Samsung Galaxy S20 "CHONKY-EDITION" (Ultra)
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2020-05-05
·
2,464 words · ~12 min read
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- My S20 Ultra 5G just arrived and I already have some questions.
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To my knowledge this, the priciest of Samsung's non-foldable smartphones,
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is only available for $1,400 with 128 gigs of storage
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or 1,600 with 512 gigs and yet, here we are,
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it's a weird 256 gig one that Deebrand seems to have unearthed somewhere.
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So, without further ado,
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let's get started. Oh, cute. They sent me JerryRigEverything's phone.
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Thanks guys. And wow,
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this thing is freaking heavy.
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I hadn't managed to stay completely cloistered on this one. So I had already seen some people's comments
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that this thing was thick and heavy, but feeling it for myself as a different than held together.
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You know, more than the weight, I think it's really the thickness that makes the S20 Ultra feel so different.
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Somehow, even compared to a monstrosity, like the Note9,
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it just dwarfs it. Look at this. Even without the camera bump, it's a monster.
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And then you add that in and this thing is like, it feels like double the thickness
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when you're holding it right here. Oh yeah. Can I borrow that? Thanks Sandy.
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(phone thuds) Oh my God. Why would you do that? Well, no wonder it felt lower density.
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They're about the same weight, but this is like a centimeter shorter and here, wow.
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Let's get camera bump to camera bump, look at that.
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That's a bump. (phone thuds) That's a, that's a hill.
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It's big, but to Samsung's credits, it's very well balanced.
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Like, I don't feel like there's a heavy side or a heavy end to it.
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Now, I wasn't that happy with the speed of Samsung's ultrasonic fingerprint scanner
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when it first came out and I was accused of using it wrong, but as it turned out,
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they did end up updating it. And no, it doesn't matter if you just touch it
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or if you touch it, then hold it. It's exactly the same speed.
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And it was, and still does appear to be a touch slower than OnePluses,
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but they've definitely improved it quite a bit.
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That's not bad. I can definitely live with that. It's in a really ergonomic spot too.
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Like it's right where I would naturally touch the phone if I was bracing it on the bottom with my pinky
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and actually it seems to not really care if you get it in exactly the right spot.
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It took a little longer that time you see, but it still managed to hit it.
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Let's go a little low. Yeah, managed to grab that one.
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You know, what I really like about this out of the box is the bezels.
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So the top and bottom are both skinny enough that I think you can with a straight face
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call them infinity edge or whatever it is that Samsung's branding for that is.
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But more importantly to me, the right and left bezels are a little bit bigger
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than they were on the Note10. That was something I praised with the Note9,
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having a little bit of buffer space for when you're reaching across the screen
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and I was disappointed to see them remove. I'm really glad to see that that's back.
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It's got support for dual SIM, but not in the conventional way. So you wouldn't put one SIM here
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and then another one here where the micro SD slot is, you would just use an eSIM for your second one.
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Out of the box, it looks like we're configured for 60 hertz display mode operation
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and that's one of the big features of the S20 Ultra,
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the 120 hertz refresh rate.
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So let's go ahead to apply that. Now, one thing that I think people weren't really expecting was that when you go to 120 hertz,
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you are stuck in the full HD plus screen resolution. So you can either do WQHD plus.
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This names have gotten confusing, or you can drop down to full HD
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and you can have 120 hertz. So you're gonna see what's going to happen here. Yeah, high refresh rate isn't supported
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in WQHD plus. Frankly, it's been years since my eyes
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have been good enough to notice the difference between the two anyway. So I know the first thing that I'd be doing
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is adjusting to 120 hertz and sticking with 10 ABP. Now, one thing that's curious about this phone
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is that Samsung is not giving users the ability
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to run at a variable refresh rate. So that is to say it will drop down to 60 hertz
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to save battery sometimes, and then jump up to 120 when the user will benefit from it.
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Some other manufacturers have done that, but Samsung seems to be of the mind
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that the 10% hidden battery life is worth it to just have this responsiveness all the time
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and personally, I guess I could kinda get behind that.
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Like, even though we're filming this video at 24 frames per second, I'm sure you guys can notice
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what I'm seeing here. This is absolutely freaking nuts.
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What's remarkable though, is not just the smoothness, but also the low pixel persistence
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like you can read the text as it's scrolling by. One of the reasons, allegedly, that Samsung didn't release
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one of their own phones with a high refresh rate display up until now, was that they weren't happy
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with the color reproduction on them. So that's why you've only seen them on third-party devices
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from the likes of OnePlus and ASUS.
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That's pretty though, there's nothing to my eye that looks off about this.
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It's a fine HDR experience. You can really see the highlights of the reflections
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on the leaves and things like that, that flash of the sun behind him.
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Great. You know, what's curious, even with all the power in this thing,
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it barely got warm during initial setup like I'm accustomed to, actually I realized we haven't
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even talked specs yet. So if you're in the US which apparently also includes Canada,
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except when it comes to sampling review units, you get an 865.
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So that's the top of the line. If you're elsewhere, you get an Exynos 990,
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it's got 12 gigs of RAM and the 128 gig version, 16 gigs of RAM and the 256 gig version.
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It's got a 5,000 milliamp power battery and upgraded Gorilla Glass 6,
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which apparently has the same scratch resistance as before,
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but with better impact resistance so you should be able to drop your phone more often
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and from higher. Of course, though, the big headline feature
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is the quadruple camera setup. So you've got your 108 megapixel F 1.8
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with optical image stabilization. That's the main shooter on this thing
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that's been making headlines, you've got the 40 megapixel F 3.5 telephoto.
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So that one uses this extra space over here to add a 10 X hybrid optical zoom.
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It also has optical image stabilization and then you've got the F 2.2 12 megapixel ultra-wide camera
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for fitting all of your friends in your photos. For people who have lots of friends.
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I wouldn't know. I don't. Finally, there's a 0.2 megapixel time of flight cameras.
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One of these down here, I think it's that one a little flash and all that good stuff.
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So that's for 3D depth sensing. So it'll show you the broader context
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of what you're looking at and then the little square indicates
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what you've actually got in the frame of the image you're capturing.
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Let's start with our one X image, there's a little bit more purple in this wall
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than there is in person but overall, I would say that is darn impressive.
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Like you can read a lot of detail on things like, you know, here.
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Like I can clearly read this label at least as well as I can in person.
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This dark area over here, you can see it captured a ton of detail over there.
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At least what I can see to the eye. Really nice looking and then let's zoom
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in on our little house here. Now, one of my criticisms of phone cameras
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that have alternate lenses or optical zooms in the past is that a lot of the time I have noticed
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that you don't actually get much of a benefit over just zooming in the main shooter,
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which is typically the best quality one. Now, one that did a better job of this
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was one of Walway's recent phones, where I was like, oh yeah, there is a market improvement here.
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But let's go ahead and make our way through. So this is our 2x image.
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I would say that there is maybe, a slight improvement there
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and not much, here's our 4x image.
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That, looks way better than our zoom in,
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definitely, a 100%. Okay, here's our 10x
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that also does not look noticeably better than this one to me.
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In fact, I would go as far as to say that actually looks more processed and worse.
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Now let's go all the way to 100x. I don't think that's any better than just zooming this in.
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I mean, it makes four an impressive spec, but like that's clearly worse.
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I'm actually more impressed by the 12 megapixel ultra wide.
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So that's a perfectly usable image for a 12 megapixel camera,
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but that's not really what I'm looking at. I'm more interested in how straight the C-stand pools
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are at the edge. You can see they've had the process them a little bit.
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They're not perfectly straight you can really see it on this one right here, but that is not bad.
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The weight? Oh, wow. So now that's really impressive.
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Yeah, it is actually slightly. It is slightly curved and this table here along the bottom
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looks completely straight. That's really hard to do with something so close
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to a fish eyes capture mode. I'm really happy with that.
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You know what's interesting is you can really, you can actually see it making the corrections in real time.
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So when you're moving it around, you see something more akin to what the lens sees
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with all the distortions but then when you hold it still,
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it's kinda like, ah, hold on, go stretch this out a little bit. Yeah, got no problem. Got this, got this bro.
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So that iPhone looks the same size
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in the center of the frame or at the edge of the frame.
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Once they've made their corrections. Now, I wanna address the big one,
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the 8K video recording feature.
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So this is the part of the video where Brandon, I actually hand you the phone
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and you pick up one of our 8K cinema cameras from RED
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and record me talking about something else in 8K
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on the S20 Ultra. Can you do that for me please? All right. Thank you, sir.
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Here's the thing, guys, when you add more pixels to an image,
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what you're doing is you're increasing the data rate. So you're increasing how many samples you're taking
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and how many pixels that you are encoding into the finished file.
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But what you are not necessarily doing is capturing more definition,
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like harder edges between objects in the frame,
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because you are inherently going to be limited by the quality of your sensor,
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not just the number of receptor sites that are on it.
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No Bixby, we don't wanna talk to you, by the way, massive kudos to Samsung removing
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the Bixby button about time, thank you. You know, I'm gonna use this opportunity
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to provide some followup notes on the Galaxy Folds. I still absolutely love the giant screen,
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but something I didn't do with it much during my review was use it outdoors.
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I didn't even realize that its peak brightness is only around 350 to 400 nits.
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So how's that 8K recording quality Brandon, what do you think?
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- It doesn't look that great. - Of course, it doesn't look that great it's a phone camera. I don't know why we keep going on with this silliness.
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I have no problem with adding recording modes that give you more frames per second,
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because then you're actually capturing more information
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that might be useful if you're trying to like do a back flip or whatever.
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But pumping up the resolution in these devices
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that have bottlenecks elsewhere is kind of like upgrading your graphics card
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when you're running a Celeron CPU from eight years ago,
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it just serves no purpose and all we're doing is creating larger file sizes
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so that people need to buy a phone with a greater storage capacity
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with no appreciable benefit that we couldn't achieve by just having, better encoded 4K, for example.
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Focus the effort somewhere else. Overall, I like this thing so far,
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and I think I'm gonna try and daily drive it for a couple of weeks. So you guys can expect a full review
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over on the Linus tech tips channel. Oh! Right, and one more thing before we do that though
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cause I never cover this stuff over on LTT is going through the accessory.
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Here's a Korean standard charger, a cable (blabbering).
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Samsung earphones.
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Here's the top of the box. Not empty (box rattling)
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(box thudding) An included the case.
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Oh wait, we're not gonna use that, by the way massive shout out to Deebrand
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for sending us over this S20 ultra because I'm on Samsung's bad list apparently.
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So they also have their grip available for the S20 Ultra, which you can also get with their cool Zack edition skin
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that shows the internals of the phone. It's available on glossy or, actually my preference is definitely the matte one.
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This one looks nicer in my opinion, but I'm not gonna show it to you
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because you're gonna have to go over on Deebrand's website and check it out there (chuckles).