i know this title concept has been done to death but i have actually never done
it because i believe that if a product pretty much does what it says on the box
there is someone out there who will love it otherwise why would they make it
and there is a lot that i have found to like about the samsung galaxy s20 ultra
over the last two weeks i'm not gonna skip over that stuff but the truth of
the matter is i'm gonna be shelving this phone as soon as i am done filming this
video let's talk about why
today's video is brought to you by ifixit ifixit's mahi driver kit includes
their quarter-inch aluminum screwdriver handle with a magnetic bit socket knurled grip and swivel top plus 48
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my immediate impressions of the s20 ultra 5g were mostly positive it's
generally chunkier than the iphone 11 pro max despite being a little bit
lighter but it is superbly balanced as
all things should be and the slimmer 20 by 9 display makes it easier for me to
wrap my fingers around it the materials are also great and remind me more of an
iphone 10 or 11 series than anything else that i've held today
but with all the right samsung flair added to it the bezels are much thinner
than apples and i think samsung has finally perfected both the curve of the
edge of the display and the width of their bezels so that distortion and
reflections around the edges of on-screen content are non-existent and i
almost never managed to accidentally activate the touchscreen with my palm
while i was reaching across it even the hole punch display which i
still hate and would immediately trade for a pop-up selfie camera like oneplus
pro series is obviously better than apple's now very
for head notch i did miss having the earpiece a little
bit lower down i find it more comfortable to hold against my ear but
if the mandate at samsung is maximum screen coverage
i prefer a proper grille even if it's a weirdly positioned one to a vibrating
screen like on the lg g8 even though i normally use my airpods pros these days
when i do want to listen out loud like in the bath it makes a big difference
for watching movies and videos on the go to have an amplified earpiece speaker
that doesn't vibrate your phone as a quick aside by the way guys i get a lot
of flack for constantly bringing up the movie watching experience in my phone
reviews and i'm finally at the point where i'm just not going to take it
anymore i've got to defend that look guys not everyone has the income or the
lifestyle to allow them to settle down for two hours at a time on the couch
with their big screen HDR tv and watch a movie
so yeah the phone is small and there's going to be directors and filmmakers out
there that are going to give you a hard time for watching their movies on it but
given how awesome phone screens have gotten this one in particular i don't
think it's much of a stretch to say that a galaxy s20 ultra is probably going to
be the best HDR display in the house of
most of the people who end up buying one the white point of the natural mode is a
little warm for my preference but after a short adjustment the s20 ultra screen
looks great under basically any conditions at night in bed all the way
to under direct sunlight so yeah if your close-up vision is still
good i see nothing wrong with throwing on a pair of like drop thx pandas and
firing up a movie on your phone i had no difficulty even streaming my heaviest
blu-ray rips from my plex server over wi-fi and the good news about the screen
gets even better 120 hertz support is basically the icing
on the cake here sweet delicious long-awaited icing it was
actually kind of funny seeing the reviewers who obviously mostly use
mainstream phones heralding 120hz says
the next big thing guys it was the last big thing like to
be clear it's great but here's some kid back in 2011 explaining how it improves
the smoothness of game animations and makes your device feel snappier and more
responsive but hey at least we finally got there right so gamers and
performance enthusiasts rejoice i have seen some complaints about poor
battery life particularly with 120 hertz enabled and especially on the exynos
models as well as about the lack of support for high refresh rate at the
native resolution but samsung's full hd plus mode didn't
bother me at all and i managed to get through the last two weeks with
everything enabled no dark mode everything at 120 hertz always on
display and that includes one really long day with over seven hours of screen
time love it the only thing i ended up not loving about the screen is the
in-screen ultrasonic fingerprint sensor it's much better than when it first
launched on the s10 series and most people probably won't notice or care but
when it comes to raw quick draw speed apple's face id and competing
fingerprint unlocks are still a hair faster something people are noticing and
caring about is the significant differences this time around between the
exynos and snapdragon versions of the s20 ultra
i have seen outlier results for both with users reporting more than 10 hours
of screen on time with various optimizations but for the most part the
ones who are complaining about really bad battery life are only exynos users
as for how to explain the difference andre from assani's preliminary
reporting on inauth.com seems to contain some strong clues
users who predominantly watch video which uses efficient fixed function
decoding hardware or who browse the web might see just a 10 deficit while users
who occasionally run heavier apps could fall behind by 25 or more due to
exynos's inferior power efficiency now i
get it there's a reason everyone does it the cost saving and supply chain
management rationales behind dual sourcing parts for a high volume product
like this make a lot of sense but the issue is that they have to be built to
the same spec and right now with the state that things
are in if i'm a customer who's in an exynos region
this kind of battery life performance makes samsung's entire s20 lineup a
no-go for me right out of the gate and
downright embarrassing honestly when you consider samsung's all-day battery
marketing as for the camera it's cool i it nope
it's super cool it's still a samsung camera so the colors might lean a little
on the cooler side especially side by side against an iphone which tends to
lean warmer and their over sharpening is ever present but at reasonable zoom
levels like 5x there is no doubt that
you are going to end up with images that contain a lot more detail than if you
were just trying to use software to punch in on a 2x zoom shot on an iphone
combined with the 12 megapixel wide angle you've got a lot of shooting
options and i think most people are gonna find something to love about it i
do wish they hadn't quite hyped it up as hard though video recording quality is
still way behind apple and some of the touted features like the
100x zoom and 8k recording are honestly
useless as anything other than a party trick the 100x zoom adds so much
processing that i would rather move my face closer to my phone and let my brain
do the guesswork and the 8k video recording mode isn't so much bad like
it's fine it's just entirely unnecessary
with the sensor and processing power that can be crammed into a cell phone
you're just better off with decently encoded 4k than with 8k and as for
samsung's assertion that you can pull 33 megapixel stills out of their 8k video
that is laughable even the example they show on the website looks like hot
garbage because of the motion blur that's inherent NVIDIA capture
why would anybody do that especially when the camera app supports just taking
a still while you're recording video i also didn't find myself using the 108
megapixel mode at all under ideal circumstances indirect
sunlight it might be worth switching to but you better hope there's absolutely
no shadows in your shot because its dynamic range is much worse compared to
when you allow all of the cameras to work together even though both modes
support HDR onto software samsung's Android skin has improved so much that
people rarely complain about it and in fact when we did our recent video
highlighting the top new features of Android 11 the comment section got
absolutely flooded with people who apparently didn't realize that
yes i get it those features are already built into your samsung phone but they
are not yet part of the stock Android experience
i've actually even been uncharacteristically happy with the software support that i've gotten on my
daily driver note 9 which is coming up on 2 years old now
however notifications have been and continue to be a problem for me
samsung in general needs to expose notification order controls either by
allowing app priorities to be manually tuned or by enabling an option to just
put everything in in reverse chronological order because i am
constantly getting pings on my phone that are for like my garage door opening
and then i need to scroll all the way down through a list of messages people have sent me to find out what buzzed my
phone not to mention that most of the notifications don't have a time stamp on
them for some reason also nothing that i did made my
microsoft teams notifications come through on the s20 ultra now this could
easily be microsoft's fault since teams is a hot pile of steaming garbage but it
does mean that i'm going to have to dump this phone immediately no matter how much i like it because i use that for
work bottom line then the s20 ultra is
great in a lot of ways the quality of the materials the specs the performance
all top notch and i'm not usually one to complain about a
price customer for anything remember
but the thing is it starts at fourteen hundred dollars that is three hundred
dollars more than the base model and just fifty dollars less than the top
spec iphone 11 pro max with four times
the storage that would be fine if it was utterly
flawless or if it had some space-age new technology that needed an early adopter
subsidy remember guys i defended the fold
but it's not and it doesn't at this price where literally anything
else is in play if you want a head turner get a fold if you want a status
symbol buy an iphone if you want to take pictures get a pixel or an iphone if you
shoot a lot of video get an iphone if you actually work for
your money here's the thing i didn't notice a significant day-to-day
difference in experience between this and my old daily driver note 9.
if however you're a rich kid and you want to play with the zoom something i
can pretty much guarantee you'll get bored of within a few days hey for you
though there's the s20 ultra
and it's brought to you by dbrand dbrand is making me say this the
dbrand grip is super grippy you will never drop your phone again even if
you're me haha see is that so that'll show you dbrand where'd it go it
includes military grade impact protection absorbing technology it's
ultra low profile at just two millimeters thick it's got super tactile
buttons with their springy polymer and full compatibility with dbrand skins hey
check this out dbrand i improved your skin i put an Linus tech tip sticker on
top of it so check out dbrand.com Linus drop tips we're gonna have that linked
below to check out their lineup if you want my impressions of the z flip by the
way check out our ShortCircuit channel where i unboxed it i am not going to do
a full review on here because i didn't want to use it for that long so i sent
it back to dbrand as soon as i was done i'm going to link that video down below
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