Inside this box is my new phone, which is great, because as you can see, I desperately need one.
The S... Very funny, you guys.
S23 Ultra S. Look, I know they didn't change much this time around,
but I personally think that a new kind of glass
on the front of a phone, yeah, that's totally enough to justify a new revision number.
Also, that isn't the only thing they changed. They've upgraded to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor.
The base model comes with 12 gigs of RAM instead of just eight gigs.
And... AI?
No, I'm sure there must be something else. Oh yes, the second telephoto lens, the Zoom one,
is 5X with a 50 megapixel camera and a faster lens,
and it's got a titanium frame. Nice.
I like titanium. T-A-N-I-A, get a gassy, get titanium.
That's it, huh? But there's still a lot for us to experience,
starting with the display. Samsung claims that this new display
will reach peak brightnesses of 2,600 nits,
and what's even more unbelievable than that is the fact that we reached even higher results
in our independent testing, HDR.
And we're gonna look at this in a second, but first, can we talk about this gorilla armor?
I mean, normally, here on the ShortCircuit set, reflections are a huge problem on devices,
but both to my eye and even in the camera, look at this, guys.
That's a studio light. Look at that, completely washed out on a mere mortal phone.
Is that friggin' impressive or what? Here, I'm trying to catch that light.
Look at that, that's crazy. We should just open the video with this,
not to mention the difference in color performance. Did we really open this with, ah, it's kind of an S23S
because that screen, I don't think I've seen
anything quite like it on a phone. And that anti-glare coating, not to mention,
it's not just anti-glare, it almost, it almost looks like a matte display,
but to touch it, it's still glossy. I really like this.
There's a lot to like here. Here, let's do a quick physical tour. At the bottom, we've got our SIM slot,
USB-C charging port, one of our speaker ports, and gotta love it.
Once you get used to the S Pen, man. It's a funny thing because I don't use it every day,
but when I use it, I'm like, man, I'm really glad I had this. Okay, check this out.
It was date night the other night, and my wife and I have these little cards that tell us,
okay, here's what you're gonna do on date night. You just scratch it, and that's what you do.
So our card earlier this week is all, go to a dollar store, buy glow sticks and tape,
and turn yourself into glow stick, stick people. So we're like, oh, well, this is really cool,
and it'd be great to get a picture of ourselves dressed up like this, but we don't wanna ask anyone else to take it.
So I set up my phone on a log,
grabbed my S Pen, remote shutter, let's go.
Oh, I guess she asked me not to share them with the internet. The point is, I like the S Pen.
On the top, a microphone, I guess we've got an amplified earpiece speaker,
just right in there. And then over on the side, we've got our volume rocker,
as well as our lock button, and oh, 5G cut out, very nice.
Get that millimeter wave. We're looking at a very similar camera already last time.
We've got a 200 megapixel main shooter, a 12 megapixel ultra wide.
Instead of the 10 and 10 telephotos, we have a 10 and then the 50 megapixel telephoto
that I already told you guys about. And then at the front, we're looking at a 12 megapixel selfie camera.
As usual with Samsung, you can double click to open up your camera app,
double click again, boom, I'm taking a selfie. Oh, that looks really sharp.
Damn, that looks really good. The initial reaction, the later reaction.
Wow, that minimum brightness though, honestly, as a nighttime phone user,
in some ways, that's more important to me than how bright it can go.
Cause phones are already bright enough that I can use them under basically any conditions.
Look at that. That is not even close. That's awesome.
You can't even see that. And that's a good thing. Obviously, it's a very old phone
to be comparing it against, but that's something that I think our little joke
about S23 Ultra S didn't really captures.
Most people are not upgrading their phone from the very last generation.
They're upgrading from something older. This is so dim, I can't find the slider.
There we go. God, it's fixed. And there's a lot to like here.
I've always kind of liked the curved display. I know, I know, I'm sorry.
They've gone with a flat display this time. Doesn't really bother me either way.
So if that's something you're into, then that's great. And performance, while we found that it wasn't actually
as good as some of the other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices
that we've checked out recently, it's certainly better than the last gen.
I do have to wonder why this is, given how much Samsung has talked about their amazing
cooling solution for this phone. I mean, it's certainly not a size constraint.
She's chunky, boys. Though, if I had to guess at something,
I'd say maybe they don't want the difference to the Exynos one to be too much.
That's all conspiracy too. I got my tinfoil hat on for that one. I mean, I've got the hairdo for it.
I'm not saying it's aliens, but aliens?
One thing that's not different from one region to the next is the titanium frame.
I don't know. Like cool, I guess, right?
Like that's neat. Coming back to performance in games,
the S24 Ultra was also behind other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices,
particularly when it comes to frame time consistency.
So the 1% lows that we observed in Dolphin, as well as Genshin Impact were a little bit
on the lower side, which is to say, you're still gonna be getting a pretty darn good gaming
experience playing fucking Wii games on this thing.
Incredible. Another area where it falls behind other similarly equipped phones, though,
is battery longevity. To be clear, we are not disputing Samsung's claims
of all day battery life. In fact, we found that we got over 24 hours
of YouTube playback at 480p, 200 nits brightness.
That's great. It just isn't the 30 hours that Samsung claims.
Our stress test saw us land just shy of three hours,
which is pretty darn solid. And our charge time was very reasonable.
An hour at 65 watts, though it should be noted
that that was not with an included charger.
Does it have Wi-Fi 7? Yeah. Hey, that's not in the list.
Wi-Fi 7 is freaking awesome. And if you don't already love it, you should.
What about Bluetooth 5.4? No. 5.3, 5.4 is some big improvements
in terms of latency, as long as you have a compatible device.
I don't know, anyway. Okay, still, Wi-Fi 7, very cool.
The display is 6.8 inches. It's 120 Hertz, so obviously it feels super smooth.
And we've managed to get this far into this video without talking about any of the glorious AI.
Now, I haven't personally experienced any of this stuff. So the one and only Jake Belivance,
our producer on ShortCircuit, is going to tell me two that are the best
that I should experience right now. Does all kinds of cool stuff. Their Notes app now locally will handle transcribing
your conversations and meetings. Apparently it can even handle multiple people.
There's interpreter functions in Android Auto. It'll summarize incoming messages
and suggest relevant replies. That's super cool. Ooh, Galaxy AI editing tools.
Okay, so in your photos, some of these things run locally. So if you wanna remove a shadow or reflection
or something like that, that'll actually run on the beefed up AI processor
that's built right into the phone. But then some of these things do rely on the cloud.
Like if you wanna move a person around or remove an object. Okay, Belivance, what are we doing?
Circle to search with Google. Circle to search with Google.
All right, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. So I'm gonna take a picture.
And I have no idea how this stuff works. I wasn't at impact. So I'm gonna take a picture of myself.
I'm taking a picture of myself. I'm gonna take a picture of myself.
Then I'm gonna hold the home button. Which one's the home button?
Oh my God, Bixby. Where's the home, where the hell's the home button?
How do I find the home button? I don't have on-screen buttons. It's broken, I broke it.
Got your S Pen? Yeah, I've got it, just chill.
What, that's stupid. Okay, home button.
Okay, I'm gonna search this guy.
Yeah, I'm trying to try it now.
There. No way! Oh!
I did not stage that. I did not stage that.
Okay. We can search for anything.
So I don't know, I could just do this like anytime.
This is so cool.
Why are all the results from Reddit so far? Are they just appending Reddit to every search?
Okay, what's this thing?
Okay, what is that? I swear to God, if this is Reddit again.
No way, no way, no way, actual link to buy.
Okay, this feature exclusive to the S24 series right now,
actually I think it's all coming to the S23 too, all the AI stuff, but there is no way this doesn't come
to basically anything that'll do it because Google desperately wants all of this delicious data.
They want it. Anytime you're gonna buy shit, Google's like, I'm there.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, oh man. I could play with this feature all day, I think.
Oh, no way, lttstore.com, baby.
It's so fast because it runs locally. Thank God we're all over this whole cloud thing.
You know why it happened? Because Google and Microsoft and all these guys
are looking at their data center costs going like, holy shit, how is this sustainable?
Again, what is it that thing we used to do where we put like processing power
in the user's actual device? Let's do that, love it.
Swiping up is gonna give us some quick fixes. We could add some background blur.
You know what, that's actually not bad. More blur, less blur.
Pretty cool, especially for only having one camera.
Not bad though, not bad, especially if it's doing this processing on device.
Object eraser, this is all, this is stupid.
Let's get rid of it. That's very usable. Yeah, that's, you know what?
I'm kind of into it. That is definitely an improvement.
Let's get a picture of me with shadows on my face then. Makes my nose look even bigger, which is impressive.
Oh, here we go, here we go, here we go. Okay, well, no, what the?
Yeah, how about just this shot? Oh.
Um. Oh boy, okay, not what I intended.
I don't want to get rid of any of the dynamism
in my lighting. I just want to remove this weird shadow on my face
and instead we just get this weird nonsense.
Uh.
Now that, that is some nightmare fuel.
It has like an assist, which is kind of cool to help you stay on the lines, at least it feels like it.
Either that, oh, buddy, that's pretty good.
Okay, give me one more. AI editing tools.
AI editing tools, all right. Let's take a picture.
Okay, so how do we do this? Oh, this maybe. Advanced intelligence.
Ooh. Really?
Okay, re-imagine your images. Move or move and resize the people and objects
and use advanced intelligence to fill in the background. Okay, so that was like the crappy local version
we were using before. This is super cool. I want this computer to move.
Yeah, okay. I'm going to put it there.
So what, this is free until 2025? And then realistically after that, you get to pay?
Dang, that's actually not bad.
How do you fill this in? Did it just guess or is it using imagery
of the Northern Lights desk pad? Like, did it go find out what this thing is and what's supposed to be there?
That's pretty impressive. Save as copy.
A visible watermark will be overlaid on the output image
in order to indicate that it is AI generated. So this is interesting, especially in light
of the recent controversy with AI generated images of Taylor Swift.
Samsung is marking both in the metadata and actually on the image itself,
that the image has been, yeah, there it is.
AI doctored. There it is right there.
That would be so hard to crop out
and then repost with no metadata somewhere.
This solves the problem. Verbal irony.
Hilarious.
Solution solved. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.
Oh wait, we didn't talk pricing. The S24 series is priced anywhere from 40,
the one terabyte capacity, to $100 more than the S23 series.
And while the S23 series was priced really high,
this uplift doesn't seem that unreasonable, given that at that base tier where it's $100 adder,
at least you're getting additional RAM. How do you feel about that, Apple? Should anyone put any RAM on their devices?
Or will it make you look bad? At any rate, that's it for today. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.
See you later, guys.