Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Review

Where to buy

Samsung's position in the global phone sales market has long been anchored by its high-cost premium smartphone ranges; early in a given year we'll see premium Galaxy S phones and later in that same year Note-branded equivalents with a few tweaks. Samsung's slightly upset that equation recently with the inclusion of foldable phones such as the Galaxy Fold and Galaxy Z Flip, but that's serving a slightly different market so far.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra is 2020's early year flagship phone with a price point to match. It brings some exceptional camera quality, a very fast Exynos processor (on the model tested) and the largest battery Samsung has dared to put into a phone to date.

Still, that price point weighed heavily on me going into this review. What amounts to essentially two grand or more for a phone is a big ask in an era where so many mid-range phones provide very good performance. Can Samsung really justify the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's asking price?

The answer will depend on what you want out of a phone, of course, but in the main Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra hits most of the sweet spots you'd want out of a flagship device. The display is huge but it's one of the best I've ever used, the battery life is a leap ahead of last year's disappointing S10 phones and performance is up there with the industry's best.

However, Samsung's claim that it has the best camera hardware on any phone doesn't quite stack up in real-world testing. It's an issue that may get better with software tweaks and it's easily Samsung's best camera to date, but not everything it touches turns to photographic gold.

Design

Design

• Enormous 120Hz display
• Huge camera bump
• Only two colour styles

• Read our full review of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's design

  I've been reviewing phones long enough I can still recall the very first Samsung Galaxy Note phone. In its time it was viewed as a "huge" phone with its 5.3-inch display.

  If that's huge, I'm not sure that the English language has a term to describe the 6.9-inch display on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. I'd figured I'd topped out on screen sizes with phones like the Asus Rog Phone II or even Apple's own admittedly large iPhone 11 Pro Max, but the Galaxy S20 Ultra dwarfs them all.

  Picking the Galaxy S20 Ultra up involves grabbing a phone that measures some 166.9mm x 76mm x 8.8mm with a weight of 220 grams. That's both big and heavy, and unless you happen to actually be Andre The Giant – and let's face it, you're not – you're going to be using the Galaxy S20 Ultra in a two-handed way most of the time.

  The design style is a slight refinement of that found in the Samsung Galaxy Note10, with a centrally mounted holepunch-style camera in the top middle part of the screen. It's ever so slightly smaller than the holepunch camera on the Note10, but you do have to hold them side by side to even notice that.

  The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra features a 6.9-inch 1,440 x 3,200 pixel Super AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. That can have a profound effect on the visual display clarity, although by default Samsung leaves it at a lower 60Hz rate to preserve battery life.

  Either way, Samsung's quality in display technology shines through on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. While technically the smaller Galaxy S20+ and Galaxy S20 have a higher PPI rating thanks to smaller screens with the same resolution, you'd have to peer close with a microscope to notice the difference.

  The one catch with throwing the Galaxy S20 Ultra into 120Hz mode, besides the hit on battery life, is that it only works by putting the entire display into 1,080p resolution, on a screen that can manage 1,440p if you're happy staying at 60Hz.

  It's around the back where the biggest design change in recent years from Samsung phones is present, in the form of a very prominent rectangular camera bump. It's more like a camera mountain really and while I appreciate that Samsung is packing a lot of camera technology into the Galaxy S20 Ultra, I do wish it had opted for a slightly thicker phone overall to make the bump less prominent. Even throwing on the supplied clear plastic case only mitigates this a little and I'm constantly worried that the lenses will get scratched over time.

  The Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S20+ phones come in a variety of colours to suit all tastes, from the extravagant to the more subdued.

  The Galaxy S20 Ultra, the most pricey of the bunch, doesn't. You can get it in Cosmic Black or Cosmic Grey, and that's it. Grey is a shade nicer than Black in my view, but that might be jaded by so many years of plain black phones. If the Galaxy S20 Ultra is a hit, we may see other hues later in the year, but with the short timeframe in Samsung's release calendar, that's far from assured.

  Like last year's Samsung Galaxy Note10, you won't find a headphone jack on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Samsung's slightly lessening that sting for early buyers by bundling in its new Galaxy Buds+ headphones as a pre-order bonus, but if you have a good set of cabled headphones, you'll have to go diving for a USB-to-3.5mm adaptor.

Camera

Camera

• Space Zoom is a gimmick
• Single Take works well
• Low light results are wildly inconsistent
• Room for software improvement

• See sample photos and read our full review of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's camera

  Ask Samsung and representatives will talk endlessly about how the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's camera leads the current flagship market race by a wide margin.

  At a specification level, Samsung might just have a point. That tiny punch-hole lens at the front houses a 40MP selfie camera. That massive camera bump at the rear is home to a primary 108MP sensor, 48MP periscope-style telephoto lens that enables up to 100x "Space Zoom" photography – more on that in a second – and a 12MP ultrawide sensor. Samsung's not done yet, as there's also a Time Of Flight sensor on the rear to more accurately measure distance for AI-led photo effects.

  It's a mind-boggling recipe, but it's one that Samsung really rather needed, having let the crown of best smartphone camera slip to the likes of Huawei and Apple in recent times.

  Actually using the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra as your day-to-day camera shows just how powerful the camera hardware is, but the end results can be somewhat inconsistent. For every shot where I thought the Galaxy S20 Ultra absolutely nailed it, there was always one where it didn't quite make the grade.

  Take for example Single Take mode. I love the idea here, which is that you point the phone at an object and move around it for a few seconds. All of the rear cameras kick into gear, capturing multiple exposures and short video loops. When you're done, you're presented with a small gallery of shots and videos to choose from. If you've ever tried to get a shot of a moving subject or taken just one shot because of timing pressures only to realise that the framing wasn't just right, it could be a real life saver.

  However, as fun as it is, it's also entirely AI-led. You can't tell Single Take that you only want video, only want stills or prefer certain exposure types. You just point, shoot and wait to see what the AI thinks is "best". There's so much potential here, but allowing for preference picking around your favourite shot types could make it even better. More than once I took shots wanting a still photo only to find that the AI had selected mostly video shots.

  The primary lens can shoot at up to 108MP, but by default it uses pixel binning to combine 9 pixel sites into 1, delivering 12MP photos with theoretically better colour accuracy and low light performance.

  You can opt to shoot at 108MP, at the cost of around 20MB per photo, but I really didn't find too many situations where this delivered a genuinely better result than shooting at 12MP, especially as 108MP shots only support 3:4 ratio photos.

  The other factor that the 108MP lens and 48MP telephoto lenses support is what Samsung calls "Space Zoom". Samsung really doesn't want you to forget about Space Zoom, so much so that it's stamped on the back of the phone.

  You get the same "trees" based metaphor for lens selection, with 3 wide trees for ultrawide, 2 for standard and 1 for telephoto shots, but as soon as you change from one lens to another, you're also greeted with a range of zoom option buttons, from 0.5 (ultrawide) all the way up to 100x zoom. It's only actually optical zoom up to 5x optical, which is the default for zoom mode for a reason.

  Samsung's take on Hybrid Zoom works acceptably well up to 10x. If you're not too fussy even up to 30x can work OK. However, at 100x zoom, you're basically looking at a child's impressionist drawing of whatever you're pointing it at. A tripod is a must because your hand shudder will seriously impact your framing, which also means it's not that much use as a tourist binocular either. It's often hard not to feel a little creepy zooming in that much from a phone, too.

  Any flagship phone should be able to take a good photo in good light these days, but it's in low light that you really want to see results, and here again the Galaxy S20 Ultra was highly inconsistent. For some low light shots, I got superb results with lots of detail, minimal noise and surprising levels of colour without seeming "coloured in" as some phones tend to opt for.

  

  The Galaxy S20 Ultra handled the complex lighting and dark areas of this shot very well indeed. Image: Alex Kidman/Finder

  However, that wasn't always the case. Taking the Galaxy S20 Ultra out shooting one night with a bevy of competing flagships gave me some surprising results. Specifically, I tested with an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max, Google Pixel 4XL, Huawei P30 Pro and Samsung's most recent flagship prior to the Galaxy S20 Ultra, the Galaxy Note10.

  I took a shot of a local park at 9pm at night, taking photos across the darkened park area. The idea here isn't for a stunning shot, but instead to see how each phone handles low light situations. To give each phone its best potential shot, all phones were placed in a holder on a tripod with night modes enabled.

  Apple's iPhone 11 Pro Max didn't impress me at launch with its low light prowess, but the updates that Apple has made to its software in the meantime have improved matters markedly:

  

  Being on a tripod meant that the iPhone 11 Pro kicked into Night mode automatically, but for the Pixel 4XL, it took this to extremes, deciding to use its Astrophotography mode. Spoiler alert: It was the best shot of the lot, but that's because it took a full four minutes to capture the scene. That's cheating in a comparative sense:

  

  Huawei's impressive P30 Pro can take low light shots either with its standard SuperSensor for straight photos or its combined exposure night mode, so I gave it two tries at the subject. Here's the night mode shot:

  

  And here's the SuperSensor standard photo shot. Impressive colour, but it can't help but look a little fake, even if it has drawn out details everyone but the Pixel missed:

  

  Keeping it in the Samsung family, here's how the Galaxy Note10 fared in its own night mode:

  

  Now, up against that, the Galaxy S20 Ultra should have a lot of advantages, especially given the combined 9 pixel binning set-up for its low light modes. I was expecting good results, because my other low light shots were very good.

  I didn't get them. Here's the shot the Galaxy S20 Ultra gave me:

  

  Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S20 Ultra with a seriously good photographic engine, at least in theory, but there's need here for some fine tweaking of how it handles some shot types, especially in low light. That's not an impossible ask, it's exactly what Apple did with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which handed out photos worse than the above at launch but now shoots much better. At launch, though, Samsung's camera software team has some work to do to catch up with the impressive work its camera hardware team has already managed.

  Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• Exynos 990 runs well
• 12GB of RAM gives room for lots of apps
• Samsung OneUI is nicely configured
• 5G ready for future networks

• View test results and read our full review of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's performance

  The model of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra that Samsung provided for review – and almost certainly the model you'll most frequently find for sale in Australia – uses Samsung's own Exynos 990 platform, where international models run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 SoC. That's a very common play from Samsung for its flagship phones; the only exception we've seen in recent years was the Galaxy Fold, which Samsung only made with a Qualcomm processor on board.

  Samsung's not shy when it comes to matching up RAM with the Exynos 990 or Snaprdragon 865 either. The review model was the entry level 128GB storage variant with 12GB of RAM, but there's also a full fat 512GB version that ships with an extraordinary 16GB of RAM. Samsung does produce a 256GB storage variant as well, but we won't see that model for sale in Australia.

  At a benchmark level, the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra performs well, although it's not massively ahead of the the field in any particular way. Here's how it compares using Geekbench 4's CPU test:

  Apple still rules the roost here, although the Galaxy S20 Ultra's single core performance is the best we've seen outside of an Apple phone to date.

  And here's how it stacks up using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme test:

  Those performance figures don't boost the Galaxy S20 Ultra above the competition by much, if at all, so why throw in so much RAM?

  It's because, rather like with the cameras, Samsung's very much taking a brute force approach to the issue of app management. Giving the Galaxy S20 Ultra so much RAM gives it plenty of breathing room for multi-app environments, right up to and including being able to select specific apps to stay resident in memory.

  If you've ever had to pause a game because actual life got in the way only to discover Android had discarded your progress, you can select it to stay open for quick launching, keeping your data up to date at the cost of a little RAM usage. That's what the RAM overhead is for and it does work very well.

  The same is broadly true of Samsung's ONE UI launcher, which sits on top of Android 10. Old hands at Samsung's UI choices will find it comfortable to use, but even those who are coming to it from more stock Android approaches will find it easy enough to get to grips with.

  While the regular Samsung Galaxy S20 ships in 4G and 5G variants, the Galaxy S20 Ultra is a 5G-only device, which is fitting for a phone that costs this much. It's also the first phone to launch in Australia with dual mid-band and mmWave support for 5G. We won't see mmWave 5G in Australia until at least 2021, although Telstra has recently announced it's going to trial the relevant bands so it's ready to go as soon as possible. Given recent trends towards keeping phones for even longer periods of time, it means that buying the Galaxy S20 Ultra won't leave you behind in the 5G speed race once those networks properly emerge.

  As with all things 5G, actual network coverage will vary. I tested with a Telstra SIM in Sydney and found some pockets of 5G in my travels, but never quite enough to run a full suite of speed tests. Once again, buying 5G is an investment in future network rollouts, not something that you're likely to use every day unless you're lucky enough to live entirely under a 5G coverage cloud. I certainly don't as yet.

Battery life

Battery life

• 5,000mAh is a new high water mark for Samsung
• Battery is good for a full day's usage
• 120Hz doesn't use as much power as you might think

• View test results and read our full review of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's battery life

  The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is Samsung's biggest phone to date. Just as it does in every other aspect of this phone's build, Samsung has gone all out in terms of battery capacity. Or at least as all out as Samsung's willing to do, what with the ghost of the Note7 still lurking. It packs in a 5,000mAh battery, which is impressive in capacity terms. You can get a larger battery in a flagship phone, notably the Asus ROG Phone II for example.

  The Galaxy S20 Ultra has a lot of calls on that power, too. It's 5G-capable which can chew up the power heavily and it has a large display with multiple refresh rates. Samsung does note that using the 120Hz refresh rate can impact battery life and I was keen to see how much of an impact this would have. As a result, I ran our standard battery test across the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra in both 60Hz and 120Hz modes to see what level of impact it would have.

  While there's a cost associated with 120Hz display modes, it's not one that's terribly onerous in terms of overall power consumption. The Galaxy S20 Ultra does still continue the general trend of Samsung phones of late, with battery life that's entirely suitable for single-day usage but less likely to make it through into multiple days. It's feasible that the results could be quite different with the model running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU though. We're yet to see any Snapdragon 865 phones in Australia to get a picture of how that platform handles power usage.

  Samsung at least makes it easy to charge up the Galaxy S20 Ultra, with fast wired charging from the supplied 25W charger. You can punch that up to 45W if you're particularly impatient, but you'll have to buy Samsung's supported charger separately to enable that. It's also Qi-enabled for wireless charging. I was curious to see if the camera bump impacted the ability for wireless chargers to pick up the Galaxy S20 Ultra, but it had no issues during my tests with both flat and angular stand type wireless chargers.

Verdict

Verdict

• Big
• Powerful
• Expensive

Should you buy it?

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is a beast of a phone with a heap of potential. From its large and brilliant display to that 108MP camera sensor, from Samsung's slick OneUI to its massive 5,000mAh battery. Samsung has definitely stretched itself to pack all of that into a phone.

However, there are some catches. It's super expensive, but then that's seemingly par for the course for flagship phones these days. The camera hardware is impressive, but Samsung does need to refine the software results that pass through those lenses. At launch it doesn't feel like it's as good as Samsung seems to think it is. The same is true for battery performance, because while Samsung has thrown plenty of power at it, it's not shy about using it throughout the day.

Most of those issues could be fixed with software updates, of course. Samsung has produced a great phone without a shadow of a doubt and reasserted its place in the smartphone hierarchy. However, it's not hard to see how it could be even better.

Pricing and availability

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Pricing and availability

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra will go on sale in Australia from 6 March. It's available either as a 12GB RAM/128GB ROM model for $1,999 outright or as a 16GB RAM/512GB ROM model for $2,249 outright.

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is also available on contract terms through Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Woolworths Mobile:

Alternatives

Within the Samsung family, you could save some money and pick up the Samsung Galaxy S20+ or Samsung Galaxy S20, although you wouldn't get the same camera specifications or battery capacity either.

You could also consider the Samsung Galaxy Note10+, especially if you like the S-Pen stylus that comes with it.

In the high-performance Android phone competitor space, you could opt for a more pure Android experience with the Google Pixel 4XL or go all out on a gaming phone with the Asus ROG Phone II.

Specifications