Samsung Galaxy S24/Ultra Impressions: More Than Meets The Eye!
(bright music) – Yo, welcome to your first look at the Samsung Galaxy S24 Series. And I think they’re way more interesting than they look on the outside. So we got three new phones today: Galaxy S24, S24+ and S24 Ultra. And as expected, yes, they look very similar to the S23 lineup, especially design-wise, but it’s when you get under the hood and especially with software and the whole Samsung AI thing, that it gets way more interesting. So first, let me start with everything that’s physically new, ’cause the list actually isn’t long. So on the outside, S24
and S24+ are going to look just like last year, same dimensions, same body sizes, the camera rings, the button placement. There’s just new colors: black, gray, violet and yellow. All matte instead of glossy, which I was not expecting, but I like it. And then it’s squared off, basically exactly like an iPhone. Now, I know, you know, sometimes people say, oh, there’s this feature that kind of resembles the iPhone or it looks a little like the iPhone. No, these flat sides and the flat screen look exactly like the iPhone all the way around, just being honest
here, but now inside that body, the bezels are again, slightly thinner all the way around, making way for slightly larger displays on S24 and S24+. So now it’s 6.2
It’s 1080 by default, but that’s definitely an upgrade they didn’t have to do and I appreciate that. And then the phones also have slightly larger batteries, both of ’em, up to 4,000 milliamp hours on the S24 and 4,900 milliamp hours on the S24+. And then the big dog, the S24 Ultra is actually even more tweaked. So again, it looks similar, obviously, but it’s trimmed up just a tiny bit. It’s just a little bit thinner, and then these side rails are now titanium instead of aluminum, whoever heard that before. And the display up at the front
is now completely 100% flat from corner to corner, and I’m really liking it. So you might remember we went from having really dramatically curved edges on the old Ultra phones and Notes from back in the day, to a gentle curve, to almost no curve, but now it’s no curve at all, which means it’s totally flat, and there’s actually much less bezels all the way around. And the screen goes to the very edges. And then also the Ultra is matte in all of its new colors, black like usual, but a new titanium color and a violet
and yellow. Then on the inside they’re all running the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip across the board. And then the cameras, the cameras appear to be more or less the same as last year with the S24 and S24+, but the S24 Ultra, they’ve shook it up just a little bit. So the Ultra phone we’ve gotten used to having this space zoom. So it was the 200 megapixel main camera, but then it had two telephotos: a 3x and a 10x. But with this new S24 Ultra, you still get the 200 megapixel main camera, but then
a 3x telephoto and then a new 5x telephoto, which is kind of curious, but I actually think it makes sense here. Basically the 10x is a huge jump of zoom and I think Samsung is realizing not a lot of people are actually zooming to 10x, is just my theory anyway, so instead of having a 10x telephoto lens, which was only 10 megapixels, this new redesigned 5x is 50 megapixels. So the 5x, you know, that’s a much more common zoom range, and then the higher megapixel count should mean that when you hit the 10x button that’s
in the camera, it crops into the middle 50% of the frame and you should still have nearly the same quality of a shot as the old low-res 10x. Now, this is all a theory, a lens theory, but I’m gonna have to test all this stuff out and of course see how well it works for the full review. So definitely make sure you get subscribed to see that when it comes out. Shout out to MatPat. Now, other than that, it feels like it’s pretty much the same set of cameras across the board, and the Ultra that
also still has a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery with the S-Pen slotted in the side as usual. So if you want all the new specs across the board, here’s a nice little chart we’ve made for you, so you can pause and see the numbers and the prices and everything. I do wish to S24 started at 256 gigs in 2024, but anyway, we gotta talk about this new chip for a minute. So all these phones are running the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip across the board, great flagship chip, beginning of its life cycle, so you know, there’s
a couple phones trickling out with this one now, and there will be way more. And of course I have to test things, like the performance and the battery life and how heating works out, but it’s also very clear that Qualcomm has built in a bunch of AI processing features into this chip. And so now it’s up to the manufacturers who use the chip to decide what to do with it, and so there’s phones coming out left and right with all kinds of AI features, and I think a lot of ’em are actually the most useful
parts of some of these phones, and let me know if you agree. So the big one that I think most people will find the most useful on this phone is the instant visual search. So no matter where you are on the phone, whatever you’re doing, if you just hold down the home button, or if you have gestures, just hold down the gesture bar, you can then either tap or circle something on your screen to instantly Google search it. And it’s just, the few times I played with it, it’s really fast, and this whole visual search
feature thing, it’s not like it’s totally new. Like, we’ve had Reverse Image Search and Google Lens for years, but I’m loving the convenience of just, you know, being on a website, seeing an image or something you just wanna know more about, and then just long pressing, Googling it real quick, and getting the info. Or even something in your gallery, you know, maybe there’s a landmark or something in a photo and you just Google the image. I mean I think it’s awesome. I think people are gonna be probably using it a lot. It’s also just something
you have to spend a little time getting used to, ’cause everyone knows you can type things into Google, but to just visual search Google stuff, super useful. Then basically there’s a bunch of other little places in the phone where you see the little stars, the little barred stars. If you see those, then you know there’s some AI lurking ready to help you out, just press it. So the voice recorder app gets AI, so now it does much improved speaker labels and transcriptions, and it can actually summarize your voice recording after you record into a bunch
of bullet points. The Notes app gets AI. Now it can do things like straighten out your handwriting or turn your notes into bullet points, or summarize your notes. It’s just, you gotta find those little stars and press ’em. And the Galaxy S24 Ultra, it feels like it becomes more than just the ultimate note-taking device, but now it’s even more useful on top of the already borderline magical handwriting recognition and all that stuff, so I love that. The phone app gets AI. So this stuff might start to sound familiar, but let’s say you’re gonna have a
phone call with someone who speaks a different language. It will do live transcription and translation audibly in real time as you’re having the conversation. So let’s say I only speak English and you’re gonna call someone who only speaks Korean, so you have to go into the phone app and download the language pack before the call, so it does all this transcription offline with a model stored on the device, and it seems like the models are, you know, somewhere from 100 to 500 megs each, and when you get on the phone, you just speak your language
and the phone will visually and audibly translate what you’re saying for the person on the other end. They hear their own language. Then they speak their language and the same thing. You hear them, but then you immediately hear a translated version in your own language. And it’s pretty fast. I mean, I’ve never used live translation this smooth before. Now, I also don’t speak Korean, so I’m not about to vouch for how accurate it is, but you know, I’m gonna try this with Spanish and try to verify a little more when I review the phone, but
there’s even the option to not even hear the other person speak, but just hear the translated voice, which is bold, but it also speaks to how accurate they think it is. And then of course the photo app gets AI. This one’s not a shocker, but it’s also kind of shocking how close it is to some other things that we’ve seen before. So once you have a photo, you hit the info button with the stars, and you can do a couple simple things like add background blur or erase an object in the background or remaster a
photo, which seems like it’s just doing some color and lighting and balance tweaks automatically. That’s cool. It works. I think a lot of people will just find that stuff useful right off the bat, but once you go into the editor, you’ll see in the bottom left hand corner a familiar group of stars that are back. It’s literally a full on magic editor, just like the Pixel. (laughs) So you jump in there, you can circle things, highlight things to move around, and of course it’s even more precise with the S-Pen, but then it literally does the
same thing. It takes a few seconds to generate to fill the background, it plays a nice little animation, and then when it’s done, it’s spits out a few options of a new photo that is just completely fake. And also, I don’t know, there seems to be less restrictions with this one than Google’s, at least, because I remember the Pixel was very picky about letting me move people around, but I encountered nothing that this one was not willing to mess with, so the good thing is in the final result, there is a baked in watermark at
the bottom left-hand corner. So you’ll know in your gallery if you’re looking at an image that has those stars as a watermark, that it didn’t actually look like that when you captured it. And you can also apparently turn a regular video into a slow motion video as the AI generates new frames in between actually captured frames, and that can slow down the video for you. I don’t know how well that’s gonna work. Again, if it’s as good as some of the generative AI stuff I’ve seen, could be shockingly good, but that’s just another AI feature.
Either way, clearly there’s a lot going on. Now, it’s kind of funny. Bixby (laughs) is like sort of the main character of AI on Samsung phones in the past, and I don’t really see any indication that Bixby itself is actually taking big leaps forward. It’s still on the phones. It still works, but we’ll have to see. I’m gonna test that. I gotta test how good these screens are, how well these new cameras work, and all that stuff. And maybe there’s some other stuff buried in that I haven’t found yet that isn’t just blatantly copying Apple’s
homework. And also, if you want your phone to look at least a little different, I checked with channel sponsor dbrand, and they confirmed that they’re ready to go with the Grip Case shipping around the same time that Samsung will be shipping out these phones. One thing I’ve always liked about the Grip Case is they actually individually do the precise cutouts of the camera lenses instead of just one big lazy window cutout. Oh and bonus, they added MagSafe compatibility this year for the S24 series. So if you want a clean, protective, matte black magnetic case, well,
that links in the description. Either way, let me know what you think of these new phones and let me know what you wanna see in the full review. (smooth music) Some interesting stuff here, I’ll say that. Thanks for watching, catch you in the next one. Peace. (smooth music continues)
