Review: Samsung’s AI-focused Galaxy S24 Ultra is the best Android phone around but has a flaw

After 10 days testing Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, it’s pretty clear that this is the best, most powerful flagship Android phone you can buy. It costs more (from €1,469) than almost any other Android, but it can’t really be beaten.

Its physical design is improved, its screen is substantially improved, its battery is excellent and its camera system is, once again, top of the line in the Android world.

But its extra appeal may be in the slew of new AI features which, while shared with the less expensive S24 and S24 Plus models, make it one of the most compelling software experiences on any recently-launched phone.

The one that most people will use quickly is ‘circle to search’. On any screen on your phone — a photo, a web page you’re on, or whatever — just long press the home button and it will invite you to ‘circle’ (with your finger or the S Pen) whatever you want on the screen. Once you do that, it will instantly call up results via a reverse Google image search.

In general, I have found that it works very well for most things, from landmarks to celebrities to animals to food. For example, it recognised most photos of city-centre buildings in Dublin I threw at it. I also found that, when watching a movie, I could quickly snap a photo of the actor and then look them up quicker than it would take to google ‘[film]’ cast and then click on the right one.

It can also be potentially useful for those who scroll a lot of Instagram or TikTok, as it will throw up things like recipes for circle-searches you do around bits of food, or clothes-shopping sources for garments you circle.

To be clear, this isn’t a Samsung-exclusive feature — it’s rolling out on Google’s Pixel 8 range right now and I’d expect to see it on more Android phones over time. But the S24 models are the first to get it.

What is a Samsung exclusive AI feature is instant translation within telephone calls. This translates your voice or text into another language instantaneously and vice versa, once you’re using the native Samsung calling or texting app. It’s something of a wow feature on paper but, while it does work, it’s more than a little rough. For a start, it’s not quite instantaneous, taking a second or two sometimes to get the translation sorted.

But the main challenge in this early implementation is accuracy. When I spoke into it to ‘translate’ my remarks into German, it completely mistook what I was saying more than a bit of the time. (It gives you a written transcript of your utterances, as well as speaking the translated language for the person on the other end of the line, so I could see that it quite often mangled what I was saying.)

I’m not sure it’s my Irish accent, as transcription services such as Otter understand me just fine – I think it’s just a slightly weaker voice recognition engine that Samsung is using. Hopefully, it will get better as right now I don’t think I could depend on it, especially for any kind of important call.

Other fairly impressive uses of AI on the phone include the ability to make summaries and bullet points out of notes and some fairly advanced photo-editing tricks (see below).

In fact, there’s a whole list of new AI things that Samsung has in a new menu called ‘Advanced Intelligence’.

One thing to remember about these Galaxy AI features is that they’re not exclusive to the S24 Ultra — they’re available to all of the S24 range. That’s a good thing for creating the widest-possible audience for Samsung’s latest AI interface tools. But it also means that the actual differentiator of an S24 Ultra over, say a cheaper S24 or S24 Plus, remains the hardware and cameras.

I’ll start with the cameras which are still, in my opinion, the clearest hardware difference between the S24 Ultra and the standard S24 models.

And they’re truly excellent here.

Samsung has changed the order of things around a little from last year. It has swapped of the four optical lenses — the top 10x optical lens — for a 5x optical lens.

That means you now have a separate 0.6x, 1x, 3x and 5x lens (zoomable up to 100x digital), instead of last year’s 0.6x, 1x, 3x and 10x lenses.

Samsung appears to have done this to improve the quality of the zoom shots between 5x and 10x which, last year, were stretched digital shots from the 3x lens; now they’re clearer, less stretched images from the 5x optical lens.

Of course, the price to be paid for this might be in the longer end of the zoom photos and videos. If you want to take a shot or video at 20x zoom, for example, you’re now digitally stretching the 5x lens four times instead of the 10x lens two times.

Samsung has tried to compensate by making the resolution of the new 50-megapixel 5x lens a lot higher than last year’s 10x lens, meaning that you can digitally crop in further and still see similar resolution because of the greater number of megapixels. I no longer have an S23 Ultra to directly compare the two phones’ zooms, but I recently posted examples of some 100x photos I took from the S24 Ultra lens and they’re not, to my eye, any worse looking than photos I posted last year when testing the S23 Ultra.

Basically, Samsung thinks that when you’re using the zoom, you’re more likely to want shots and videos under 10x than over 10x and has rearranged the lenses to maximise the quality in that regard. I think that this is, overall, the right estimate and it’s a good thing that they did it.

(One extra bonus is that the 5x optical lens takes relatively nice, mid-zoom portrait shots of people, something that wasn’t possible on last year’s S23 Ultra.)

Other smaller, but still noteworthy, upgrades include faster shutter speeds (an issue with Samsung phones compared to iPhones), 4K video at 120 frames-per-second (fps) in ‘Pro’ mode and the ability to zoom between lenses while recording at 4K 60fps (which you can’t do on the S23 Ultra).

But AI is also an important feature in the updated cameras system. The S24 Ultra can photoshop photos in quite a convincing way, moving objects (or people) within photos or removing them altogether. If you delete something from a photo, the camera’s AI tech then ‘fills in’ the gap left with what it thinks looks like continuity from the rest of the photo. For the most part, it works pretty well; sometimes if you look closely, you can see a slight fuzziness in the replacement background where the removed object or person was.

Google was the first to introduce this feature on its Pixel phones two years ago, but it works nicely here too.

If you’re into videography, there’s quite an impressive AI feature that lets you create slow-motion videos out of any video you’ve already taken, by just long-pressing on the video. What the phone does is to ‘create’ new frames that look seamless to the ones you’ve shot, stitching them in between the video frames you’ve actually shot. The effect is, artificially, more frames in your video which allows it to do a ‘slow motion’ version of it.

From a physical design perspective, there are some tiny physical differences between last year’s S23 Ultra and the S24 Ultra. The new model is slightly wider and very slightly thinner than its predecessor; it also now has tougher, light titanium as frame instead of aluminium and the glass is completely flat (an improvement over the slightly curved aesthetic of last year and most previous high-end Samsung flagships).

That glass is a little tougher than last year’s version and is also a bit less reflective on a sunny day or with a bright light overhead.

The overall feel of the handset is still a little too angular in the corners for my pocket threading’s liking, but it still feels to me like a design upgrade.

Just as it has been every year, the Ultra’s main physical distinction over any other flagship phone is still the built-in S Pen stylus, which is nice and responsive and clicks nicely back into place inside the lower left corner of the phone.

Other than the difference in glass quality, the display technology is worth talking about on its own merits as it’s probably one of the phone’s biggest technical upgrades. Its peak brightness capability (again, think about using it on a sunny day) is way, way brighter than last year’s S23 Ultra — 2,600 nits compared to 1,750 nits. That’s a genuinely serious upgrade that anyone using this daily will really, really appreciate.

As for engine-power, the under-the-hood upgrades here should leave even the most demanding mobile user fairly happy. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, slightly modified for this phone, is now benchmarked as the most powerful phone chip you can get (slightly surpassing Apple’s A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro). This, allied with a bump from 8GB to 12GB of Ram, creates an absolute beast that can’t really be topped by any mainstream rival.

Aware of the gaming opportunities this presents, Samsung has almost doubled the size of ‘vapour chamber’ (compared to the S23 Ultra), meaning longer playing time without needing a break to let things cool down.

The extra graphics firepower can also be seen with the addition of ‘ray tracing’ – which is used for more lifelike lighting effects like shadows and reflections – in the phone’s arsenal.

The S24 Ultra’s battery life is very, very good — noticeably better than last year’s S23 Ultra, which was already absolutely adequate. I could usually get a day-and-a-half out of a single charge with normal usage, putting it within range of the iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 15 Pro Max, the current phone battery kings.

Finally, the S24 Ultra gives seven full years of Android updates, which is considerably more than anyone else in the Android world and which means that this phone should, if you take care of it, be fully usable for several years.

Overall, this is — again — the reference phone for Android. It doesn’t really get any more comprehensive or high-performing than this S24 Ultra.

You can see where Samsung — and most phone makers — are now going; the phones are to become way smarter and faster at letting you do everyday stuff.

The S24 Ultra comes in a choice of four colours – Titanium Grey, Titanium Black, Titanium Yellow or Titanium Violet. It starts at €1,469 for 256GB and – at the time of writing – costs €1,589 for the 1TB variant.

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