I finished my 30-day iPhone challenge months ago so why am I still dailying
this thing it's not cuz I love it it's cuz I've been waiting for this as
someone who daed the Galaxy Note 9 for over 5 years I've come to appreciate
Samsung's one UI as well as their inclusion of useful features like micro
SD expansion a headphone jack and of course an integrated stylist now some of
those features have been courageously lost on the latest spiritual successor
to my beloved note 9 but I do still find
that Stylus is incredibly useful day to-day when marking up documents or
screenshots and there are some new things that I have come to love about
Samsung's latest best starting of course
with the screen just like last gen we get a whopping rated 2600 nits of peak
brightness which our Lads testers found it was able to exceed in a 10% window
and we get a second generation of corning's incredible glare reducing
coating look at this this is a studio
light okay let's grab my iPhone by comparison that is flipping incredible
and of course it's not you know just that the iPhone is bad or whatever you
take an old Android device and do the same thing and you're going to have a pretty bad time wow gamechanging how
does it compare to last gen though here's an s24 ultra for comparison yeah
I don't know if I'm convinced it's changed that much and honestly from our
measurements it really doesn't look like it has both of these within what we'd
consider to be device to device variants hit a about the same brightness and
about the same overall performance which isn't to say that Samsung didn't change
anything about the performance on the inside it uses the latest Snapdragon 8
Elite processor a 3 nanometer chip that
delivers markedly better performance compared to last gen this might be the
biggest generation overgeneration Improvement that we've seen in quite some time I'm talking a 10% Improvement
in single-threaded performance and a 30% Improvement in multi-thread performance
even in light performance mode which goes up to more like 30 36 and 38%
performance Improvement if you're running in the standard performance mode
that's really impressive it's got 12 gigs of RAM up to a terabyte of storage
and feels just butter smooth with a variable refresh rate display that can
do anywhere from 1 to 120 HZ man it
feels smooth it's a 1440p class screen
specifically 3120 by 1440 so even the
very eagle-eyed among you will appreciate its sharpness but it should
be noted that you might not be appreciating it for as long compared to
the last generation s24 Ultra we actually measured about an hour less
battery life NVIDIA playback at the same screen brightness running the same
video under the same conditions it's still 20 plus hours but it is something
for you to watch out for and our best guess is that this comes down to the
more powerful processor on board while Samsung still hasn't adopted any of the
just wild High wattage charging rates that some of the Chinese phone
manufacturers have we found found that it only takes a little over 70 minutes
to go from zero to a full charge unfortunately the wireless charging is a
bit more of a downer it supports what Samsung calls their fast wireless
charging 2.0 which is limited to 15
watts and while it's ready for G charging 2.1 which allows magnetic
alignment just like Apple's mag safe it doesn't have the magnets for the
standard so you have to get a case with the magnets in order to align with the
magnetic charging thing let's try the camera the preview is definitely
oversharpened let's see how the final image looks damn that's a lot of
resolution 50 megapixel Ultra wide 200
megapixel wide 50 megapixels on the Tet 2 lens and 10 megapixels on the Tet 1
lens that is flipping wild that is
definitely a more pleasing Zoom even on the
plus whoops yeah that color way better yeah skin tone too but hold on hold on
if you're coming from an old note huh yeah okay okay there's some generation
overgeneration Improvement there HH dude those skin tones though that is not what
this man looks like I don't know we can play around with the telephoto let's
play around with the telephoto all right how does it nail the skin tones now
sorry the top down doesn't look very good I've got the brightness up too high for you right now hold on hold on too
bright you shine too bright Mr bellance that's way better what the crap it's
almost like there's tradeoffs for everything look at this
hot actual garbage so your mileage may
vary ladies and gentlemen I am not a fan of how every phone is just like a
squared off brick these days I picked up my old iPhone 6s the other day cuz I was
thinking of taking it with me on a trip just like loading some media on it having like a beater phone with a
headphone jack that I don't care about and I picked it up and I was like damn
phones used to be so light and thin and
pocketable and it's like like you can you can hear it like you can hear the
sound when this thing falls down uh on the right we've got the volume rocker as
well as our lock button on the left we got nothing as it should be so you have
a surface to brace yourself against on the top we've got I don't know noise
cancelling microphones and then on the bottom we've got our USBC Port SIM tray
as well as our stylus that like what a
weird cost-saving measure no longer includes bluetooth support I used the
remote shutter feature on this thing all the flipping time it is awesome because
what it allows you to do is if you're you know able to get good instead of
using your selfie camera which is particularly bad on a phone this old I
can use my rear camera and take a little picture it's freaking awesome that's the
only thing that I cared about Bluetooth for but I don't know what because
Samsung doesn't advertise the feature enough and not that many people use it they just rip it out of the phone by
default is it at least generation over generation compatible I don't think so
no look at this they are ever so
slightly a different length there's a bunch of AI stuff you can hold the power
button to have Gemini do stuff open the camera and take a
selfie oh I actually was not expecting
that to do anything open up a note taking
app what if I don't know what my note taking app is called Samsung Notes oh we
haven't talked about gaming performance this thing performs like a hot Dam even
once it reaches steady state it absolutely crushes the last generation
as well as the pixel 9 Pro we did find a weird issue by the way I probably should
have mentioned this when we were talking about the screen if you like auto
brightness no problem this thing will do over 2,000 nits and it'll just adjust to
whatever is going on in your daily life if you don't like auto brightness though
in SDR it'll only go as high as around 450 nits they do have like an extra
brightness toggle that you can put on but that still only gets up to around
850 so you're not really taking advantage of the entire capability of
this display I have waited so patiently Samsung for you to give me a successor
to this something with handsfree unlocking this one had an iris scanner
gone so now I just get the unders screen fingerprint scanner or I have to use the
camera no Bullet Hole or notch in the
display expandable storage headphone jack like what I really want is for Sony
to fix the ability to swap the multitask and the back button I would just use an
xeria so that I could have my headphone Jack but as it is they don't do that and
as a right-handed person who likes to press back here and not across and risk
dropping my phone it's just simply not an option and yes I'm aware that
gestures exist I just daed a phone with gesture control for like 3 months I
don't prefer it so yeah sure I'm going to go s25 Ultra and I don't know maybe
I'll do an LTT review if I have any more thoughts but honestly these things have
gotten to the point where it's just like yeah when you need a new one you kind of
get the new one but I think the days of you know up upgrading the last gen one
to the latest one are long behind us and
you see that reflected in people's sort of disappointment as new generation
after new generation comes out oh God they rounded the corners on the screen
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