Samsung Galaxy S20 review: better than the Ultra
All right. Are you ready? Are you ready? Let's do this. Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20 Plus review. (upbeat music) Let's just set the stage here. I think that it is really easy to take the Galaxy S lineof phones for granted. Samsung sells so many of them, more than any otherAndroid phone in the US, so I know it isn't hip or cool to say that I like the Galaxy S phones but I usually reallylike the Galaxy S phones. Sure, Pixel phones tendto have better cameras, and OnePlus get a ton of attention and they also tend to cost less but, there's just something really familiar about the Galaxy S line. It's like the default Android phone, and so in some ways, Samsung's biggest job withthe S20 and the S20 Plus was to make sure that it didn'tmess up a good thing. Like for example, I justreviewed the S20 Ultra, this phones big brother and I think that Samsung overextendeditself with the S20 Ultra. These phones though, they're trying to do a little bit less than the Ultra and so I think they endup accomplishing more.
There are three big newthings about the Galaxy S20 that you need to know about. First is the new camera system, the second is that they support 5G, and third, it has a nicerscreen with 120Hz refresh rate. There's also a bunch of little stuff too, like they got rid of the headphone jack. They also added a bunchof Samsung-y features to the software but beforewe get into any of that, let's just not takethe design for granted. It looks a lot like what allGalaxy phones have looked like for a few years now. There's curved glass inthe back and metal rails and a screen that isalmost perfectly bezel-less but seriously though, compare this phone toany other Android phone on the market, your Pixels, your OnePluses or even your Huawei's and I think the S20 is just plain nicer. I actually think it's nicerthan the iPhone 11 Pro, just from a hardware perspective. Also the small one, it comes in pink, whichis the best color option. The camera module on the backis this big oblong rectangle that's off to the side.
The screen is only interruptedby a tiny little hole for the selfie camera instead of having a big old notch or a forehead or whatever. It uses an in-screen finger print sensor which I have to admitis a little bit slower than other biometric methodsbut I do just fine with it. Now this thing starts at 1000 bucks and the Plus version is 1200 bucks and so I know that you can get most of these features for cheaperon other android phones, but the Galaxy S line just usually manages to feel more like a complete package. Samsung is charging a lotof money for this phone and for that money, you deserveto get a really nice object and yeah, Samsung delivers. Don't take it for granted. Okay, enough gushing. Let's talk about the camera, which is the first big newthing you need to know about. Okay so, actually with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, I had to go into this biglong complicated story about how high megapixel cameras work, but with the S20 and the S20 Plus, it's a lot easier, mostly. So the main camera is a moretraditional 12 megapixels and so is the wide angle camera. The telephoto though is 64 megapixels. Samsung says that itneeds all those megapixels to improve the zoom on its telephoto and that actually works. You can get a better shot zoomed in at three or four X thanyou can with an iPhone or even a Pixel. It's still not great, but it's a step up.
Now it also can theoretically go up to 30X but it looks really badand it definitely loses to the S20 Ultra at that zoom, but the S20 Ultra costs 400 dollars more and I really don't think it's worth it to get decent 30X zoom shots. Now I was really hardon the Galaxy S20 Ultra for auto focus problems and for how it did weird stuff to faces. The regular S20 though,it's better for that stuff but it's not perfect. Focusing is improvedand maybe that's because it's using that moretraditional 12 megapixel sensor which uses a more traditionaldual pixel auto focus method. It still hunts for focus just a little bit in video but it's not awful. Now as for faces, I do think that this phoneis a little bit chiller than the Ultra with the sharpening and the smoothing butit's still doing it more than I would like, it's a Samsung phone so it wants to smooth faces. You should never ever turn onBixby scene detection though if you want the white balance to be any good at all. What kills me is that ifyou turn on the Pro mode on these cameras, everything looks great and if you use the selfie camera and turn off all the smoothing there, everything looks great. Basically I feel like ifSamsung would just get out of it's own way with the camera, the whole camera systemwould be right there with the iPhone 11 Pro and the Pixel 4 but as it is right now, it'sstill a third place finish. As a whole package, I do actually like thisbetter than the Pixel 4 because you get an ultra wide and you get way better video performance.
All right. There are some otherfeatures to talk about. So you can take 64megapixel photos with this, but even if you do itin really bright light, when I crop in, I didn'tsee enough clean details to make it worth it. I think night mode is pretty good, it's right in there with the iPhone and about to the level of the Pixel, better than I expected. And video quality of course is very good, it's Samsung quality video. It's not quite up to the level of the iPhone Pro though. Oh if you were thinking you wanted to get the S20 Plusinstead of the smaller S20 because it has that time offlight depth vision camera, honestly don't bother. I didn't see any improvementin portrait photos because of that extra lens. The second thing to know isthat these phones support 5G and I have to be honest, I didn't get a chance to really test 5G because I'm here in San Francisco where I don't have 5G networks to test on with the carriers that I have. I did test 5G on theUltra back in New York and it was great but I still think that you shouldn't buythis phone just because it supports 5G, I just don't think the 5G networks are there yet. One thing you should know is that the Plus modelsupports the millimeter wave version of 5G while thesmaller S20 doesn't, but unless you love standing on a particular streetcorner to download videos, who cares about millimeter wave. Now one reason you mightwanna get the S20 Plus besides the biggerscreen, is battery life. I mostly tested the smaller S20 which has a 4000 milliamp battery and after everything settled down from the initial setup, I was getting aroundfive hours of screen time with the high refresh rate turned on.
Brennan tested the S20 Plus which has a 4500 milliamp battery, he got a little bit more. I think either one canget you through a day and both really embarrassthe Pixel 4 for longevity, but neither one is like stellar. As for performance, I mean it's great. The only Android phone that's faster than these phones is probablythe Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. There's plenty of RAM andthe Snapdragon 865 processor, it seems like the real deal. Still Samsung is doing Samsungstuff with the software, I could complain about this all day but rather than do that, I actually wanna tell you what I do to corral Samsung's worst tendencies. I clean up quick settings first of all, second I install thisapp called Side Actions which lets you reprogramthe power and volume buttons to do the stuff that you actually wanna do like launch you know, the Google Assistant and set up Bixby. Next I install this appcalled Edge Calendars which is awesome, it lets you swipe in to see your calendars right away. I turn off Samsung Daily and I also move the brightness slider up to the top so it's easier to access. Oh there's one more setting that I turn on everytime with the Galaxy S20, the 120Hz screen. I don't know if I everwanna buy a phone again that doesn't have a highrefresh rate screen, it's just, it's so much better. The animations are better, the scrolling is better, it just, it feels better.
There is a trade offfor battery life though, it is worse if you havethe high refresh rate on and Samsung just locks at 120Hz, it doesn't try and vary it. So on the small one, if you definitely need it to last all day, you might wanna ratchet it back to 60Hz. Samsung also knocks downthe screen resolution when you're at 120Hz but I think that trade off is totally worth it on both sizes of the phone. Again, it just improves the experience of the phone so much. And of course the screen isa typical Samsung screen, which means that it's, it's great. I do think Samsung's default colors are a little bit too garish, but you can set it to natural and then it just, it just looks good. Anyway, that's it. That's the third thing to know about the S20. The screen is awesome. And I don't think you shouldever spend 1000 dollars on a phone again without ahigh refresh rate screen. Samsung decided to callthis the Galaxy S20 instead of the Galaxy S11 because it has those three things.
The new camera system, support for 5G and thehigh refresh rate screen. But I think the camera is only a minor evolutionary upgrade over the S10. The zoom is really nice, but otherwise it fundamentallyacts like the Samsung cameras that I'm used to. Good, but not the best. I think 5G is a wash becausethe support really isn't there in most cities and although I dearly lovethe 120Hz refresh rate screen, I understand that that's a nice to have, it's not an actual functional improvement. So yeah. In my book, this is more of an S11 than an S20. It's not a whole new generation but with fundamentals this good, I'll take it. Call it what you want Samsung. Hey, thanks so much for watching, we went pretty fast insome of the features on this phone but we wentinto much more detail on the Galaxy S20 Ultra review so you should go check that out.
There are three big newthings about the Galaxy S20 that you need to know about. First is the new camera system, the second is that they support 5G, and third, it has a nicerscreen with 120Hz refresh rate. There's also a bunch of little stuff too, like they got rid of the headphone jack. They also added a bunchof Samsung-y features to the software but beforewe get into any of that, let's just not takethe design for granted. It looks a lot like what allGalaxy phones have looked like for a few years now. There's curved glass inthe back and metal rails and a screen that isalmost perfectly bezel-less but seriously though, compare this phone toany other Android phone on the market, your Pixels, your OnePluses or even your Huawei's and I think the S20 is just plain nicer. I actually think it's nicerthan the iPhone 11 Pro, just from a hardware perspective. Also the small one, it comes in pink, whichis the best color option. The camera module on the backis this big oblong rectangle that's off to the side.
The screen is only interruptedby a tiny little hole for the selfie camera instead of having a big old notch or a forehead or whatever. It uses an in-screen finger print sensor which I have to admitis a little bit slower than other biometric methodsbut I do just fine with it. Now this thing starts at 1000 bucks and the Plus version is 1200 bucks and so I know that you can get most of these features for cheaperon other android phones, but the Galaxy S line just usually manages to feel more like a complete package. Samsung is charging a lotof money for this phone and for that money, you deserveto get a really nice object and yeah, Samsung delivers. Don't take it for granted. Okay, enough gushing. Let's talk about the camera, which is the first big newthing you need to know about. Okay so, actually with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, I had to go into this biglong complicated story about how high megapixel cameras work, but with the S20 and the S20 Plus, it's a lot easier, mostly. So the main camera is a moretraditional 12 megapixels and so is the wide angle camera. The telephoto though is 64 megapixels. Samsung says that itneeds all those megapixels to improve the zoom on its telephoto and that actually works. You can get a better shot zoomed in at three or four X thanyou can with an iPhone or even a Pixel. It's still not great, but it's a step up.
Now it also can theoretically go up to 30X but it looks really badand it definitely loses to the S20 Ultra at that zoom, but the S20 Ultra costs 400 dollars more and I really don't think it's worth it to get decent 30X zoom shots. Now I was really hardon the Galaxy S20 Ultra for auto focus problems and for how it did weird stuff to faces. The regular S20 though,it's better for that stuff but it's not perfect. Focusing is improvedand maybe that's because it's using that moretraditional 12 megapixel sensor which uses a more traditionaldual pixel auto focus method. It still hunts for focus just a little bit in video but it's not awful. Now as for faces, I do think that this phoneis a little bit chiller than the Ultra with the sharpening and the smoothing butit's still doing it more than I would like, it's a Samsung phone so it wants to smooth faces. You should never ever turn onBixby scene detection though if you want the white balance to be any good at all. What kills me is that ifyou turn on the Pro mode on these cameras, everything looks great and if you use the selfie camera and turn off all the smoothing there, everything looks great. Basically I feel like ifSamsung would just get out of it's own way with the camera, the whole camera systemwould be right there with the iPhone 11 Pro and the Pixel 4 but as it is right now, it'sstill a third place finish. As a whole package, I do actually like thisbetter than the Pixel 4 because you get an ultra wide and you get way better video performance.
All right. There are some otherfeatures to talk about. So you can take 64megapixel photos with this, but even if you do itin really bright light, when I crop in, I didn'tsee enough clean details to make it worth it. I think night mode is pretty good, it's right in there with the iPhone and about to the level of the Pixel, better than I expected. And video quality of course is very good, it's Samsung quality video. It's not quite up to the level of the iPhone Pro though. Oh if you were thinking you wanted to get the S20 Plusinstead of the smaller S20 because it has that time offlight depth vision camera, honestly don't bother. I didn't see any improvementin portrait photos because of that extra lens. The second thing to know isthat these phones support 5G and I have to be honest, I didn't get a chance to really test 5G because I'm here in San Francisco where I don't have 5G networks to test on with the carriers that I have. I did test 5G on theUltra back in New York and it was great but I still think that you shouldn't buythis phone just because it supports 5G, I just don't think the 5G networks are there yet. One thing you should know is that the Plus modelsupports the millimeter wave version of 5G while thesmaller S20 doesn't, but unless you love standing on a particular streetcorner to download videos, who cares about millimeter wave. Now one reason you mightwanna get the S20 Plus besides the biggerscreen, is battery life. I mostly tested the smaller S20 which has a 4000 milliamp battery and after everything settled down from the initial setup, I was getting aroundfive hours of screen time with the high refresh rate turned on.
Brennan tested the S20 Plus which has a 4500 milliamp battery, he got a little bit more. I think either one canget you through a day and both really embarrassthe Pixel 4 for longevity, but neither one is like stellar. As for performance, I mean it's great. The only Android phone that's faster than these phones is probablythe Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. There's plenty of RAM andthe Snapdragon 865 processor, it seems like the real deal. Still Samsung is doing Samsungstuff with the software, I could complain about this all day but rather than do that, I actually wanna tell you what I do to corral Samsung's worst tendencies. I clean up quick settings first of all, second I install thisapp called Side Actions which lets you reprogramthe power and volume buttons to do the stuff that you actually wanna do like launch you know, the Google Assistant and set up Bixby. Next I install this appcalled Edge Calendars which is awesome, it lets you swipe in to see your calendars right away. I turn off Samsung Daily and I also move the brightness slider up to the top so it's easier to access. Oh there's one more setting that I turn on everytime with the Galaxy S20, the 120Hz screen. I don't know if I everwanna buy a phone again that doesn't have a highrefresh rate screen, it's just, it's so much better. The animations are better, the scrolling is better, it just, it feels better.
There is a trade offfor battery life though, it is worse if you havethe high refresh rate on and Samsung just locks at 120Hz, it doesn't try and vary it. So on the small one, if you definitely need it to last all day, you might wanna ratchet it back to 60Hz. Samsung also knocks downthe screen resolution when you're at 120Hz but I think that trade off is totally worth it on both sizes of the phone. Again, it just improves the experience of the phone so much. And of course the screen isa typical Samsung screen, which means that it's, it's great. I do think Samsung's default colors are a little bit too garish, but you can set it to natural and then it just, it just looks good. Anyway, that's it. That's the third thing to know about the S20. The screen is awesome. And I don't think you shouldever spend 1000 dollars on a phone again without ahigh refresh rate screen. Samsung decided to callthis the Galaxy S20 instead of the Galaxy S11 because it has those three things.
The new camera system, support for 5G and thehigh refresh rate screen. But I think the camera is only a minor evolutionary upgrade over the S10. The zoom is really nice, but otherwise it fundamentallyacts like the Samsung cameras that I'm used to. Good, but not the best. I think 5G is a wash becausethe support really isn't there in most cities and although I dearly lovethe 120Hz refresh rate screen, I understand that that's a nice to have, it's not an actual functional improvement. So yeah. In my book, this is more of an S11 than an S20. It's not a whole new generation but with fundamentals this good, I'll take it. Call it what you want Samsung. Hey, thanks so much for watching, we went pretty fast insome of the features on this phone but we wentinto much more detail on the Galaxy S20 Ultra review so you should go check that out.
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