Samsung today unveiled the "end of summer-autumn" collection, or rather the flagship phones from the second half of 2020. It's about the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. The Ultra model is the best equipped, with a reasonable price and relies heavily on advanced audio capture, a more angular design, large screen, but a fairly ergonomic and compact body.
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Video Presentation:
Some decisions made in Note 10 have been reversed, the stylus has a much lower latency and new control and navigation gestures. We also have a completely new photo setup in the back and a familiar CPU. First impressions and all the details about the 6.9-inch phablet with periscope camera, which I recently got my hands on, can be found below.
Design
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is a phone made of glass and metal (stainless steel). Where the Note 20 had a plastic back, the Note 20 Ultra brings a glass back. Where the Note 20 had a flat screen, the Note 20 Ultra increases the diagonal and offers a curved panel on the edges, but not excessive, a discreet curvature and not a "waterfall". The phone weighs 208 grams and measures 8.1 mm at the waist.
It has IP68 certification and will be available in Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black and Mystic White. It is very important to mention that the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is the first phone that comes with Gorilla Glass Victus, protection recently announced, and here it appears front and back.
Display
This smartphone has a 6.9 inch Dynamic AMOLED screen with WQHD + resolution and 120 Hz adaptive refresh rate. It has very narrow edges and a hole in the top and center for the selfie camera.
Hardware
The room
In front we find a 10 megapixel selfie camera with Dual Pixel Autofocus technology, and in the back we have a triple camera set, along with a special laser sensor for depth. Note 20 Ultra has a 108 MP main camera, a 12 MP ultrawide camera and a 12 MP periscope telephoto camera with 5X optical zoom and 50X digital zoom. The name Space Zoom is still in the equation.
I had the opportunity to see the zoom camera in action, being on a high floor in a central area of the Capital and being able to see the clear details of the scaffolding placed next to the dome of a cathedral, even at 30X and even 50X zoom. The advanced zoom seems much better stabilized than the S20 Ultra. Samsung has put a lot of emphasis on advanced audio capture and allows you to record audio while shooting with all microphones, front or rear. You also have the option of recording with a pair of Galaxy Buds headphones connected to your phone or a professional microphone connected via USB.
Pro Video mode now works in real time as we shoot and go to ISO, Shutter speed, exposure and more during capture. We can control the zoom speed, and Single Take has also evolved, allowing now a total of 15 seconds of capture and extra filters, as well as Hyperlapse capture. An 8K cinematic film was also implemented at 24 FPS and in 21: 9, following the model of the Hollywood captures.
Each movie can have a set speed and playback set to create a slow motion at the pace we want. The clips can be combined with the Highlight Reel function and can have new filters applied, soundtracks, plus all the options from the Note 10, which were a lot. We also have special 120 FPS footage, so you can enjoy the videos as they should be seen on the 120 Hz screen. From what I understand, we also have new color options in Portrait mode, to simulate a professional photo capture of your face in a photo studio.
OS, UI, S-Pen
The phone runs Android 10 with One UI 2.5 applied over. It does not make any visual changes to the One UI 2.1 and retains its Samsung Daily homescreen, multitasking, Dark Mode and all the other classic features. Samsung has bet heavily on its partnership with Microsoft, which includes expanding its Link to Windows functionality, as well as the ability to play Xbox games on your phone via Xbox Game Pass.
About 100 titles will be available in the first phase. All the productivity activities we do on our phone will sync with OneNote and we'll be able to continue working on our PC. There is also drag and drop between PC and phone. The Samsung DeX feature is now also available wirelessly, which means you can mirror your phone screen on any Samsung TV from 2019 onwards.
Related to the S-Pen, an important bonus over the Note 20 is that we have a 9 ms latency of the stylus, compared to the 26 ms of the Note 20 and 48 ms of previous generations. A feature appears in Samsung Notes that allows you to correct handwriting, even if it's crooked. We also presented this feature in video hands-on.
Additionally, you can save what you wrote as a PDF, highlight and take notes on an existing PDF, and save it in another format, including PowerPoint. You can take notes now while capturing audio of what you hear around and integrate the note into your document. Samsung has simplified and clarified the way Samsung Notes are organized so that there is no confusion. We have some sort of folders now in the Nested system.
S-Pen has 5 new control gestures, bringing the total to 11. So far we can move the stylus in the air to move from one camera to another, zoom in and take photos by pressing the button on the S-Pen. Now that we hold down that button we will be able to make 5 new gestures: Home, Back, Recents, Smart Select and Screen Write.
Each one is in the shape of the letter "V", let's just say, it rotates differently in the air, if I may make a metaphor. I had a tutorial and it seemed easier to learn with these gestures than last year. Smart Select allows you to make a screen selection, from which you can even create a GIF or a video, and with Screen Write you take a screenshot and write or draw on it. Thanks to the low latency, the writing experience with the stylus is now a "pencil on sheet" type, the latency is not felt at all. On the security side we have Knox, but also an ultrasonic fingerprint reader integrated in the screen.
Another novelty comes in the area of connectivity, through the support of UWB (Ultra Wide Band). The technology allows this phone to make very high speed transfers with other Samsung terminals, but also to have a more precise positioning inside. 8250 MHz band is used and you will be able to direct a Note 20 to another Note 20 or other future UWB chip phones for ultra-fast transfer. The technology is similar to the UWB chips on the iPhone 11, with which the phones were oriented in space after other iPhone 11 units in their area.
Price and availability
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra can be pre-ordered from August 5 for 1299 euros. In some territories it will come with a bonus in the form of a 3-month Xbox Game Pass subscription, but I do not guarantee that with us.
conclusions
With the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, Samsung returns to a more mature, serious and angular design approach. 2 keywords define the product: wireless and audio. In wireless we think of navigation through the interface with the stylus, now in the whole interface and all the menus with Back, Recents, Home, and also in wireless we have Dex and synchronization in cloud and cloud gaming. In audio, we have plenty of audio capture options during filming.
The 120 Hz screen, the amount of RAM, the battery and the processor could qualify the terminal as attractive for gamers, especially considering that you can also play Xbox games on your phone. I also notice that Samsung allows us to do more and more activities while the phone does multitasking: it sends an image via Dex Wireless to the TV, you take notes. It captures audio of a conference, you can take notes.
Last year Note 10 was a phone for vloggers, gamers, influencers. I had a ton of video and AR editing options. This year is a phone call for journalists, for those who can't bring content to the newsroom whose acoustics don't sound like 10/10. It's for those who have their hands busy even when they have their hands free, so to speak. Note 20 Ultra is a more sober product, more focused on a mature target audience, who knows what he wants on the business side and creating niche content.
That audience also has a bigger budget and that is reflected in the price. It has no pretensions of a cameraphone, although from what I saw it is not at all ridiculous when filming, zooming, options. It remains to be seen whether the laser rangefinder has managed to compensate for the ToF of the last year ...
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, updated prices: