this is the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra and while it might look very much like the s23 ultra which look like the s22 ultra it's actually one of the most fascinating phones of the last decade I'd actually Peg it as the phone that's about to reignite the entire Battle of the smartphone and starting today I'm going to be fully switching over to it in place of my iPhone why well a bunch of important Hardware improvements but most significantly this is the first phone to come with Galaxy AI which is a lot cooler and a lot more
useful than the gimmick I was expecting it to be but the first thing you're going to notice is the updated design it's kind of like if you took the s23 ultra and dressed it up for the red carpet and I think it's a stunner everything is flatter and less rounded even the end of the S Pen is squared off it's almost like they just took a shaver to their last phone but without being so boxy that it just feels like a brick plus points for the new satin finish that hides fingerprints even better and side
rails that are completely matte now and textured instead of high gloss and I am happy there's finally some new colors you got a funky yellow a two-tone Violet which if nothing else is unique and of course the gray which feels like a very clear winning option made even greater by the fact that it kind of changes color as the light catches it but let's be honest the best colors will probably end up as Samsung website exclusives like they always do but yeah I have a feeling this gray one especially is going to draw a lot
of comparisons to the iPhone 15 pros and for good reason this is the most similar I can remember iPhone and Samsung flagships ever looking not just because of the color and the Finish but also just like the iPhone Samsung has swapped out the material of the phone entire frame from aluminium in this case to Titanium and that's awesome titanium is stronger it's better at conducting heat from the inside of the phone to the outside and while it is a heavier metal than aluminium because it's tougher you need less of it meaning that the weight of
the phone has actually gone slightly down instead of up and also like the iPhone this is now a flat display for the first time on one of the company's top-end models since like 2015 now I've personally always liked the smooth feel and the futuristic look of a curved screen and so pardon me can't help but feel like this is a step back but I'm willing to concede it I can totally see how there is practical benefit to a flat screen flat screens are sturdier they're easier to apply screen protectors to they can feel a bit
sharp on your fingers which is something that I was persistently telling off the older iPhones for doing that Samsung's mitigated that with the way the side rails very smoothly curve into it and what I love is that the flat screen here has allowed Samsung 2 for the first time ever completely even out the screen borders praise the lord we took our sweet time getting here but isn't symmetry just the most beautiful thing especially paired with a front camera that's now even smaller and even less of an interruption the only thing they haven't fixed and I'm
going to keep banging on about this until they do is these sharp Corners look I get it the phone's got a pen it's like a notebook but that doesn't change the fact that this aesthetic differentiation causes very real hand indentation oh and then also with these s24su is launching new flips suit cases which are like Smart cases that will also change your phone's wallpaper NE to match and then a really cool spin on the idea of a case that's also a grip for your hands and a stand I'm very curious to see how this mechanism
holds up over time anyways design aside the new phone also has a bunch of Hardware upgrades most fairly expected but that doesn't mean meaningless the base amount of RAM for example has finally gone up from 8 to 12 GB about time for an Ultra phone to be honest but nonetheless this is another one of those things that have bugged me about past phones that we can just take off and be happy about now Samsung's changed up the design of their internal speaker funnel which gives the sound more space and should improve the clarity of audio
last year's phone supported Wi-Fi 6E this year supports Wi-Fi 7 which is actually kind of crazy it's up to four times faster than 6E if you can find a router and a supplier willing to actually give it to you it's very early days right now the screen is a big one so your responsiveness is up by 12% so your inputs will feel just that little bit more real time but more noticeably brightness before it topped out at 1715 H which already to me felt absurdly bright and very able to hold its own in direct sun
now it is 2,600 I don't even know what to say about this one but cool I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of extreme brightness phone screens this year mostly so that you can not just see your screen but also preserve the high contrast High dynamic range experience even if you're in bright sunlight now I'm definitely someone who would get more excited for a screen that focuses on preserving battery as opposed to getting even brighter but to be fair Samsung's saying this one is made of a new material that does that too and
then the glass that protects it all is also upgraded from Gorilla Glass victus 2 on the last phone to gorilla glass armor the company says it's like four times more scratch resistant versus the competition but I can't stand that phrasing cuz like what's the competition what does that what does that mean which is why I specifically asked them multiple times what's the actual difference between this glass and the last phone's glass but for some reason the company's just decided they don't want to make any specific comparisons which makes this four times number completely useless as
a stat the other interesting aspect of this gorilla glass armor though is that it should also be able to reduce screen glare by up to 75% I'm always surprised how this company manages to seemingly remake glass every year and give it new features but hey I'm not complaining the s24 ultra's display does look absolutely drop dead gorgeous so these are good spec bumps to what was already very much not broken and I haven't even talked about the biggest one the s24 ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chip which is probably the meatiest
upgrade in The Last 5 Years and the first time in recent memory where you can actually unambiguously say it is more powerful than the latest iPhone which is already big but then Samsung uses a custom version of that chip called the 8 gen 3 for Galaxy which gives you even faster speeds than all your normal peasant H gen3 friends so there's no doubt in my mind that at Peak Performance apps will fly but it's just that especially nowadays I don't think the Peak Performance figure should be the focus it should be how well can it
control its temperatures is it going to affect battery life and thankfully for both of these things it looks like Samsung's worked it out they built a 1.9 times larger heat sink which means a bigger surface area of heat to be conducted away from the chip pretty impressive considering that this phone is actually Slimmer than last year's and for battery Samsung is quoting a further 15% increase battery life over the already very good s23 Ultra but it all needs testing and I will be doing exactly that with my review of this phone so sub to the
channel would be Almighty however there is one more important aspect of this new chip now the companies are about to start properly dialing up the involvement of AI in your phone all of a sudden all that chat about the AI cores in your phone's chipset and the fact that they're two times faster here than last year's you know the part of the presentation where you start to doze off a little bit all of that matters in a much more real way now this chip is powerful enough to run entire large language models completely on device
without internet but more on that when I get to the Galaxy AI part cuz before that we got to talk cameras that's some cool stuff going on here like the main 200 megapixel camera has been refreshed by refreshed I mean it's a new camera sensor but it's got like basically the exact same spec as last year not insignificant though because it has a faster technique for capturing photos which combined with a little sprinkle of software magic has quite significantly brought the time to capture down from 333 milliseconds to 238 and the most recent software now
let you select an option to shoot even faster but it's at the cost of quality so I don't really know who that's for both the front and rear cameras now have better noise reduction algorithms which I'm very curious to test properly because noisy videos have been my single biggest gripe with past Samsung cameras so if they can fix that they're going to shoot up the rankings but what's pretty clear already is the improvements to photos in my very early testing you can see some decent improvements to color reproduction and most importantly the smoothness and Clarity
of the shot and that is apparently down to what Samsung calls the pro visual engine now I asked about five separate times and I could not get a clear answer on exactly what this Pro visual engine is but it seems like it's a blanket marketing term that Samsung's using for what's actually lots of different camera optimizations they've made here like for example there's a new AI model that's been trained on millions of different photos to understand what things should look like that the phone can reference to improve its color accuracy or simple things like the
smoothness of the camera app it still feels one generation off being perfect but this is still by far the slickest Samsung's camera has ever felt like you can actually Zoom all the way from 0.5 times to 10 times without your phone acting like you're trying to torture it and that's a big win I think having a camera app that feels polished is a big part of the photo taking experience oh and also video can now be recorded in both 4K and 120 frames per second at the same time which might sound excessive and Niche Until
you realize that 120 FPS is the same frame rate many phones use for slow-mo so you can now actually take 4K slow motion video that's lowkey like the most exciting upgrade to any camera mode ever and the thought of having that capability in my pocket at all times is bringing me great joy but the last major camera change is a little bit weird see last year's s23 Ultra had a main camera an ultra wide a three time zoom and then a 10 time zoom camera now this year with the s24 ultra that 10 times lens
has been swapped for just a five time zoom lens why would you do that well there is one clear perk cuz the problem we had with the three times lens and the 10 times lens is that when you're zooming in and you're at let's say seven times or nine times your photos used to look pretty rubbish cuz you're well past your three time zoom but you're not quite activating your 10 times whereas here the entire sort of standard Zoom range from 0.5 times to 10 times is looking mighty fine and consistent if I say so
myself plus you can also use this new five time zoom to take what feels like the prettiest portrait mode shots I've ever seen come from a Samsung couldn't do that before on the old 10x lens but it does leave us with the obvious question mark surely the new phone is going to be worse when you try and zoom in all the way like say 100 times which has been like Samsung's whole thing for the last 4 years well there's two things Samsung's done to try and make that not the case one that this new five
times zoom camera is actually a much better quality camera than the 10 times used to be it's a significantly bigger sensor with two times the optical image stabilization and five times the resolution so even after you reach five times it has a lot more room to be able to use digital Zoom to get further and then also smarter AI that after you've taken your Zoom shots can just go back into them and intelligently upscale them that said in my again very early testing I wasn't blown away it's too early to say for sure if these
Max Zoom shots are going to be better or worse on average but I can say for sure that if they are better they're definitely not going to be significantly better this isn't going to be the generation where all of a sudden your 100 times Zoom shots are finally usable I was also a little worried about if you wanted to take say a 10 times zoomed in video since videos tend to Faire much worse than photos when you digitally zoom in in but to be fair it looks okay so far you can take 8K video at
five times zoom and 4K video at 10 times and now just before we get to the AI side of things I just want to say that I'm really happy with the general software direction that Samsung's taking the s24 ultra is going to come out the box with Samsung's one UI 6.1 based on Android 14 and I love it since the launch of their last phone they've completely redone the drop down menu it's more organized your brightness slider is One Touch Away now there's a new always on display and it's all just so much more aesthetically
pleasing to me than what Samsung software used to look like even just one generation ago you get Dynamic widgets like the live animated weather you get camera widgets which let you instantly open up your camera into your favorite mode like rear camera photo and the software's jazzier like when you listen to music you got a real-time visualizer it's just fun and I'm really glad that Samsung is slowly leaning into that away from the ultra corporate styling that they've had for the last decade not to mention that Samsung's also had a bit of a software support
Arc where they've quite quickly gone from one of the worst companies in that area to a real standout in the Android world right let's talk about the AI cuz this is like the first flagship phone launch in memory where cameras haven't actually been the main talking point it's this the fact that the phone is now supercharged with artificial intelligence so what does that mean you can do and how good or bad is it well let's just go through the different AI features and I will rate them based on my early Impressions so the first is
instant slow-mo literally go into your phone's Gallery hold down on any video in it and Bam it halves the playback speed while keeping it smooth using real time frame interpolation analyzing your video's motion and inventing extra in between frames the tech isn't perfect like you can see some slight weirdness if you look close but I do think this is still a class feature to have it literally the touch of a finger oh but also what I think is so cool is that this effect can also double up with videos you've already taken in slow-mo so
if we're watching back a 4K video that I shot at 120 frames per second hold down and those 120 frames become 240 frames it has bugged out a couple of times on me but I still think it's an easy 9 out of 10 there's generative wallpaper which gives you like three different parameters that you can tweak to make a continuous stream of One of a Kind images I'd say there's a lot you can do with this but equally it doesn't feel like completely unbounded creativity seven there's AI image editing which comes in two flavors there's
instant effects that you can just apply with one tap to photos while browsing in your gallery like the portrait mode effect when it notices it will work particularly well but the main new editing feature is the generative AI editor which lets you do mostly three things you can move your subjects you can erase distractions like people who got in the way and you can expand things or even straighten the image if it's crooked and AI will fill in the blanks and just to kind of set expectations this is not the most powerful AI image editor
on the planet you know you see those Twitter threads of people doing some absolutely insane image and video manipulation with AI it's not that level but it does achieve what I assume it was setting out to which is being a really polished really accessible easy to use entry route into AI editing that will definitely impress people who are yet to experience that and Samsung's made good decisions with it like the fact that it doesn't make you wait in between each action it lets you do all your changes and then you just hit the button once
to fix up the whole image the fact that it adds a little bit of metadata into the shs that can let other people know that this has been AI modified for a first gen AI that has kind of come out of nowhere I would give it an 8 out of 10 we've got an upgraded voice meeting app for which you just plop your phone down on table to record and it can figure out who the various speakers within a conversation are for up to 20 people which is that's almost like a classroom and it can
even summarize those meetings as well as translate them into other languages so we had to test it I sat down with an unsuspecting Samsung employee and just dove into a conversation about Pokémon cuz let's be honest that's 90% of what's Happening up there there we chatted for like 2 minutes and mixed bag really the trend I picked up with my few hours with the phone is it's not very good at understanding what you're trying to say like I say Squirtle it thinks I'm saying squirrel and then the next sentence we say Squirtle again it thinks
we said squiddle which squiddle a word even though it's picking up our voices really clearly which you can tell because when you play the voice recording back it sounds awesome it's just the transcription that needs to get smarter I think the phone needs to be able to better understand the context of the conversation and then use that to inform what the words it's hearing should be and this also applies to the phone's live translation feature but I'm getting there on the flip side though the phone's ability to summarize things is amazing and this has many
benefits partly for the audio recorder which rescues it a little bit to what i' call a pretty mid five out of 10 feature for now but this also has implications Beyond like for example if you download a PDF on your phone one tap will summarize it if you're browsing a website on the internet you now have a button that that can read the entire page for you and churn out a very good summary in like 2 seconds or if you're making notes in your notes app I don't know about you but when I make notes
they're a real scribble and there is no organization at all every thought is a new note and basically buries the one before it and so the fact that now your notes app can use AI to organize the entire document with headers and subheaders and bullet points that it can summarize any points you've waffled on about for too long and even add an automatic cover page so that you can easily navigate through them afterwards feels like was designed for me and like absolute magic at your fingertips N9 out of 10 all right so that live translation
feature is in concept brilliant it's the ability to talk to any person in any language and them being able to hear you in their own native tongue without even needing an s24 of their own it's such a big feature that I'm going to say it actually feels like a step changing communication and you can really tell with these AI features that Samsung spent the time to figure out how people will want them as well because they even give you the option to decide if you want to mute what you or the other person is actually
saying so that you can just hear the translated portions and the translation happens in nearly real time as you talk so it doesn't feel close to as bogged down as I expected it would like you say something then you wait for it to be translated for them and then when they say something you wait for it to be translated back it's so seamless that in moments you actually forget that you're talking across language barriers and that is exactly how you would want it to feel what reminds you however as I've alluded to is that the
phone's ability to understand what you're trying to say it's not good so I tried two different conversations one with a Spanish speaker one with a German speaker and both conversations were absolutely butchered by the phone to the point where I was actually creasing just reading the conversation that the phone thought we were having which would have made absolutely zero sense in any language or culture was mildly offensive and also unusually morbid as it stands right now this feature is probably a five but benefit of the doubt it will probably probably get better not necessarily with
a quick fix on launch day but over the next year or two for sure and when it does it is going to be a big deal there's a new Circle to search feature which is literally that anytime you want you just hold down the home button you Circle something and your phone will Google that exact thing now I don't think it's anything that couldn't have been implemented like 5 years ago but regardless it is kind of perfect for things that you can't quite articulate into words like a specific shoe you've seen someone wear that you
want to get to and finally there's the new smart keyboard which has something called chat assist baked into it and that does three things translation writing style and grammar so let's say that you're typing out a message but you want to swap out the language tap chat translation and then you just pick which one that part's pretty simple and it's done well the spelling and grammar check is nice too I guess if you're using your phone to type out really long serious emails and you want a second pair of eyes to have a full scan
when you're done it's powerful to be able to have that level of reassurance at your fingertips but the most interesting one is definitely writing Stu style when you tap the button for it you get back the thing you've written but in like every possible different tone casual to professional I can see the potential I can see why Samsung decided to make this a feature cuz like drisha my fiance when she's helping me to write out a caption for say a Tik Tok because she comes from a really corporate background this could actually help her to
type more conversationally but in practice the actual responses it gives you just feels a bit cringe and I'm not convinced I'd use it I'm pretty sure that I'd rather just type in the exact tone that I think is right for the situation as opposed to specifically not doing that to then rely on AI to try and fix it for me but the keyboard is not just able to control what you send but also what you receive so in your phone settings you'll set up what your native tongue is and then this keyboard makes sure seemingly
whatever application you're messaging in that any incoming message comes with both what was originally said but then also that message in your language which again reinforces this as like the first proper beat down of International Communication barriers no one needs to download anything no one needs to change their habits it just happens 8 out of 10 one of the reasons that I was so skeptical about this whole galaxy AI thing was that we already have so many AI applications that are so powerful and so what I thought Samsung was going to do was create a
whole bunch of new Samsung branded apps that basically do the same thing as what already exists but what they've actually done is weaved AI features seamlessly into the apps you already use and that is much better like building all these chat assist bits into your keyboard it just makes sense it means they're with you all the time and it will actually make things quicker versus the alternative which is using another app or website to do your translation and then copy and pasting that translated result back or how for live translation the fact that it's baked
into your default phone app and pops up as you receive a normal phone call reduces all the friction that might prevent people from giving it a go but there is one more key consideration with any AI features companies often don't make it clear when they're announcing them what is done on your device and what is being done on the cloud but the difference is massive if you have an AI feature that can be pulled off completely on your device it's likely to be faster because it doesn't need to connect to the internet more reliable cuz
you can use it literally anywhere on the planet regardless of whether you're connected or not and also safer since none of your data is actually having to leave your phone at all and so in this regard I would give Samsung's phone a pass not a distinction but a pass or translation for example is done completely on device I mean you can kind of tell but still that's a tick AI slow motion on device but then quite a lot of the other stuff is internet based like the generative image editor the ability to make new wallpapers
and basically all of your summarization tools now Samsung has added an option that pivots the phone to only performing AI tasks offline but then that will just straight up stop the ones that need to be online from working so overall initial assessment of this phone I would say solid Hardware upgrade to what was already top tier Hardware software that's not just incredibly flexible but also starting to become kind of fun and then as for the AI it is a little rough around the edges but about 50% on device which is a good start with most
features available on day one in seemingly every region which is how you should launch a feature very well thought out in terms of where and how the AI is weaved into the phone and really exciting as a prospect like even if this isn't the phone that you end up settling on there's no denying that it has just come in and set the terms of what's going to now be a very quickly evolving new Battlefield and that's why I'm switching to it so I will see you guys in the camera test and then the full review
