SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 20 ULTRA 5G
One of the best and most expensive phones you can get
With its massive, lush screen and powerful S Pen,
this is hard to beat
From $1,799 samsung.com
The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is Samsung’s most expensive, most premium flagship phone of 2020. It’s not for the bargain hunters – it’s for people who want a smartphone that pushes the bar as high as possible and don’t mind paying extra for it.
It looks like a phone made for the super-rich (as indeed its price tag suggests) – all finely polished curves and a 6.9-inch, 1440 x 3088 pixel resolution, HDR10+ supporting AMOLED screen. It runs at 60Hz by default, but will ramp up to 120Hz if you knock down the resolution to 1080p FHD. You simply can’t fault this from a design perspective.
If we did have to pick a flaw, we’re not all that happy with the huge camera bulge at the back of the phone. You won’t be able to lie this phone flat on its back, and the bulge makes it more difficult to slip it into a pocket but this wouldn’t put us off buying it.
Fortunately, that camera is fantastic; in particular the 5x optical
zoom is going to get you closer to whatever subject it is that you’re photographing. The triple-lens 108MP wide, 12MP periscope telephoto and 12MP ultrawide rear camera produces pictures that are fantastically bright and sharp, with excellent colour reproduction that’s maybe a touch too vibrant in certain situations. Dark and light spots are well-handled by the HDR processing, focus and shutter speed are good, and overall this is a camera that’s definitely worthy of a flagship phone.
Night mode shots come out reasonably well too, though we think that the Google Pixels and even the Apple iPhones are ahead of Samsung in this area. The brightening effect Samsung uses is just a bit too aggressive, though it will definitely help the camera pick out details where there’s very little light available.
Slick scribbler
Battery life is satisfactory without being spectacular, which is perhaps to be expected considering the huge screen, super-fast processor and 5G. While you will make it to the end of most days with some charge left, you might need a top-up during the day if you’re really stressing your phone.
There’s a huge amount of power on board, led by the Exynos 990 processor. That’s paired with 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage, which would outclass many a laptop, never mind other smartphones. 5G is included, as the name gives away, but you’d expect that at this price.
We can confirm that the phone is blazingly fast in day-to-day use, even if you’ve got all of your favourite apps loaded up at once and dozens of tabs on the go in your web browser. This is one of the most powerful smartphones ever released – so powerful in fact, that it offers more speed than a lot of people are really going to need.
Once again though, the key feature of the Note 20 Ultra 5G is the S Pen. This super-responsive stylus is the main reason most people will get this phone, and it gives you the usual slick pointing and scribbling performance we’ve become accustomed to from this accessory. As well as reducing the latency even further from the Note 10, it now supports more remote shortcuts and gestures than ever before, and it’s really handy for operating the phone camera via remote control.
The phone comes with Android 10 on board, and the OneUI that Samsung sticks on top of that continues to improve (even if we still prefer the stock Android experience).
With a starting price above $1,700, this is not a phone for the fainthearted. In the end, the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is the phone for the person who wants everything: a premium design, fine performance, a really good camera, 5G connectivity and a stylus, all wrapped up in one very expensive package. If that sounds like you, and you have the cash, you won’t be disappointed by what this Samsung flagship has to offer.