of your list when buying a new smartphone is you want the smartest smartphone. It's gotta have all the software and AI features. And honestly, it should have a nice

long roadmap ahead of it of on-time software updates, sounds like I'm describing a Pixel but turns out, this phone now has a ton, a ton of helpful AI features built-in that are actually good, they make a meaningful difference to everyday use. Now the funny part about a lot of this is a lot of these features are made in partnership with Google, as you'll see. And I can't help but keep thinking like it feels like Samsung needs Google to have all of these features in their phone to compete especia

lly against the iPhone. But then Google, now their own phones are a little bit less competitive, but it's probably worth the trade off because now technically they're helping to compete against the iPhone. It's this weird like thing where they need each other. I think it's fascinating and probably worth its own separate video, maybe let me know with a comment or by subscribing if you'd be down to see that. But that's all the background, all of this. So we were just talking about photos a second

ago, the second you're done taking a photo and opening it up in Samsung's Gallery app, there's a ton of useful AI driven stuff that you can do with it. And it's kinda all based on what sort of scene it auto detects that you've taken. So lots of photos just end up with a remaster button where you click it and then it can add some contrast and brighten things up a little bit as needed and gives you a solid before and after. But if your photo has some glass or a window, it'll show you an Erase Refl

ections button and then you can literally go in and circle the reflections you wanna get rid of and it'll generative fill what should actually be in the glass. And it works pretty well. Now with this photo, I didn't take it in portrait mode but it's recognized that there's a subject and so it'll offer to add background blur. And even without a bunch of extra depth information, it analyzes the subject and it lets me add a little bit or a lot of background blur with a pretty good cutout, if you as

k me, to just create a portrait mode shot out of thin air. But if you ever really, really wanna go crazy, there's a whole separate Magic Editor that feels exactly like what we just got with the Pixel minus any restrictions, it's never told me it can't do something. So you open any photo, hit that Edit button, and then there's this little blue green button with the stars, that's Samsung's new Magic Editor. And once you're here, you can just go nuts. You can move the subject around a photo and hav

e a generative fill in the background. Or you can have it remove things entirely from the foreground or the background of a photo, like photo bombers or just unnecessary random objects. I actually found this super useful. But probably actually my favorite one, underrated, you know how normally when you need to tilt a photo, like fix the horizon, you end up cropping in and losing some of the outside of the photo? You can still do that but with this Magic Editor, you can open it up and tilt the ho

rizon to whatever angle you want, and instead of cropping, it will literally generative fill in the outsides of the photo, which works very well because usually the outside of the photo is the least important part of the photo. You can get away with generative fill. And by the way, literally all this stuff works with photos you download to the phone too, not just photos you've taken on the camera, but photos you just get wherever just like the Pixel. Now I also find it hilarious that if you use

the Magic Editor to alter a photo on this phone, it'll add a little watermark to the bottom corner with these little stars so that you know that this photo was AI manipulated, which is good, that's a good responsible thing to do, especially if you're gonna upload this to social media. But then you can also immediately erase that watermark with a built-in object removal tool in Samsung's Photo Editor app. There's a nice little section in the settings where Samsung's tucked all of the AI features

of this phone. It's called Advanced Intelligence, instead of artificial intelligence. Still AI though. That's where you get stuff like the live phone call translation feature or the new Voice Recorder app getting much improved speaker labels and summaries and transcriptions. The Samsung Browser will now do summaries of webpages. This might all sound very familiar, but the best new one in my opinion is Circle to Search. Now Google Lens has been around for a long time, in my opinion, one of Google

's most underrated products. So people might have already known that you could basically do this already, but it would take several steps. Circle to Search, just makes it one step. It's much faster, it's pretty awesome. You literally just hold down on the home button or the gesture bar at the bottom and then circle or tap whatever on your screen that you wanna Google search and it just immediately Googles over the top of whatever you were doing without leaving that app and it's so useful. Just,

even during the week I've been using this phone, I've searched pictures, parts of pictures before, it almost always works, just like uploading it to Google Lens. I've searched objects right in front of me through the camera view finder. I've searched random landmarks. You can also search text and you can even append text to your search. And I was just constantly impressed by how fast it is, and it basically works as expected every single time. The one fidgety part is sometimes selecting text get

s a little weird. Using the S Pen can solve that a little bit to just get a more precise selection. But yeah, once you do it, it's much faster than if you're gonna use Google Lens, having to like take a screenshot and then upload it through Lens and then maybe have to crop it and the whole thing. This is just fast. Now real OGs will know that there used to be a feature on Pixels called Now on Tap. It was like the same exact thing, hold the home button and it would just Google whatever was on you

r screen and help you out but that was everything on your screen and they kinda ended up wrapping that into Google Assistant. This is just so much faster and more selective. Also, Pixels are gonna get this feature very soon as well. But then bonus points, if you really love software, Samsung is now promising seven years of security updates and seven generations of major software updates on this phone, on this S24 lineup. I assume seven generations of software updates is basically seven years. Th

at means this phone will be up to date in 2031. Loving that. So we know the common wisdom was that if you wanted four, five, six plus years of software updates or if you want every single little software and AI feature, you basically had to go iPhone or Pixel. But now that this phone also has that, why get anything else? But speaking of the iPhone, they're going at them too. Now I know I said in the beginning of this video, $1,300 slab Android phone, so I know the iPhone 15 Pro Max was never rea

lly on the table, but if we're being honest, Samsung has never been shy about competing directly against the iPhone, so why not take some of the best stuff from there too? They weren't being subtle about it. So they've got this shiny brand new titanium color with titanium rails on the S24 Ultra, just like the iPhone. They have flatten the screen and the sides and made boxier corners all the way through the lineup, just like the iPhone. They have moved to a max 5X telephoto lens like I talked abo

ut earlier, also just like the iPhone. They also have this new always on display that doesn't just show the time but shows your whole wallpaper now, kinda like it's half awake just like the iPhone. Thankfully, you can also turn that off and save some battery, just like the iPhone. You can also now long press to select an object in a photo that automatically cuts it out and makes it a sticker you can use in other apps, just like the iPhone. And there's even these new lock screen widgets now that

look exactly like the iPhones, like copy my homework but don't even worry if they know you copied it. These two are gonna keep copying each other till the end of time, none of this is a surprise, it's just at the end of the day we are technically winning because they're making each other a little bit better bit by bit. But at the end of the day, S24 Ultra, I really do feel like, it feels like peak slab phone. And there's also a whole bunch of stuff I didn't even really mention with this phone. T

he haptics are really nice, I didn't even get to that. Now there's AI generated wallpapers, a whole section for 'em, if you're into that. And it's nice that the AI stuff is mostly kinda tucked away in ways where you don't ever have to use it if you don't want to, but if you notice it and it's helpful to you, bam, turn it on, could be your favorite feature. Really the only things that I miss, from the Pixel specifically, are Call Screening and Now Playing. So really the best argument not to buy t

his $1,300 phone is the fact that it's a $1,300 phone. And the truth is you can get 98% of the phone for much less money. You can see it in Samsung's own lineup. Samsung's own S24 Plus has a 4,900mAh battery instead of a 5,000. It has a 6.7 inch display instead of 6.8 and it drops the S Pen and one of the telephoto cameras for $300 off. And you know you can get the regular S24, again, for much less money with almost as much phone. So you don't have to spend 1,300 bucks on a phone. But if you are

going to, and you put the word Ultra in the name and you stuff as much stuff in one phone as you possibly can, this is the one that you should get. This has all the things; it's reliable, it's fast, it does everything, it checks all the boxes, it sounds great. It kinda feels like an ad when I just say all these positive things about the phone but it's not. Until right now, this video is sponsored by Ridge. The Ridge Wallet is iconic at this point. It's a minimalist, modern wallets like the oppo

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