Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20 Ultra hands-on

It is Samsung Galaxy S20 time and also its S20 plus time. And now it's also S20 Ultra time. See these are Samsung's flagships, they're the big contenders for the best Androidsmartphone that you can get. They're all 5G phones, they all have 120 Hz refresh rate screens, and they all have brandnew camera systems. But the camera systems and each of these are a little bitdifferent from each other. And frankly, so are some of the specs, it's a little bitcomplicated in the details, but it is super obvious at the top level, which one you are going to want to get. The ultra or maybe the S20 because it's small and you can get it in pink. Or maybe you just want the S20+ because it's kinda the in between phone. Okay, whatever let's just get into it. Alright, first things first, why are these called the S20phones instead of the S11 which comes after you know, the S10 Samsung's answer is thatthey're a new generation especially in the camera system, but I don't know I justlook like phones to me. They look good, I think the camera bumpwhich is rectangular now it looks just fine. I do think they're way too reflective and they pick up fingerprints and I am a little bit bummedwith the headphone jack, but they look like Galaxy phones, which means that they look goodand they feel high quality. And Samsung is right, that there really are newinteresting camera systems here. So let's talk about them. So all three phones have astandard three lens setup that you're probably used to by now. There's a regular wide angle lens, there's a telephoto lens andthere's an ultra wide lens.



 Plus there's a time offlight sensor on the ultra. But what's new this year is that Samsung is goingfor a high megapixel count. So on the S20 and the S20+ it's 64 megapixels, and on the ultra it's 108 megapixels and usually when you see areally high megapixel count, that means that the phone is bad, it means it's bad. They couldn't make a good camera and so they just compensated by throwing a lot ofmegapixels at the specsheet and hope you don't notice. But Samsung says its doing a bunch of imagecomputation levels megapixel so that they actuallybelong on a flagship. Alright, so let's focuson the Samsung S20 Ultra. It has a folded zoom lens, which means that the light comes in it hits a prism then itgoes across the phone to hit the sensor, which isa lot like the periscope lens on those Huawei phones. It doesn't make the phonekind of thick though, I think, but it's not that big a deal. What that folded lens systemgets you as a 4X optical zoom. And then Samsung claimsyou can get up to 10X with lossless and then on top of that you can go all the way up to 100X zoom with some sensor cropping. But how does all this work?



 Well, Samsung says that it's binning it can take nine pixels from the sensor and combine them into one pixel using hardware that'sbuilt right into the chip, which means that they come out as regular 12 megapixel photos by default. Samsung also says thatthat binning can help with a low light performanceon the telephoto and I don't really know if the optical science adds up there yet, but yeah, we'll see what happens we actually have to use these things for real. Anyway, as you zoom in on the systems the whole system switchesbetween some combination of binning and then sensorcropping and then adjustment for handshake and so on so forth. And in our hands on tests, which were admittedlyin a controlled setting, it seemed pretty good. Now, I don't know if theresults are gonna be as good as Samsung says, but I do know that I love the interface thatSamsung made for the zoom, you can tap on littlebuttons to zoom right into the amount that you want. And when you get zoomed way in, it shows a little thumbnailof the entire scene so you can see exactlywhat you're zoomed in on so that you can aim at it exactly right. It's really neat. Now because this is Samsung, there's a bunch of new camera stuff because Samsung loves throwingfeatures at the camera.


They claim that their nightmode is way better now that it uses up to 30 shots to build the final night mode image. It can also shoot at 8Know at 24 frames per second and you can edit that 8Kfootage right on the device but my favorite feature isthis thing called SINGLE TAKE. See you know, Samsung hasthose kazillion camera features but you never know whichone you should actually pick so what you can do is go into single take just hit the shutter wait 10 seconds and then Samsung just kinda does you know like all of them, it showsyou a collage when it's done. And there's like aportrait and a wide angle and maybe a little, youknow, gif that it makes and a movie and whatever else. And then you could just pick the one you actually wanna save from it. It's really kinda great. Alright, so that's the camera system, you got 12 megapixels,and you got 108 whatever. It's a lot. It's pretty complicated. And we really do have to test all of it. I'm looking forward to doing that. Another thing that's complicated,though, are the specs. Like there are a lot of specs,look at all these specs. Yeah, sorry, that is,in fact, a lot of specs. So here we are, we'regonna show you them again. But we're not gonna havetime to get into all of them. We're just gonna hit a few. So first thing they all have120 Hz refresh rate displays, and they also can readyour touches at 240 hertz. It is just a switch though they didn't do any of this dynamic stuff. Were its trying to changethe refresh rate on the fly. It's just 60 or 120. And when you're at 120, Samsungsays it's about a 10% hit on your battery life. They started 12 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage, and they have micro SD.


They of course have a Snapdragon 865. And there is a fingerprintsensor underneath the screen. Of course, they all useSamsung's new interface. It's called One UI 2. And I still think it's pretty good. There are some new software features that I really think arekind of neat, though. They have a new direct sharething that's, you know, exclusive to Galaxy phones. It's basically like Wi Fi direct. They have this free service where you can upload up tofive gigabytes of data a day to a cloud service andjust share a link out so you don't have to fusswith getting it under some other cloud service. And they have this thing thatthey call Bluetooth sharing, where if you don't want tohave to have a friend pair to the Bluetooth in your car.


You can have them pair theBluetooth on your phone and then a Wi Fi directs fromtheir phone to your phone and then their audio plays in your car and it's just wackadoo it's kinda neat. Anyway, as for the rest of the specs, you can just assume that there's like a good better best cadencebetween these three phones. So for example, the S20has 5G but only the S20+ and the S20 Ultra support millimeter wave. screen sizes are 6.2 inch,6.7 inch and 6.9 inch battery sizes are 4,000, 4,500 and 5,000 the S20 Ultra can get up to 16 gigs of RAM if you spring for the 512gigs of storage option. Also there's like 25 wattcharging and 45 watt charging depending on which oneyou get, etc, etc, etc. Bottom line these are spec beasts, that's what they're forand they cost a lot too. They start at 999 99 theplus starts at 1199 99. And the ultra starts at 1399 99. And if you wanna get the 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage,that is 1600 dollars. Pre orders start February 21stand they ship on March six. And I know this is a lot,It is a lot of specs. It is a lot of megapixels and it's a lot of money. Even for Samsung, this isa lot like maximum a lot. So I'm actually really lookingforward to reviewing these like a lot. Hey thanks for watching. Really appreciate it. There's a lot more videos coming from Samsung's unpacked eventso stay tuned for those and if you wanna click on something you should click ontheverge.com/newsletters 'cause I send one out every day. 

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