Less than a week after the big Samsung Unpacked event, I just took the South Korean autumn flagship out of the box, on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G. We have it in the shade Mystic Bronze and on this occasion you will find out what is in the box. I remind you that we are dealing with a S-Pen phone with lower latency, triple camera with periscope and large 6.9 inch screen with 120 Hz refresh rate.
You got your first impressions from the hands on material a week ago, and now we're filling our impressions with new ones. The phone costs from 6,299 lei and up and if you pre-order it until August 20, you can receive a pair of Galaxy Buds Live headphones as a gift.
Available in Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black and Mystic White, the terminal features Gorilla Glass Victus protection, available both on the back and front. Between them is a solid stainless steel frame. The body of the phone is IP68 certified, and the rear camera is protruding and gently lifts the phone onto a flat surface. However, it is a smaller protuberance than the S20 Ultra. In the box we find the following:
We should have had a special pliers for removing the tip of the S-Pen and spare tips, but we probably have a test unit without that. Commercial accessories will also have these accessories. Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a generous 6.9-inch screen with a resolution of 3088 x 1440 pixels. It is a Dynamic AMOLED, which comes from the factory set to an adjustable refresh rate of 120 Hz and Full HD + resolution. If you want Quad HD + you have to switch to 60 Hz.
I can already tell you that it's about as bright as the Galaxy S20. Curiously, it seems more maneuverable than the Note 10+, being more angular than the S20 Ultra, not being so massive. It measures 8.1 mm at the waist and weighs 208 grams, but the weight is excellently distributed. I held him in the strangest positions when I took pictures of him and I never felt too heavy or uncomfortable. It's also very sticky and I like the look of the Mystic Bronze shade on the matte back.
Inside is the same Exynos 990 processor on the S20, while the Americans and Chinese received the Snapdragon 865+ version. Here I was asked on YouTube at the unboxing of the Note 20 Ultra if the phone heats up when taking pictures. Unfortunately, the answer is "YES", although it's true that I took about 300 photos at a time with 35+ degrees Celsius, but of course the temperature was high from the first 20 frames. We also have 12 GB LPDDR5 RAM, UFS 3.1 storage from 128 to 512 GB and a microSD slot.
The battery is smaller in capacity than we expected, after seeing a 5000 mAh one on the S20 Ultra. Here we have a 4500 mAh unit, it's like a leap from the Note 10+, which had a 4300 mAh battery. We also have a charge of only 25W, where the S20 Ultra offered power at 45W and curiously it's a downgrade, because the Note 10+ also had power at 45W. However, Samsung has probably noticed people's complaints about battery wear, we can at least assume.
We also have wireless charging and reverse charging. Arriving at the cameras, in front is about the same story from S10 onwards: 10 MP camera with 4K filming at 60 FPS. It is now cut into a center hole in the screen, following the Note 10 model. We have the following setup in the back:
As a novelty we have 8K filming in 21: 9 cinema format, but also Omnidirectional audio capture from the Pro Video area. We can choose to use rear or front microphones, a microphone connected via USB or via Bluetooth (even a pair of Galaxy Buds Live headphones, why not?). Single Take can now capture up to 15 seconds and has new capture types, including hyperlapse. After playing with the camera for a while, I can say that it has a much more stable zoom than the S20 Ultra, even at an advanced level. He seems to be doing even better in the foreground, but there are still imperfections to be solved.
Otherwise, we have 5G, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC, USB-C 3.2, but also the new UWB, for a faster connection between two nearby Samsung terminals. We also have DeX Wireless, which means mirroring wireless TV for your phone. The ultrasonic fingerprint reader on the screen is clearly faster than on the S20, and as an OS we get Android 10 with One UI 2.5 over.
The S-Pen has much lower latency than its predecessors (9 ms compared to 48 ms) and is also lower than the 26 ms in the Note 20. It also has 5 new control gestures: Back, Recents, Home, Screen Write , Smart Select. It all involves holding down the stylus button and making gestures with it in the air, as if more intuitive than we saw on Note 9 and Note 10. The total number of gestures has reached 11 now. Otherwise we can take notes on PDFs, save as PowerPoint, correct crooked text and integrate audio notes into written notes, as a kind of bookmark.
Unboxing photo gallery Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G
Gamers will enjoy Xbox games on this phone via Game Pass and Microsoft's xCloud. Also with Microsoft, a collaboration was made with allows a better synchronization of the phone with the PC. If you are connected to your Microsoft account on your PC and this phone, you will not need to pick up your phone from the table, you will have all the necessary notifications, news, data on your PC.
I still find it a more sober, angular, more serious phone with nuance and flat areas (angular camera, flat up and down) and I see it designed for business people and journalists who will record audio in the field and people who even connect phone microphone for an interview. We come back with a review!
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, updated prices: