**The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra: A Beast of a Phone with Some Caveats**

I recently had the opportunity to review the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, one of the most advanced smartphones on the market. As I spent more time with this phone, I couldn't help but feel that it's an excellent device on paper and in practice, but there are some notable drawbacks that may make it not worth the investment for everyone.

**Charging Speed: A Frustrating Limitation**

One thing that's very frustrating about the S20 Ultra is its charging speed. You can only get the fastest charging times if you buy a separate 45-watt charger, which comes in at $50 extra. The one that's included in the box is not a 45-watt charger, and I couldn't help but feel like this was a bit crazy. I just paid $1,400 for this phone, and I still can't charge it as fast as I want to. It's kind of frustrating, especially when you consider that the S10 Plus, which is not as advanced on paper, includes a 45-watt charger in the box.

**Storage: A Limited Option**

The S20 Ultra also has an addition of a one terabyte storage tier, which may be important for users who shoot a lot of photos and videos. However, this ups the price obviously, and it's not available as an option on the base model. The base storage is 128GB, and you can only go up to 512GB with a microSD card. This means that if you need more than 512GB of storage, you're stuck with the lower-capacity version of the phone. I know that this will be a problem for some users who shoot in 8K resolution or need more storage for other reasons.

**5G Connectivity: A Debated Topic**

One of the most debated topics when it comes to smartphones is 5G connectivity. Some argue that it's the future of mobile internet, while others claim that it's not worth the extra cost and complexity. As someone who doesn't live in an area with 5G connectivity, I didn't get to experience it on the S20 Ultra.

**Specs Comparison**

Let's take a look at some of the specs of both phones. The S20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch quad-HD+ dynamic AMOLED display with a resolution of 3200 x 1440, while the S10 Plus has a 6.4-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 3040 x 1440. The S20 Ultra is also heavier and more powerful than the S10 Plus, weighing in at 220 grams compared to 175 grams for the ceramic version of the S10 Plus.

**Performance: A Beast**

In terms of performance, both phones are beasts. The S20 Ultra has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 processor, depending on where you are in the world, while the S10 Plus has an Exynos 98 0 PS 2.0 processor. However, when it comes to the battery life, the S20 Ultra far outpaces the S10 Plus, with a 5,000mAh battery compared to 4100mAh for the S10 Plus.

**Camera: A Mixed Bag**

The camera is one of the most critical components of any smartphone, and both phones have their strengths and weaknesses. The S20 Ultra has a quad-camera setup with a 48-megapixel telephoto lens, an 108-megapixel wide-angle lens, a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens, and a depth vision camera. However, the autofocus on this phone is not 100% there yet, which can be frustrating for users who rely on precise focus.

**Conclusion: A Winner**

So, who wins in the end? In my opinion, the S10 Plus is a better value proposition than the S20 Ultra. While both phones are excellent devices on paper and in practice, I don't need all the bells and whistles that come with the S20 Ultra. The screen on the S10 Plus is still fantastic, and it's just more comfortable to use in my hand than the giant phone that is the S20 Ultra.

However, if you're a user who needs 100 Hz refresh rate, you'll love the S20 Ultra's display. Additionally, if you need a high-resolution camera with plenty of zoom capabilities, the S20 Ultra may be worth considering. But for me, it's just not worth the extra $600 to upgrade from the S10 Plus.

**Final Thoughts**

Overall, I really do like using the S20 Ultra, but the value proposition is just not quite there for me. It's a beast of a phone with some amazing features and specs, but it comes at a high price. If you're in the market for a new smartphone, I would recommend taking a closer look at both phones before making a decision.

If you have any questions or concerns that I didn't address in this review, feel free to ask!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou want a galaxy phone and the galaxy s 20 ultra is pretty tempting but the galaxy s 10 plus is so much cheaper so which one do you buy welcome to more or less the show where I compare expensive tech products to their cheaper alternatives and boy oh boy the galaxy s 20 ultra is expensive it is the most expensive gadget I have ever had on this show starting at $1,400 in the US by comparison last year's s 10 plus starts at eight hundred and fifty US dollars after a price reduction so whether you are looking to splurge or save a little bit of cash I'm gonna compare everything about these two phones on cameras design performance and more so let's get started if size is important to you then the S 20 ultra is significantly larger in the pocket than the s 10 plus six point nine inches versus six point four now when you put them side-by-side one on top of the other it doesn't actually look like that much difference but let me tell you this is a significantly heavier phone in the pocket I know what you might be thinking hey Lexi you're a lady and you have lady pockets correct I do so to test this out for the gentlemen out there I found a gentleman with appropriately sized pockets if you have larger pockets the s20 ultra should not present a problem in either the front or the back pockets it does fit pretty neatly the s10 plus by comparison fits pretty nicely in whichever pocket you choose lady or gentleman let's talk screens because another difference between the two even though they both use dynamic AMOLED screens is the refresh rate and the resolution now the s20 ultra comes with a 120 Hertz refresh rate which you can turn on in the settings if you do choose now there are some trade-offs here yes it does affect battery life which I will talk about later and yes you are only effectively getting around a 1080p or HD resolution however once you use 120 Hertz it's so hard to go back if it's buttery smooth I absolutely love it and going back to sixty Hertz on the s10 plus you know it's fine and it does the job and I have zero complaints about it but it's like my eyes have been opened up to a whole nother world of smooth smooth silk in terms of other design cues you may notice that the s10 Plus has a headphone jack and the espheni ultra does not there is also a screen protector installed by default on the s20 ultra now I've been using it for a few weeks and I've been noticing that it's actually started to lift up a little on the edges maybe this is not a huge deal you can just replace it yourself but I would expect a pre-installed screen protector to last a little bit longer than a couple weeks before it started lifting off that said both these phones are incredibly delicate so definitely put a case on them do not drop them without a case don't worry we do that for you so if you want to check out the drop tests of both of them check the link in the description both of the phones do have reverse wireless charging and an in screen fingerprint reader and really I couldn't tell much difference at all between them the fingerprint reader has definitely gotten a lot better on the s10 plus over the past year thanks to a lot of updates and now they're both pretty much as fast as in responsive as each other both of the phones run one UI - and Android 10 so effectively they look pretty much the same once you have them up and running camera time let's take a look at some of the shots because I think that the results of this is quite surprising even though the hardware is significantly different I think most of the general shots of landscapes and people are actually very close the real differences obviously come when you start to talk about the zoom capabilities on the s20 ultra with that four times optical zoom that then goes out to a hybrid zoom to ten times and then of course you can go to digital all the way to 100 times now comparing a ten times hybrid zoom from the s20 ultra to a digital 10 times zoom on the s10 plus it's not a pretty picture for the s10 plus but if you don't zoom that much then maybe this isn't a huge point of difference for you I love the fact that you can get a usable shot up to 30 times on the s20 ultra but let's be honest most of the time I'm not shooting zooms so for me the s10 plus is fine the ultra wide cameras are close there is a little bit more distortion on the s10 plus and overall portrait mode looks good on both I think I prefer the shot from the s10 plus just because it has a little bit more sharpness in a little bit of color but it is very very close and don't forget the s20 ultra also has that magical a hundred and eight megapixel mode with that giant sensor so you can actually crop in a lot more two shots than you can from the 12 or 16 megapixels on the s10 plus so you might be thinking the s20 ultra looks pretty good in the camera departments if you are a photographer that really likes to tweak with things but actually I think I would take the s10 plus and I'll tell you why because it has a dual aperture lens so it can vary between a 2.4 and F 1.5 so you can change it depending on the lighting conditions if you are in pro mode by comparison the aperture on the s-tronic ultra cameras is fixed so if you do want to change that aperture in manual mode you can add a luck selfie time okay so I'm not a huge selfie gal so I'm gonna leave this one up to you I think both are totally fine for video recording both of good now the s20 ultra does have the added benefit of being able to shoot in 8k if you want a future-proof your family memories it's good to have it but it's a huge file size one minute it's gonna give you around six hundred megabytes of footage and yeah you might run out of storage before you've run out of things to shoot with 8k it's nice that it has it but 4k on the s10 plus is also great the only thing that you might run into if you shoot a lot of video on the s20 ultra is at the time of recording this video there is a little bit of an autofocus problem with the phase detector F on the s20 ultra it just does a lot of hunting it just doesn't look great so hopefully a software update will fix that and maybe by the time you watch this it will be resolved let's talk battery there are so many factors that go into what effects battery life now technically the s20 ultra does have a larger capacity battery than the s10 plus five thousand milliamp hours versus 4100 on the cheaper phone now it doesn't necessarily play out that the bigger battery is better because it's all dependent on how you use your phone and connectivity of things like that both of these phones will comfortably get you a full day's usage if you are a heavy user then maybe you might be pushing it a little bit on the s10 plus and the s20 ultra might be worth a little extra cash however the s20 ultra does have a few things that do play into the battery life such as a hundred and twenty Hertz if you do have this active do not expect to get the same level of battery life that you would if you just were using sixty Hertz I'm not going to go into benchmarks and performance specs like that there are plenty of other places that do it a lot better than I could however what I will say is that there isn't much that I could throw at either of these phones that they couldn't cope with obviously editing and shooting 8k video is designed for the s20 ultra I wouldn't even dream of trying to edit 8k footage on the s10 plus overall I didn't notice any significant performance differences between the two with everyday tasks the only thing I noticed was that just the s20 ultra started up a tiny bit faster than the s10 plus both is fine support super fast charging the s20 ultra is faster however one thing that is very frustrating about it is that you can only get the fastest charging times if you buy as separate 45 watt charger the one that's included in the box is not a 45 watt charger you white Samsung I just paid $1400 for this phone and I still can't charge it as fast as I want to it's kind of crazy I don't want to spend another 50 bucks on a charger so the s10 plus also has the addition of a one terabyte storage tier maybe that's important to you if you shoot a lot of photos and videos I know that I definitely value that of course it ups the price obviously but the s20 ultra doesn't give you that option of a one terabyte internal storage option yes they both use micro sd so you can expand the storage if you like but the fact that your base storage is 128 and then you can only go to 512 like why this shoots a K you need more than 512 if you shoot a lot of 8k come on if you do choose to buy the 512 gigabyte version of the ultra then you do also get the bump up to 16 gigs of ram very nice to 5g or not to 5g that's is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of millimeter-wave or well mid-band or live with 4G LTE the outrageous misfortunes of living in New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago on the south side for 5g or suffering the sorrow of 4G LTE the BOD couldn't have written it better himself so I don't live in an area with 5g connectivity so I didn't really get to experience it on the s20 ultra let's check the specs the s20 ultra has a six point nine inch quad HD + dynamic AMOLED with a resolution of 3200 by 1440 the s10 plus has a six point four inch AMOLED with a resolution of 3040 by 1440 the s20 Ultra is 220 grams whereas the s10 plus is 175 or 198 if you get the ceramic version the s20 ultra runs qualcomm snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 depending on where you are in the world the s10 plus is the 855 core Exynos 98 20 PS 20 ultra has a five thousand milliamp hour battery whereas the s10 plus is 4100 and the s20 ultra has four cameras a 48 megapixel telephoto 108 megapixel wide-angle 12 megapixel ultra wide and a depth vision camera the s10 plus has a triple camera array 12 megapixel telephoto 12 megapixel wide-angle and 16 megapixel ultra wide now it comes down to the part of the show where I need to select my overall winner so the s20 ultra is an excellent phone on paper and I think in practice once you start using it it probably gets around 90 to 95 percent of the way there I am a little bit let down by the camera yes it is an incredible feat of Engineering I love that you can shoot at 108 megapixels that you can shoot 8k video but overall I don't use zoom that much so for me it's not really worth the money for the extra zoom capabilities they do get on this camera plus the autofocus is not 100% there yet hopefully a firmware update will resolve it and it might have fixed it by the time you see this video I love the screen on the s20 ultra it's a hundred and twenty Hertz and it looks fantastic the battery is incredible and honestly the performance of this thing it's a beast and I really do like using it however the value proposition is just not quite there for me so for that reason I am choosing the galaxy s 10 plus for me it's just a little bit more comfortable to use in the hand than the giant beast of a phone that is the S 20 ultra I get a great screen yeah sure I don't get a hundred 20 Hertz but I don't think it's worth the extra like six hundred dollars for me to upgrade to this just for a hundred and twenty and the cameras are all so great on the s10 plus I don't need a hundred and eight megapixels of resolution and I don't need that zoom I love it that I could have it but for me it's not worth all that cash thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the episode give it a thumbs up and a like if you did and let me know if you have any questions that I didn't answer I make this show for you so let me know check out some more related content including an episode of more or less about ear buds and something else down there byeyou want a galaxy phone and the galaxy s 20 ultra is pretty tempting but the galaxy s 10 plus is so much cheaper so which one do you buy welcome to more or less the show where I compare expensive tech products to their cheaper alternatives and boy oh boy the galaxy s 20 ultra is expensive it is the most expensive gadget I have ever had on this show starting at $1,400 in the US by comparison last year's s 10 plus starts at eight hundred and fifty US dollars after a price reduction so whether you are looking to splurge or save a little bit of cash I'm gonna compare everything about these two phones on cameras design performance and more so let's get started if size is important to you then the S 20 ultra is significantly larger in the pocket than the s 10 plus six point nine inches versus six point four now when you put them side-by-side one on top of the other it doesn't actually look like that much difference but let me tell you this is a significantly heavier phone in the pocket I know what you might be thinking hey Lexi you're a lady and you have lady pockets correct I do so to test this out for the gentlemen out there I found a gentleman with appropriately sized pockets if you have larger pockets the s20 ultra should not present a problem in either the front or the back pockets it does fit pretty neatly the s10 plus by comparison fits pretty nicely in whichever pocket you choose lady or gentleman let's talk screens because another difference between the two even though they both use dynamic AMOLED screens is the refresh rate and the resolution now the s20 ultra comes with a 120 Hertz refresh rate which you can turn on in the settings if you do choose now there are some trade-offs here yes it does affect battery life which I will talk about later and yes you are only effectively getting around a 1080p or HD resolution however once you use 120 Hertz it's so hard to go back if it's buttery smooth I absolutely love it and going back to sixty Hertz on the s10 plus you know it's fine and it does the job and I have zero complaints about it but it's like my eyes have been opened up to a whole nother world of smooth smooth silk in terms of other design cues you may notice that the s10 Plus has a headphone jack and the espheni ultra does not there is also a screen protector installed by default on the s20 ultra now I've been using it for a few weeks and I've been noticing that it's actually started to lift up a little on the edges maybe this is not a huge deal you can just replace it yourself but I would expect a pre-installed screen protector to last a little bit longer than a couple weeks before it started lifting off that said both these phones are incredibly delicate so definitely put a case on them do not drop them without a case don't worry we do that for you so if you want to check out the drop tests of both of them check the link in the description both of the phones do have reverse wireless charging and an in screen fingerprint reader and really I couldn't tell much difference at all between them the fingerprint reader has definitely gotten a lot better on the s10 plus over the past year thanks to a lot of updates and now they're both pretty much as fast as in responsive as each other both of the phones run one UI - and Android 10 so effectively they look pretty much the same once you have them up and running camera time let's take a look at some of the shots because I think that the results of this is quite surprising even though the hardware is significantly different I think most of the general shots of landscapes and people are actually very close the real differences obviously come when you start to talk about the zoom capabilities on the s20 ultra with that four times optical zoom that then goes out to a hybrid zoom to ten times and then of course you can go to digital all the way to 100 times now comparing a ten times hybrid zoom from the s20 ultra to a digital 10 times zoom on the s10 plus it's not a pretty picture for the s10 plus but if you don't zoom that much then maybe this isn't a huge point of difference for you I love the fact that you can get a usable shot up to 30 times on the s20 ultra but let's be honest most of the time I'm not shooting zooms so for me the s10 plus is fine the ultra wide cameras are close there is a little bit more distortion on the s10 plus and overall portrait mode looks good on both I think I prefer the shot from the s10 plus just because it has a little bit more sharpness in a little bit of color but it is very very close and don't forget the s20 ultra also has that magical a hundred and eight megapixel mode with that giant sensor so you can actually crop in a lot more two shots than you can from the 12 or 16 megapixels on the s10 plus so you might be thinking the s20 ultra looks pretty good in the camera departments if you are a photographer that really likes to tweak with things but actually I think I would take the s10 plus and I'll tell you why because it has a dual aperture lens so it can vary between a 2.4 and F 1.5 so you can change it depending on the lighting conditions if you are in pro mode by comparison the aperture on the s-tronic ultra cameras is fixed so if you do want to change that aperture in manual mode you can add a luck selfie time okay so I'm not a huge selfie gal so I'm gonna leave this one up to you I think both are totally fine for video recording both of good now the s20 ultra does have the added benefit of being able to shoot in 8k if you want a future-proof your family memories it's good to have it but it's a huge file size one minute it's gonna give you around six hundred megabytes of footage and yeah you might run out of storage before you've run out of things to shoot with 8k it's nice that it has it but 4k on the s10 plus is also great the only thing that you might run into if you shoot a lot of video on the s20 ultra is at the time of recording this video there is a little bit of an autofocus problem with the phase detector F on the s20 ultra it just does a lot of hunting it just doesn't look great so hopefully a software update will fix that and maybe by the time you watch this it will be resolved let's talk battery there are so many factors that go into what effects battery life now technically the s20 ultra does have a larger capacity battery than the s10 plus five thousand milliamp hours versus 4100 on the cheaper phone now it doesn't necessarily play out that the bigger battery is better because it's all dependent on how you use your phone and connectivity of things like that both of these phones will comfortably get you a full day's usage if you are a heavy user then maybe you might be pushing it a little bit on the s10 plus and the s20 ultra might be worth a little extra cash however the s20 ultra does have a few things that do play into the battery life such as a hundred and twenty Hertz if you do have this active do not expect to get the same level of battery life that you would if you just were using sixty Hertz I'm not going to go into benchmarks and performance specs like that there are plenty of other places that do it a lot better than I could however what I will say is that there isn't much that I could throw at either of these phones that they couldn't cope with obviously editing and shooting 8k video is designed for the s20 ultra I wouldn't even dream of trying to edit 8k footage on the s10 plus overall I didn't notice any significant performance differences between the two with everyday tasks the only thing I noticed was that just the s20 ultra started up a tiny bit faster than the s10 plus both is fine support super fast charging the s20 ultra is faster however one thing that is very frustrating about it is that you can only get the fastest charging times if you buy as separate 45 watt charger the one that's included in the box is not a 45 watt charger you white Samsung I just paid $1400 for this phone and I still can't charge it as fast as I want to it's kind of crazy I don't want to spend another 50 bucks on a charger so the s10 plus also has the addition of a one terabyte storage tier maybe that's important to you if you shoot a lot of photos and videos I know that I definitely value that of course it ups the price obviously but the s20 ultra doesn't give you that option of a one terabyte internal storage option yes they both use micro sd so you can expand the storage if you like but the fact that your base storage is 128 and then you can only go to 512 like why this shoots a K you need more than 512 if you shoot a lot of 8k come on if you do choose to buy the 512 gigabyte version of the ultra then you do also get the bump up to 16 gigs of ram very nice to 5g or not to 5g that's is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of millimeter-wave or well mid-band or live with 4G LTE the outrageous misfortunes of living in New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago on the south side for 5g or suffering the sorrow of 4G LTE the BOD couldn't have written it better himself so I don't live in an area with 5g connectivity so I didn't really get to experience it on the s20 ultra let's check the specs the s20 ultra has a six point nine inch quad HD + dynamic AMOLED with a resolution of 3200 by 1440 the s10 plus has a six point four inch AMOLED with a resolution of 3040 by 1440 the s20 Ultra is 220 grams whereas the s10 plus is 175 or 198 if you get the ceramic version the s20 ultra runs qualcomm snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 depending on where you are in the world the s10 plus is the 855 core Exynos 98 20 PS 20 ultra has a five thousand milliamp hour battery whereas the s10 plus is 4100 and the s20 ultra has four cameras a 48 megapixel telephoto 108 megapixel wide-angle 12 megapixel ultra wide and a depth vision camera the s10 plus has a triple camera array 12 megapixel telephoto 12 megapixel wide-angle and 16 megapixel ultra wide now it comes down to the part of the show where I need to select my overall winner so the s20 ultra is an excellent phone on paper and I think in practice once you start using it it probably gets around 90 to 95 percent of the way there I am a little bit let down by the camera yes it is an incredible feat of Engineering I love that you can shoot at 108 megapixels that you can shoot 8k video but overall I don't use zoom that much so for me it's not really worth the money for the extra zoom capabilities they do get on this camera plus the autofocus is not 100% there yet hopefully a firmware update will resolve it and it might have fixed it by the time you see this video I love the screen on the s20 ultra it's a hundred and twenty Hertz and it looks fantastic the battery is incredible and honestly the performance of this thing it's a beast and I really do like using it however the value proposition is just not quite there for me so for that reason I am choosing the galaxy s 10 plus for me it's just a little bit more comfortable to use in the hand than the giant beast of a phone that is the S 20 ultra I get a great screen yeah sure I don't get a hundred 20 Hertz but I don't think it's worth the extra like six hundred dollars for me to upgrade to this just for a hundred and twenty and the cameras are all so great on the s10 plus I don't need a hundred and eight megapixels of resolution and I don't need that zoom I love it that I could have it but for me it's not worth all that cash thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the episode give it a thumbs up and a like if you did and let me know if you have any questions that I didn't answer I make this show for you so let me know check out some more related content including an episode of more or less about ear buds and something else down there bye\n"