The Galaxy S20: A Comprehensive Review

As I sat down to review the Samsung Galaxy S20, I couldn't help but think about how far the company had come since its early days as a challenger to the likes of Apple. With the release of the S20, Samsung has finally achieved what many had been waiting for – a phone that can rival the best Android devices on the market.

From the moment I unboxed the phone, I was struck by its vibrant color scheme and design. The device's saturated and vivid color complex is reminiscent of a modern art museum, but after just a few minutes, I found myself craving a more neutral look – one that I can call my own. Thankfully, Samsung has taken steps to make this possible, and the result is a phone that not only looks stunning but also performs well.

One area where the S20 excels is in its camera capabilities. With a 50MP primary sensor, a 12MP front camera, and support for 8K video recording at 24fps (although with some limitations), this phone can take incredible photos. The auto focus system, powered by dual pixel autofocus, has also been improved, and I found that the S20's camera produces minimal fringing at the edges – a problem that plagued the S20 Ultra. Additionally, the device features a telephoto lens with a 30x zoom, which is more than enough for most users.

The S20 also comes equipped with a 5G connection, although it's worth noting that only the S20 Plus and Ultra support millimeter wave 5G connectivity. As someone who's been vocal about their frustrations with 5G in the past, I have to admit that Samsung has made some progress – but it's still not enough for me to recommend this phone solely based on its 5G capabilities.

When it comes to video recording, the S20 is a solid performer. While the 8K video recording feature is impressive, it does come with some limitations – such as rolling shutter and no tracking autofocus. However, the 4K video quality is excellent, making this phone an ideal choice for content creators. Speaking of which, the S20 also features Super Steady stabilization, which delivers smooth footage even in challenging conditions.

But what really sets the Galaxy S20 apart is its battery life. With a large 4000mAh battery and fast charging capabilities, this phone can last a full day with moderate use – and then some. The inclusion of IP68 water resistance and expandable storage are also welcome features that will appeal to many users.

One area where Samsung has shown its commitment to innovation is in the design department. While the S20 looks stunning, it's clear that the company has taken cues from previous models. The phone's design aesthetic is reminiscent of the Galaxy S10, with a glass sandwich build and familiar button placement. However, the changes are subtle enough that they won't alienate fans of the series – and new users will appreciate the refinements.

Finally, Samsung has made some smart moves in terms of software. While One UI 11 remains feature-rich, it's clear that the company is taking a more measured approach this time around. The inclusion of features like an ultrasonic fingerprint reader and improved button placement are just two examples of how Samsung is trying to strike a balance between innovation and familiarity.

Overall, the Galaxy S20 is a solid choice for anyone in the market for a high-end Android device. While it may not be the best phone available – that distinction belongs to the Ultra – this device is certainly one of the top contenders. With its camera capabilities, battery life, and design, it's clear that Samsung has done its homework. Whether you're a seasoned power user or just looking for a reliable daily driver, the S20 is worth considering.

A Poll on Twitter

To get a better sense of how users interact with their phones, I conducted a poll on Twitter to gauge interest in using cases with the Galaxy S20. To my surprise, it turned out that a staggering 80% of respondents use cases with their phone – a number that's significantly higher than my initial estimate of 60-65%. This got me thinking about the importance of accessories and how they can impact our daily lives.

The Grip Case from Dbrand

As part of this article, I had the opportunity to review the grip case from Channel Sponsor Dbrand. The grip features a sleek design that complements the phone's aesthetic while also providing excellent protection for your device. With its durable materials and secure fit, this case is perfect for anyone who wants to add an extra layer of protection to their S20.

A Special Thanks

I'd like to extend my gratitude to Juddner for collaborating with me on this article. His insights into the daily life of a Galaxy S20 user were invaluable, and I highly recommend checking out his video review – which can be found in the link below.

A Shout-out to Our Readers

To all our readers who are passionate about smartphones and eager to stay up-to-date with the latest developments, I'd like to extend my sincerest appreciation for your support. Whether you're a seasoned power user or just starting out on your Android journey, we're here to help – and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this review.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys mkbhd here and this is samsung's new flagship with the galaxy s20 i actually kind of like that they're catching up the name to the year so 2020 galaxy s20 now i don't know that they'd say this ever publicly but if you went to samsung and just asked hey what's the most important phone that you guys make every year what's the most influential phone in your lineup it'll be this it'll be the new galaxy s flagship this is the phone that the average person sees as the android iphone competitor as as the big nemesis and when you have such a big reputation to protect you tend to not take as many risks you want to make the right safe moves in the right places and then take the risks with other phones so i have my buddy judner here whose youtube channel is your average consumer to help me out with this one so you should definitely check out his channel link below so without any further ado let's get into galaxy s20 so samsung made some moves with this phone and they're all around pretty great it's a new higher fresh rate display a bigger battery a new camera system and 5g pretty simple safe but all good moves so i'll start with the display because it's the best upgrade so you might remember i was harping all of last year on how much i love high refresh rate displays and there were naysayers but now we're all slowly i guess realizing how good it is now samsung's onboard with the galaxy s20 and we've got a super fluid 120 hertz display it's also 0.1 inches bigger and flattened out a bit on the edges so this is the biggest best change for the galaxy s20 i'm a gamer so when i'm gaming and if the phone support if the game supports 120 hertz it's a it's a whole nother level guys it feels so different from regular games that you just fall in love immediately there's certain types of games also that take that look better at 120 hertz like i was just playing a golf game and you know it's you know the ball flies through the air and it's smooth and everything but a racing game where you're really trying to react quickly and stuff is coming at you real quick flying across the screen there's less tearing that's where 120 hertz looks amazing yeah like i said it it's a must it's a must so needless to say i'm a huge fan of the high refresh rate i've been saying it but also something you notice in pretty much every phone that's moving up to the higher fresh rate is a bigger battery to keep up with it and so galaxy s20 also does that moving from 3400 to a 4 000 milliamp hour battery on paper that's pretty good that's a substantial gain it's almost 20 percent bigger and you also still have the wireless charging and you have up to 25 watt fast charging but at the end of the day you just want battery life to hold up all right so battery life how's your battery been i don't want to spoil your video and i'm sure you'll go into detail on it but generally on s20 what's that been like uh i mean i i can pretty confidently hit five hours uh maybe even slightly under that but we're talking about 4 000 milliamp hours and 120 hertz always on right so i'm not going to say i'm i'm i'm pretty happy with it that's like that's a whole day like getting to the end of the day no problem oh yeah yeah for me it's been about the same like a five hour screen on time day is pretty good there are some days where i might need more and so i can kill this phone in a day i don't think i could say that about like the five thousand six thousand milliamp hour phones right but yeah i'm comfortable with the battery at 120 hertz yeah i i mean you'll see a difference between this and like the ultra yeah for sure i think so i think given the fact that you're you are using it at 120 hertz it's worth the trade off 120 hertz is that good to me it feels like an even trade between high refresh rate and battery life meaning this phone got up to 4 000 milliamp hours and didn't really gain a ton or lose a ton of battery life the ultra still has better battery life with that even bigger battery but overall i'd give this phone a solid b plus and then of course if you really want to save battery pro tip you can it's like it comes out of a box of 60 hertz but pro tip you can switch it back down to 60 hertz and you will gain test say around 30 battery life by switching down so if you're about to have a super long day and you know you won't have access to a charger you can switch down to 60 hertz fine longer battery life but the rest of the internal specs as a reminder are bumped up to 2020 flagship numbers which are just crazy big numbers across the board so snapdragon 865 12 gigs of ram across every one 128 gigs of ufs 3.0 storage to start and all great performers and as i expected this phone performs great actually it performs every bit as great as the s20 ultra that's something we don't talk about as much is the ceiling for performance in these high-end phones is pretty consistent and in a brand new phone you know going from 12 to 16 gigs of ram doesn't make that much of a difference right now so the s20 doesn't stutter or lag or have any problem multitasking or holding apps on the ram any worse than the ultra in case you were wondering all right i got an average consumer question for you okay because i'm apparently out of touch okay does the average consumer miss this headphone this is the first headphone jack being gone from a samsung flagship it was gone from the note 10 but like this is the default android phone the headphone jack is gone yeah is that is this a big moment for that it's it's a big moment i'd say because i think it shows the willingness people are to accept that it's gone yeah uh samsung's been one of the last companies to really hold on to it yeah i agree no headphone jack not a big deal for me it's been like three years now of me not using a phone with a headphone jack i have my wireless headphones but yeah i've i've complained about it for a long time yeah and then after a while i noticed a lot of people in my comment section would just be like dude get over it like oh am i i'm trying to defend you guys but if you're cool with it then okay so i stopped kind of knocking companies for taking it away yeah you still gotta have the headphone jack there's a couple options left but this is no longer one of them so the new camera system the last big change in these phones it's kind of funny it's a 12 megapixel main camera with ois a 12 megapixel ultra wide camera and a 64 megapixel 3x telephoto camera so of course the specs are a bit worse on paper but the camera experience of the s20 in a couple of ways is actually better than the s20 ultra that's mainly because the s20 ultra had a couple issues that the s20 doesn't have plus the couple of things that the s20 ultra does specifically better than most like zoom aren't necessarily enjoyable or applicable to everyone so a typical photo from the galaxy s20 camera is sharp first of all some may find the look over sharpened actually at times but you can't ever really complain that it's soft and samsung has continued to tone down and dial back what used to be this crazy saturated and vivid color complex to now a more neutral look that i like and i still think it works it definitely still likes bright exposures though and it will air on the side of overexposure sometimes but generally it takes nice photos plus i've had none of the s20 ultra's auto focus issues thanks to dual pixel autofocus being back here and the sensor being smaller also technically means the fringing at the edges that i talked about with the s20 ultra is less of a problem i'm actually seeing less involuntary bokeh and less close focus smearing and then zoom will get you to a maximum of 30x instead of 100x but i still find that's plenty that's enough for me like i mentioned before i usually just zoom with my feet but in the few instances where i can't you will get crisper far away shots with just this telephoto i mean videos are pretty solid especially if you're using like the super steady that's really good it looks so good like i can shoot b-roll with this and probably get away with it really i think so i think for the for the average person i think oh yeah yeah that's true but for us maybe maybe not but uh i think regular people using this for video they're not going to have any complaints like things are a bit sharp you know uh but for the most part it's pretty solid so the 4k video on this phone looks good 8k video while it's available and that's amazing it's still kind of compromised again it's still 24 fps still has some rolling shutter and has no tracking autofocus but really the main thing is it doesn't even come from the main camera this time it comes from the higher resolution 64 megapixel telephoto camera which means it crops in a lot and is just generally harder to use so i'd stick with the 4k video for the most part for safety so they hit the big three with the right moves with camera battery and display they're all better but then they have to be smart about preserving keeping the familiar good stuff which they also did a lot of with s20 so they kept the ultrasonic fingerprint reader and it's fine you know they kept the speaker at the bottom of the phone that's fine they still have one ui of course and all their 25 million features still ip68 water resistant still expandable storage it's actually better button placement meaning they got rid of the bixby button now they still have the hole punch camera up at the front it's moved to the middle now but it's still a small cut out and really they just kept the same general design aesthetic and materials from galaxy s10 i mean it's a glass sandwich in the spirit of figuring out the average consumer i did a little poll on twitter to try to figure out how many of you guys use a case on your phone and if i was guessing i would i would have said something like 60 65 but it was closer to 80 of you so if you're looking for a case for the galaxy s20 might as well check out the grip case from channel sponsor dbrand i don't have it here but uh i think andrew does over there on the other side of the studio you got the one with the teardown skin on it let me get that one over here so yeah the grip seems to work pretty well it's pretty protective so yeah like i said a lot of the right moves uh these phones also now have 5g across the board s20 to s20 ultra but the regular s20 only supports low to mid band 5g while the s20 plus and ultra add millimeter waves so you all know how i feel about 5g i already have said you probably shouldn't buy these phones just for 5g but it's worth noting this will never have millimeter wave 5g but now that we've seen what samsung's improved and we've actually used it this definitely still looks and feels like the default android phone which if you're gonna compete this is the thousand dollar phone you gotta measure up to and if you wanna charge more than that you gotta beat it at something and i feel like that's exactly what samsung wanted and they're still happy to have that spot so big thank you and shout out again to juddner for the collab you should check out his day in the life video i'll link it below the like button where he goes over all the little nuances and things you find using a phone like this on a daily basis but that's the galaxy s20 is it the best phone no it's not even samsung's best phone in their lineup that would be the ultra but this is a better buy so this is the new default who's gonna beat it that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"