let me say this straight. This is the best Galaxy Note yet, but just like the newly released Fold 6, the difference this year is not too much. Even though it's still one of the best phones you can buy today, should you still buy it? I've used this phone for more than 3 months, so let's [Music] talk. Good morning, everyone. Kenneth here, and welcome to my long-term review of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. Now, this phone when it just released earlier this year didn't attract my attention at all because the supposedly highlighted feature, as you all know, Galaxy AI, has since been rolled out to S23 series, even S22 series. So, gone is one of the three main reasons why Samsung told you to buy the phones this year, and honestly, it's even more the case when these features are only free until the end of 2025. We're going to go in depth about everything soon, but please know that you're getting my own honest opinion here always. And if you appreciate that, do help me support the

channel by buying through the affiliate link in the description. Thank you so much. And with that said, let's get through the unboxing, which is going to be very quick because there is not much going on. In the name of sustainability, we got the phone itself, a USB-C Toc cable, and that's pretty much it. As usual, my charger recommendation is going to be the 65W anchor charger. They fully utilize Samsung's 45W charging, and you can still charge another phone at 20WS, or you can charge your laptop as well. Links down below if you want to check it out. It's a pretty safe charger. Let's quickly move on to build quality, and specifically with the S24 Ultra, we got titanium here. But unlike the latest iPhones, this weighs the same as the S23 Ultra because previously Samsung uses aluminum, which is already lightweight, not like the stainless steel they use here. And out of switch just makes it stronger without adding more weight, basically. Now the new brush finish here

is slightly more grippy too for those especially with sweaty hands. And it also feels new, and thus more premium. But let's be honest, most people will slap a case on to protect this 1,300 bucks phone, right? So let's talk about the next big upgrade, which is the glasses that sandwich the phone. Starting from the back glass, this is a matte Gorilla Glass Victus 2. But the front glass, man, this thing is called the Gorilla Glass Armor. And not only it's even stronger against dropping scratches, but the anti-reflective design means that unlike any other phone in the market, it's a much nicer screen to look and use. It literally makes every other phone look like a reflective mess. You can even see it here. I'm very torn about this because this is truly amazing, but most people won't notice it because to protect their hard-earned money and resale value, everyone's going to slap on whatever screen protector the first minute they get the phone. And what will happen? This will go back to the usual reflectivity.

of any other screen protector. I know I would do that because this phone is my father's. I showed him the clear difference, and he still asked me to buy a screen protector. There's actually one way around this. Samsung is selling an anti-reflecting screen protector, which is super expensive at 30 bucks for a plastic screen protector, but as shown in Mark St video here, the entire reflection is actually quite close to the gorilla glass armor. So yeah, it's there if you want it. Link in the description as well. Another very important change they made this time around is actually making the screen flat and square. This makes it infinitely easier to install tempered glass. You don't have to bother with liquid glues and UV lights or deal with squishy hydrogel as an alternative. I think this is the single biggest upgrade in the S24 Ultra. But yeah, specs-wise, the screen resolution is still at 1440p. It's very sharp. It's slightly brighter too, at almost 1500 nits, which is around 200

nits more than the previous s23 Ultra, and that's typical numbers because for HDR effect and movies, it can go up to 2500 nits. And obviously the size of the screen, 6.8 in, and it's perfectly Square. You know, in this day and age, it's very hard to find something with just really sharp Corners. This screen is so big and nice, it's really the best screen that any mobile phone could offer. But one thing that got me curious, the screen is ltpo, and theoretically it can go anywhere from 1 HZ all the way up to 120 HZ. And we've seen phones like Xiaomi 14 only Rams up at top speed when you scroll fast, that way you save more battery, but instead we got more basic preset frame rates instead like 24, 30, 48, 60, and 120. This fortunately Works according to what content is playing, so if you play video at 24p, it refreshes at 24p, it really matches the content, but it only goes as low as 24 FPS with the

always on display, so I imagine that the battery could be better if they refresh at 1 Herz. Instead, I know this is really technical stuff, but what's important here is I find negligible difference between this and the Adaptive refresh rate system of Xiaomi. 14 battery life also lasts up to 2 days with social media use, but closer to 1 day if you game. There was a period around May to June update where the battery life really tanked, but it's been fixed now, and I got like almost more than 7 hours screen on time and literally days worth of screen off time. Charging at 45 WS is a little bit slow, you get only 20% in 10 minutes, but normally I charge from 20% to 80% with just a bit more than 30 minutes, so it's still reasonable. And on a plus side, it's USB PD, so you can use any third-party charger or power bank, and it will work at full speed. Just have to make sure that the fast charging is super fast charging 2.0. The best part is

this phone does not get hot during charging, always below 40°, which is something not really mentioned in Faster charging Solutions. Especially xiaomi, they could get upwards of 45°. Heat is the single biggest enemy of battery, so cooler temperatures is always better for battery health down the line. Now let's talk performance. We've seen how a gen 3 brings better battery life because of their more efficient smaller course. Now we're going to focus on the performance course, which is going to shred through daily tasks. From my experience with xiaomi 14, but something is a bit odd here. The s24 ultra only manages just shy of 1.8 million, and that's the same with the posted online results. Looking deeper, it seems like the GPU is not clocked as high, scoring a good 100,000 less. We'll see how this translates to real Gaming use in a minute. And on gig bench 6, it's got more than 2,200 on single core and almost 6700 on multicore. This is quite

significantly faster than Xiaomi 14. So maybe Samsung opted for higher CPU clock speed, but toned down on the GPU side. Now with great power comes great responsibility, and especially with the S24 Ultra, the power comes into use because firstly, it can do local processing for Galaxy AI features. We're going to talk about it later, but secondly, Samsung Dex. This is a feature that when it launched almost 7 years ago, it required an external dock, and when I tried it on the Note 20 Ultra, the phone would get very hot, the interface is very laggy. This time around though, call me impressed. I discovered this when I wanted to screen share to my TV, but instead of mirroring the phone UI, I was greeted with a full-on PC interface. Ideally, you should use a mouse and keyboard, but I use the phone screen as a trackpad, and it really works. Simple things like opening PDFs on a big screen while listening to YouTube music and browsing a few tabs, and then you're free to use the phone for chats and online.

meetings. That's just a GameChanger. Yes, the phone does heat up to around 40°, which is warm, but it's still very usable. And obviously, a crazy thought came to mind. I tried grinding honai starl on top of the other stuff that I'm doing. But for playing heavier games like COD Warzone or wearing waves with the controller, you'll definitely need an active cooling system for it to run smoothly. Now, Dex for me personally is a very nice-to-have feature. One of the things that makes a flagship flagship. And the same thing goes for a lot of aspects of the OS. For example, the auto-brightness. When you go to a dark room, it goes dark, but you can still go darker if you manually slide all the way to the left. And that's without touching the extra dim option, which is there if you want the screen to be even darker. Also, the OS in general is very responsive, which includes the pop-up window. This is the phone that made me pop up honai starl. Just let it auto.

fight and I'll do browsing or watch anime like going back to the game resizing the game opening app side by side is the most fluid here compared to any other phone I've tried. Sadly, I can't show honai in action here because the game simply crashes on me now, which stresses me out so much because it's only happening on this phone and not on any of my other phones. But of course, let's touch about gaming performance here, and starting with honai star rail, at least when it used to run. I remember how this phone is not as effortless as the xiaomi 14 at the same maxed out setting highest 60 FPS, so much so that I checked my own xiaomi 14 review video again, and yes, it's still around 50 to 60 FPS, but it felt more choppy. It drops frames a little bit more often, but I want to show you something that you can see for yourself, which is Call of Duty war zone, and this game is very interesting because we are getting the

ultimate Peak graphic settings here which was not in xiaomi. Maybe back then, it wasn't available. Playing in this setting with high frame rate is not a very wise thing to do. The game never touches 60 FPS, only Peaks at 50. When you're F, the view is really narrow, but mostly you play around 40 to 45 FPS with rare dips into the 30. And if you look at the GPU usage graph, there we're utilizing all the power that we got. Now I love games that push phones to the limits, and after around 7 Minutes of gameplay, we're about 40° top and 33° bottom. Actually, I start to see a pattern here where the phone limits itself to 40° on the outside. But let's check out wering waves, which is frankly not very optimized yet because it's a very new game, and I've tested a few couple settings for you to check here. First is the maxed out setting Advanced 6 FPS. Well, the game just didn't run like 60 FPS. Again, this game doesn't pin the

GPU at a constant 100% at all times like Call of Duty, but it does feel very choppy, especially when fighting with tons of skill effects. And then you suddenly flick the view to the side, you'll notice the jitters. You can even see from the graph that 40 FPS is a luxury here. You'll average around 30-35 FPS when fighting. And I tried lowering down the setting to medium, 60 FPS. I mean, at this point, we should be able to reach that, right? Well, nope. Farming Echo around Sea of Flame still gives around 30-40 FPS, very rarely going above 50. And even if you get it, it'll drop down again to below 40 FPS, which is very frustrating. Adjusting the setting back to advance, 45 FPS. We're trying to find the perfect setting here, right? Doesn't really help because the game rarely touches 40 FPS anyway. You really either play the game at low 60 FPS or stick to 30 FPS, which is more feasible on the S24 Ultra. But

yeah, after 15 minutes of playing the game, you know what's interesting? The upper part of the phone is still at 40°. The lower part is 33°, which means that the phone really puts a hard limit on the temperature here. And if you can see on the screen, the chip temperature maxes out at 44°, then it throttles, the cool down to 43, and it goes back normal to 44. The cycle keeps on going. And keep in mind that I started playing Waring waves immediately after CAU Warfare. So the phone is already at its hottest point. And you can see the prolonged performance of the phone here. Now, I completely understand that this is not a gaming phone. And thus, why the heart temperature limit actually is beneficial for most people. Because it's still quite comfortable to use. This thing is very cool relative to the much more aggressive Poco Xiaomi, which can get up to 43°. And you know what? The craziest phone that I've tested has reached

almost like 49° back in the days, which was really really insane by the way. If the video has been helpful so far, do hit a thumbs up and let me know what other phones you want me to review next. Subscribe to not miss them. But now enough of the good stuff and let's nitpick on one UI a little bit, especially in the notification center when it's full of stuff like this. I think it's common sense that if you pull down naturally, you would swipe up to close it, right? Now it's actually closing. What? Well anyway, during my months of using this, this really triggers my Ang, you know, because the way to consistently close the notification is to pull from the sides with a back gesture. And one more example is how do you open the apps drawer? Swipe up to open. Swipe down to close, right? Well, yes, but you can also swipe up to close it. To be fair with Samsung, this is much less annoying than a notification I just mentioned, but the concept that it is possible at all is confusing. I don't recall any Android

phone doing this and and I genuinely want to ask you here have you ever find this annoying look at that I swiped up and it didn't close but yeah touching on Galaxy AI features now this is basically Google's AI model licensed to Samsung and they integrated to different parts of the OS. One thing for sure is for those traveling and making phone calls abroad, the live call translation feature will come in clutch. Same thing with interpreter, which you can access quickly from the control center. The phone can also create summaries for your voice notes, which is very handy if you do interviews or recording lectures. You can also get a summary for web pages, although this requires you to use Samsung Internet app. And finally, for most people, the feature you're going to play around with the most is generative picture editing. This last feature requires you to turn off on-device processing and use cloud processing instead, and the result is, well, pretty darn cool when it works. And this portrait in a playground, it removed the person behind me pretty darn well. You can also move people around and

in the latest fold six even add things by drawing on the screen, but keep in mind that for more complicated shots, it may fail to perform. So always try to shoot the best picture that you can. And this AI generative picture is more like your backup plan, which brings us to the cameras again. Compared to the S23 Ultra, the system is much the same from the 200-megapixel main shooter, the 3x zoom, and the ultra-wide. The only thing different now is, instead of a periscope lens that takes a lot of space, we've got a 50-megapixel 5x lens now, which is similar in design to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but this one can be cropped to get 10x Zoom with sharpness similar to a native 10x. As you can see from the sample shots here, hands down, the zoom range options you got is really impressive. You have the flexibility of doing whatever the heck you want, from taking portraits with longer Zoom to get more background separation, so simply zooming 20x, 30X to

see what is going on on the other side of the mountain, or check out this grasshopper shot that still looks amazing at around 30X Zoom, although 100x is still just for fun only at this point. Colors wise, I love that the cameras are not as saturated as Samsung used to be in the past, and most importantly, the lens here does not have annoying lens flares when you shoot bright light sources like concerts, for example. And I actually brought this to shoot one, though I was a bit to the back, so I needed to zoom in more, and sharpening process makes pictures look well unacceptable. Videos Fair much better though, although personally I would still record the big screen instead. In the past months, I definitely relied on this phone to create contents. They look absolutely great, from the depth of field to the natural skin tones and the overall color rendering. Like, check out the blue skies, the white clouds, and the green plants. They absolutely look super nice. The color is consistent across the lenses as well, which includes the front.

front camera, as well. Something that a lot of Chinese phones suffer, although still in terms of dynamic range, the main shooter is always going to be the best performer. But as far as video is concerned, ever since the Note 20 Ultra days, really, the phone is more than capable for content creation. And with the S24 Ultra, it's even better because this is one of the few Android phones that is supported by Blackmagic camera, which is my Apple choice now. When recording B-rolls, let's check out the videos. Les now, and we'll conclude the video after. Okay, welcome everyone to the camera test, and we are now recording with the front-facing camera, stock camera app, and this is the video stabilization that you can expect. It's very bright at the moment, but I don't see like any overexposure or things like that. And check this out, this autofocus thing, it's pretty blurry, that's pretty cool. Okay, so we are recording with the back camera. I'm stretching as far as I can right now.

what do you think of the video quality? Is it much much better compared to the front camera, which is already pretty freaking good? And one of the things why I recommend using apps like Blackmagic camera, because you can shoot in 24p. Because this Stock app doesn't let you record at that frame rate. So yeah, that's pretty much it for the camera sample. Let's go back to the video right now. All right, I know this video is going to be extremely long, so I decided to skip the speaker test, because it's just obviously good, although it still doesn't pump as much base as a pro Max iPhone. But honestly, it gets the job done. And of course, Samsung being Samsung, you don't have aptX adaptive codec support, although that hardly matters in a grand scheme of things, because we're finally getting Le audio support. Finally, Oracast is here as well, but that's another topic for another day. And that's pretty much it for my S24 Ultra review. I hope it helps you answer your questions.

honestly, the prices have gone down at this point in time, and the difference between S23 Ultra and S24 Ultra is just a little bit. I'll wholeheartedly recommend this newer one for the screen alone, but it's got much more than that. So yeah, comment if you're getting one or if you have more questions. Let me know in the comments below. I'll try to answer them. And again, don't forget to buy through the affiliate links below. It really helps me out. And thank you so much for watching. I'm Kenneth, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is Confusing… (3 Months Review)

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is Confusing… (3 Months Review)