The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra: A Powerful Phone with Some Quirks

One of the standout features of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is its S Pen, which has been a game-changer for me since I first started using it. The S Pen is exactly the same as the one on the Note 10 Plus, but it feels faster and more responsive due to the 120Hz screen refresh rate. This allows for precise and smooth writing, drawing, and even taking screenshots. One of my favorite features with the S Pen is handwriting straightening, which automatically adjusts the angle of your writing to make it look neater and more legible.

I also appreciate the new gesture suite that comes with the Note 20 Ultra, which includes five new air gestures that can be used to navigate the phone. These gestures are customizable, allowing you to tailor them to your needs. For example, holding down on the pen button can be used to sign a little arrow to go back, sign another way to go home, do a little squiggle that does something else, or even write in handwriting. However, I haven't found these gestures to be particularly useful in my day-to-day life, as they often require me to reach for the pen button or use the S Pen itself.

A New Trick: Handwriting Straightening

One trick that I find really useful is handwriting straightening, which allows you to write at an angle without having to adjust it later. The phone comes with a button at the bottom that automatically straightens your writing, making it look more neat and tidy. This feature has been a game-changer for me, as I often find myself writing at an angle due to my natural tendencies.

A Powerful Phone with a Price Tag

The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor, which provides snappy performance and efficient battery life. The phone comes with 128GB of internal storage, plus the option to expand through a microSD card slot, providing ample space for your files and apps. There are also 12GB of RAM on board, ensuring that the phone can handle demanding tasks with ease.

5G Connectivity and Battery Life

The Note 20 Ultra supports 5G connectivity, but the speeds are only as fast as your network allows. In terms of battery life, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it lasts throughout my day without needing a recharge. This is partly due to the 120Hz screen refresh rate, which reduces power consumption and provides a smoother experience.

Comparison to the Standard Note 20

For those who are curious about the differences between the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the standard Note 20, there are some notable distinctions. The Note 20 has a smaller 6.7-inch screen compared to the Note 20 Ultra's 6.9 inches, but it also features a plastic polycarbonate back instead of the glass back on the Note 20 Ultra. The camera module is slightly different as well, with no microSD card storage option available.

Should You Buy the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra?

The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is a powerful phone that checks all the boxes for those who need a device with advanced features and capabilities. However, it's not without its quirks, such as the bezels that can cause issues when holding the phone or the camera bump that's too big. For those who love big phones, this might be a no-brainer, but for others, there may be more appealing options available.

In conclusion, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a powerful phone with advanced features and capabilities. While it has its drawbacks, such as the bezels and camera bump, it's a device that can handle demanding tasks with ease and provides a smooth and responsive experience thanks to its S Pen and 120Hz screen refresh rate.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's big it's bold it's beautiful and it is really expensive this is the samsung galaxy note 20 ultra it is a 1300 android phone that is jam-packed with all the high-end features the question is is it worth it and that's what we're here to find out first let's talk about design now this is a very large device it's got a 6.9 inch screen which is really great it's also heavy it's made of glass and metal now this phone is actually a little bit taller and a little bit wider than the galaxy note 10 plus for me that's not so great i do love a big screen but it feels just a little bit more awkward in the hand now samsung prides itself on the fact that this is truly an edge to edge screen and it is beautiful and those curved sides make it very immersive now i almost wish and this may be an unpopular opinion that the bezels were a little bit thicker on the sides and that's just to give you a little bit more clearance because i noticed that when i'm holding the phone and using it the notifications menu may start sliding down the menu on the side might kind of pop up or i'll exit out of an app that i don't want to exit out of so the edge touch rejection i think could use a little bit of work so it either needs to get more sensitive or we need to have slightly thicker bezels there or maybe not even a curved screen all right now let's flip it over and look at the back the very first thing you see is that camera bump it is huge and you really don't understand how big it is until you see it in front of you in real life it actually doesn't look too bad it just sticks out so prominently it is so impossible not to notice it it's two inches tall it's two inches at the diagonal and it's over an inch wide and you know when i put this phone down on a flat surface and i'm writing with the s pen i can actually feel it wobble i say this every time for every phone you're going to want to get a case but for this one especially i just feel like it would kind of round it out a little bit better and fill in some of these gaps keep it for wobbling as much and my biggest fear is that this phone falls out of my back pocket or it drops it fumbles in some way and the first thing it's going to hit is going to be this camera area strangely this camera module here isn't covered with gorilla glass victis which is the latest from gorilla glass that's on the phone's front and back this is using gorilla glass six pier kind of worries me because you would think that you want the most vulnerable part to be using the strongest glass but we're gonna find out in our torture test one thing i absolutely fallen in love with is the color it is called mystic bronze and it is gorgeous it's just sophisticated and matte instead of glossy i don't see my fingerprints coming up on it and i've never cleaned this and it's just got like this really nice sheen to it um i love it and it's very easy to tell why this is the signature color you can also get the note 20 ultra in mystic white mystic black but they are glossy and don't have this matte finish down here at the bottom we've got the s pen stylus interestingly it has moved from its home on the right to a new home on the left now samsung doesn't really have a good explanation for that maybe it moved because of the camera array um just so that there is enough room to actually store the pen as you can see it wouldn't really fit on this side and it fits pretty well over here so it did take me a little while to get used to using the stylus on the left but for me this placement isn't a problem at all let me dig into the screen a little bit it is big and beautiful really crystal clear it also has sort of an interesting feature it supports 120 hertz for the screen refresh rate in addition to 60 hertz so you can choose 60 hertz if you want and save yourself a little bit of battery life or you can choose to use what's called adaptive display which will basically give you 60 hertz when the screen is just sitting there static like this and then if you start doing something like playing a video game or scrolling it will automatically switch over to 120 hertz which will make it very smooth some of you have wondered if the fingerprint reader has gotten better on this device than previous samsung phones and in my experience so far i would say yes when i log into the phone using my thumbprint or any other fingerprint it seems to provide fewer error messages so it unlocks the phone faster and therefore causes a lot less frustration so i'm pretty happy with that so we've talked about the bump but now it's time to talk about the sensors we've got a 12 megapixel wide angle lens here 108 megapixel ultra wide angle and a 12 megapixel telephoto lens uh we also have fast autofocus the flash and on the front 10 megapixel selfie camera so these sensors may sound really familiar with the s20 but actually they're larger and the zoom is different too so we go up to 50x on this phone instead of 100x with the s20 ultra and that's a good thing i'll get to in a minute and we also have 5x optical zoom and i've already found that that's made pictures look pretty crisp as is the case with a lot of samsung phones any picture that you take outside using all the automatic modes really pretty sometimes the photos do look a little bit over saturated the colors can look a little bit candied as i like to say so really you know really red reds or really green greens for example and sometimes that's not so pleasant but overall all of these pictures are really beautiful this is also the second phone to have a 108 megapixel sensor the first time that i used it on the s20 ultra i wasn't really sure what it was for at this time i think that there were a few more natural examples i was at the park and i found that i had a bug on my shirt and so i grabbed the phone with one hand and i pulled out my shirt with the other snapped a little picture and i was able to zoom in there was actually much more detail on the weave of my shirt than on the bug but it was close enough for me to send to my family and send to friends and post online and say hey look what this is when it comes to zoom i think that the quality is actually a little bit better on this phone than it was on previous devices and i don't think that you need 100 x it's just way too much even 30 and 50x zoom there are very few natural instances that i can think of where you would want that and i would say that you get huge deterioration after about 4x and 10x but at 2x i thought that was really good i took a mouthwatering picture of a croissant and you could see every layer with 2x zoom and it was actually much better than when i just took an auto picture and the food filter came on and i leaned in close that being said i of course tested 50x zoom there was this beautiful gazebo with some wrought iron work at the very top and i got in really close to it uh there is a viewfinder on your phone so you can see where you're looking because when you're that zoomed in you have no idea where you are and even just holding as perfectly still as i could it was still jumping around so this is not easy to use it's not something you want to use often i really lucked out with the shot testing nighttime photography was a little bit of a challenge for me this time around i'll admit i'm basically still in lockdown but i was able to take some photos and the ones that i took i was actually pretty pleased with so i think that overall nighttime photography has improved i especially noticed this when i take any pictures of neon signage in the specific dedicated night mode it just really corrals that in and makes it really crisp and easy to read so that you don't have light bleeding out all over the place selfie images were also pretty standard i love that i can use the s pen as sort of like a remote shutter so i can set up the phone or hold it out and i don't have to like lean over or hold it in an awkward way i can just click that button and there's the picture so it makes it a lot more comfortable to use there are also new tone filters so you can actually warm up the scene or cool it down just by pressing a button one thing that is new to these note 20 phones is pro video mode so using it you can actually set the microphone to record more in the front or in the back you can zoom in and you can set all of the controls now i do happen to be filming this on a galaxy note 20 ultra but i am not using pro video mode because i am not a professional there are actually a ton of tricks that the stylist can do on the note phone and that's what's always set this line apart from any other device so one of them uh is a suite of five new air gestures so you just hold down on the pen button and you can sign a little arrow to go back sign another way to go home do a little squiggle that does something it's fully customizable the problem is i haven't found out where this is useful in my day-to-day life especially because as soon as i open an app or gesture to go back what do you do next you're going to have to reach in and press the button or you're going to have to use your s pen one new trick that i like better is handwriting straightening so i oftentimes write at an angle a lot of people do i think and then you can actually just push a button at the bottom and it will automatically straighten that for you the s pen is exactly the same for the note 20 ultra as it is for the note 20 but it is faster on this phone simply because it takes advantage of the 120 hertz screen refresh rate um so it feels like it is a lot faster as you're writing and scribbling around on it and when i'm using the note i always remember how much i enjoy using the stylus and all the things i like to do with it i like taking notes i like jotting down my ideas i love using the stylus to take really precise screenshots you can take an animated gif that way as well and there's a new feature too where you can bring in a pdf and annotate it i actually used that to sign something and send it back this phone uses the qualcomm snapdragon 865 plus processor and it is really snappy other regions will use samsung's homegrown exynos processor so your mileage may vary you have 128 gigabytes of on-board storage here plus the option to expand through a micro sd card slot 12 gigabytes of ram of course there's 5g but your speeds are only going to be as fast as your network battery life was another kind of funny one for me to test because normally i would wake up at six i have a full day in the office go test this phone and just see how long it lasts but these days i don't really go anywhere but so far i think that it's pretty good i definitely don't think it's amazing part of that may have to do to the phone switching over to the 120 hertz refresh rate but i'm i'm very pleased with it i would love to see what it's like during my normal routine but i can say with confidence that this is a phone that will take you from the morning to the end of your day without needing to charge there is support for 25 watt fast charging so that's with the charger that comes in the box but there is no longer support for 45 watt charging so you might be wondering what the differences are between the galaxy note 20 ultra and the standard note 20 other than the price the note 20 by the way is a thousand dollars instead of 1300 um what is screen size the note 20 has a 6.7 inch screen instead of 6.9 a bigger one would be the backing uh there is a plastic polycarbonate back instead of the glass back on the note 20. and the sides look like they're a little bit rounder the camera module looks a little bit different too you don't have any micro sd card storage uh batteries a little bit smaller and then there are a couple other little changes here or there this brings us to the question should you buy it the galaxy note 20 ultra is beyond a doubt a powerful phone it's got all of these great features and it fixes some problems from the s20 ultra like it introduces better zoom technology but it also creates some new problems like these bezels that cause a lot of errors when i hold it and this camera bump that is simply too big this is a do everything device that makes a lot of sense in a society that is very involved and on the go socially and with work and that's what it was really built for to be fair this phone was designed before the pandemic but i don't really feel like it fits into these times especially since economists are calling it the worst global recession that many of us will ever experience i wouldn't personally upgrade from the note 10 plus because i think it's got a lot of life left in that phone and i think that the features are still going to carry you through in order to make the galaxy note 20 ultra a worthwhile purchase you're gonna have to really love big phones because this one is huge and you're gonna have to find a really good deal for even more on the galaxy note 20 ultra be sure to check out our camera comparison shootout and thanks for watchingit's big it's bold it's beautiful and it is really expensive this is the samsung galaxy note 20 ultra it is a 1300 android phone that is jam-packed with all the high-end features the question is is it worth it and that's what we're here to find out first let's talk about design now this is a very large device it's got a 6.9 inch screen which is really great it's also heavy it's made of glass and metal now this phone is actually a little bit taller and a little bit wider than the galaxy note 10 plus for me that's not so great i do love a big screen but it feels just a little bit more awkward in the hand now samsung prides itself on the fact that this is truly an edge to edge screen and it is beautiful and those curved sides make it very immersive now i almost wish and this may be an unpopular opinion that the bezels were a little bit thicker on the sides and that's just to give you a little bit more clearance because i noticed that when i'm holding the phone and using it the notifications menu may start sliding down the menu on the side might kind of pop up or i'll exit out of an app that i don't want to exit out of so the edge touch rejection i think could use a little bit of work so it either needs to get more sensitive or we need to have slightly thicker bezels there or maybe not even a curved screen all right now let's flip it over and look at the back the very first thing you see is that camera bump it is huge and you really don't understand how big it is until you see it in front of you in real life it actually doesn't look too bad it just sticks out so prominently it is so impossible not to notice it it's two inches tall it's two inches at the diagonal and it's over an inch wide and you know when i put this phone down on a flat surface and i'm writing with the s pen i can actually feel it wobble i say this every time for every phone you're going to want to get a case but for this one especially i just feel like it would kind of round it out a little bit better and fill in some of these gaps keep it for wobbling as much and my biggest fear is that this phone falls out of my back pocket or it drops it fumbles in some way and the first thing it's going to hit is going to be this camera area strangely this camera module here isn't covered with gorilla glass victis which is the latest from gorilla glass that's on the phone's front and back this is using gorilla glass six pier kind of worries me because you would think that you want the most vulnerable part to be using the strongest glass but we're gonna find out in our torture test one thing i absolutely fallen in love with is the color it is called mystic bronze and it is gorgeous it's just sophisticated and matte instead of glossy i don't see my fingerprints coming up on it and i've never cleaned this and it's just got like this really nice sheen to it um i love it and it's very easy to tell why this is the signature color you can also get the note 20 ultra in mystic white mystic black but they are glossy and don't have this matte finish down here at the bottom we've got the s pen stylus interestingly it has moved from its home on the right to a new home on the left now samsung doesn't really have a good explanation for that maybe it moved because of the camera array um just so that there is enough room to actually store the pen as you can see it wouldn't really fit on this side and it fits pretty well over here so it did take me a little while to get used to using the stylus on the left but for me this placement isn't a problem at all let me dig into the screen a little bit it is big and beautiful really crystal clear it also has sort of an interesting feature it supports 120 hertz for the screen refresh rate in addition to 60 hertz so you can choose 60 hertz if you want and save yourself a little bit of battery life or you can choose to use what's called adaptive display which will basically give you 60 hertz when the screen is just sitting there static like this and then if you start doing something like playing a video game or scrolling it will automatically switch over to 120 hertz which will make it very smooth some of you have wondered if the fingerprint reader has gotten better on this device than previous samsung phones and in my experience so far i would say yes when i log into the phone using my thumbprint or any other fingerprint it seems to provide fewer error messages so it unlocks the phone faster and therefore causes a lot less frustration so i'm pretty happy with that so we've talked about the bump but now it's time to talk about the sensors we've got a 12 megapixel wide angle lens here 108 megapixel ultra wide angle and a 12 megapixel telephoto lens uh we also have fast autofocus the flash and on the front 10 megapixel selfie camera so these sensors may sound really familiar with the s20 but actually they're larger and the zoom is different too so we go up to 50x on this phone instead of 100x with the s20 ultra and that's a good thing i'll get to in a minute and we also have 5x optical zoom and i've already found that that's made pictures look pretty crisp as is the case with a lot of samsung phones any picture that you take outside using all the automatic modes really pretty sometimes the photos do look a little bit over saturated the colors can look a little bit candied as i like to say so really you know really red reds or really green greens for example and sometimes that's not so pleasant but overall all of these pictures are really beautiful this is also the second phone to have a 108 megapixel sensor the first time that i used it on the s20 ultra i wasn't really sure what it was for at this time i think that there were a few more natural examples i was at the park and i found that i had a bug on my shirt and so i grabbed the phone with one hand and i pulled out my shirt with the other snapped a little picture and i was able to zoom in there was actually much more detail on the weave of my shirt than on the bug but it was close enough for me to send to my family and send to friends and post online and say hey look what this is when it comes to zoom i think that the quality is actually a little bit better on this phone than it was on previous devices and i don't think that you need 100 x it's just way too much even 30 and 50x zoom there are very few natural instances that i can think of where you would want that and i would say that you get huge deterioration after about 4x and 10x but at 2x i thought that was really good i took a mouthwatering picture of a croissant and you could see every layer with 2x zoom and it was actually much better than when i just took an auto picture and the food filter came on and i leaned in close that being said i of course tested 50x zoom there was this beautiful gazebo with some wrought iron work at the very top and i got in really close to it uh there is a viewfinder on your phone so you can see where you're looking because when you're that zoomed in you have no idea where you are and even just holding as perfectly still as i could it was still jumping around so this is not easy to use it's not something you want to use often i really lucked out with the shot testing nighttime photography was a little bit of a challenge for me this time around i'll admit i'm basically still in lockdown but i was able to take some photos and the ones that i took i was actually pretty pleased with so i think that overall nighttime photography has improved i especially noticed this when i take any pictures of neon signage in the specific dedicated night mode it just really corrals that in and makes it really crisp and easy to read so that you don't have light bleeding out all over the place selfie images were also pretty standard i love that i can use the s pen as sort of like a remote shutter so i can set up the phone or hold it out and i don't have to like lean over or hold it in an awkward way i can just click that button and there's the picture so it makes it a lot more comfortable to use there are also new tone filters so you can actually warm up the scene or cool it down just by pressing a button one thing that is new to these note 20 phones is pro video mode so using it you can actually set the microphone to record more in the front or in the back you can zoom in and you can set all of the controls now i do happen to be filming this on a galaxy note 20 ultra but i am not using pro video mode because i am not a professional there are actually a ton of tricks that the stylist can do on the note phone and that's what's always set this line apart from any other device so one of them uh is a suite of five new air gestures so you just hold down on the pen button and you can sign a little arrow to go back sign another way to go home do a little squiggle that does something it's fully customizable the problem is i haven't found out where this is useful in my day-to-day life especially because as soon as i open an app or gesture to go back what do you do next you're going to have to reach in and press the button or you're going to have to use your s pen one new trick that i like better is handwriting straightening so i oftentimes write at an angle a lot of people do i think and then you can actually just push a button at the bottom and it will automatically straighten that for you the s pen is exactly the same for the note 20 ultra as it is for the note 20 but it is faster on this phone simply because it takes advantage of the 120 hertz screen refresh rate um so it feels like it is a lot faster as you're writing and scribbling around on it and when i'm using the note i always remember how much i enjoy using the stylus and all the things i like to do with it i like taking notes i like jotting down my ideas i love using the stylus to take really precise screenshots you can take an animated gif that way as well and there's a new feature too where you can bring in a pdf and annotate it i actually used that to sign something and send it back this phone uses the qualcomm snapdragon 865 plus processor and it is really snappy other regions will use samsung's homegrown exynos processor so your mileage may vary you have 128 gigabytes of on-board storage here plus the option to expand through a micro sd card slot 12 gigabytes of ram of course there's 5g but your speeds are only going to be as fast as your network battery life was another kind of funny one for me to test because normally i would wake up at six i have a full day in the office go test this phone and just see how long it lasts but these days i don't really go anywhere but so far i think that it's pretty good i definitely don't think it's amazing part of that may have to do to the phone switching over to the 120 hertz refresh rate but i'm i'm very pleased with it i would love to see what it's like during my normal routine but i can say with confidence that this is a phone that will take you from the morning to the end of your day without needing to charge there is support for 25 watt fast charging so that's with the charger that comes in the box but there is no longer support for 45 watt charging so you might be wondering what the differences are between the galaxy note 20 ultra and the standard note 20 other than the price the note 20 by the way is a thousand dollars instead of 1300 um what is screen size the note 20 has a 6.7 inch screen instead of 6.9 a bigger one would be the backing uh there is a plastic polycarbonate back instead of the glass back on the note 20. and the sides look like they're a little bit rounder the camera module looks a little bit different too you don't have any micro sd card storage uh batteries a little bit smaller and then there are a couple other little changes here or there this brings us to the question should you buy it the galaxy note 20 ultra is beyond a doubt a powerful phone it's got all of these great features and it fixes some problems from the s20 ultra like it introduces better zoom technology but it also creates some new problems like these bezels that cause a lot of errors when i hold it and this camera bump that is simply too big this is a do everything device that makes a lot of sense in a society that is very involved and on the go socially and with work and that's what it was really built for to be fair this phone was designed before the pandemic but i don't really feel like it fits into these times especially since economists are calling it the worst global recession that many of us will ever experience i wouldn't personally upgrade from the note 10 plus because i think it's got a lot of life left in that phone and i think that the features are still going to carry you through in order to make the galaxy note 20 ultra a worthwhile purchase you're gonna have to really love big phones because this one is huge and you're gonna have to find a really good deal for even more on the galaxy note 20 ultra be sure to check out our camera comparison shootout and thanks for watching\n"