Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G Mobile Phone; Sim Free Smartphone 128GB - Cosmic Grey, (UK Version)

Product Information

According to our display colourimeter, the S20 Ultra’s screen is pretty much faultless, aside from a slight discrepancy with oversaturated dark red tones. Contrast – as you’d expect from one of Samsung’s AMOLED screens – is a perfect infinity:1, and the screen is capable of getting plenty bright, peaking at 667cd/m2 with a torch shining directly on the ambient light sensor. Over the course of my week with the S20 Ultra my battery life experience has changed numerous times. With the 120Hz refresh rate on and two SIMs (one 5G) enabled I struggled to make it through from 8am to 10pm without getting nervous and topping things up before I left the office. The Note 20 Ultra consistently lasted us a full day on a single charge with normal use. It’s not Samsung’s longest-lasting phone, and that comes down to the curbed battery capacity compared to the S20 Ultra – 4,500mAh for the Note 20 Ultra vs 5,000mAh for the S20 Ultra. That said, we found it to have enough juice for most power users who gravitate to a Note. Battery: Actual battery life varies by network environment, features and apps used, frequency of calls and messages, number of times charged, and many other factors.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G Mobile Phone; Sim Free Smartphone

For this review, I have been using a European Galaxy S20 Ultra powered by the Exynos 990 and 12GB RAM. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Qualcomm edition varied in areas like battery life and benchmark scores as we’ve seen this previously with Samsung phones. Customisability is key here; whether it’s changing how the phone performs while you’re gaming to how fast or high-res the screen is, Samsung lets you tweak lots of things to work how you want them too. Big doesn’t necessarily define the Note series anymore. Oh, the Note 20 Ultra is a massive phone in the hand, requiring two meaty paws to operate it – it's just no longer uniquely big. It shares the same 6.9-inch screen size with the S20 Ultra. It’s impossible to justify the Galaxy S20 Ultra price for everyone – even those who bought the S9 Plus or S10 Plus, and intended to get the next ‘big one’ from Samsung. The answer is simply that you should go with the regular S20 if you want the S20 range while keeping things relatively affordable and the Ultra for just the all-round best device. S20 Ultra or the newer S21 Ultra: which is the better choice

Samsung gets the 'Ultra' right

User Available Memory: User memory is less than the total memory due to storage of the operating system and software used to operate the device features. Actual user memory will vary depending on the operator and may change after software upgrades are performed. In fact, there’s currently no Android phone on the market that’s any faster than this. I say Android because Apple’s A13 Bionic – which powered the iPhone 11 lineup – still has everything beat. Not that you should worry though, as the S20 Ultra is powerful enough to handle absolutely anything you care to throw at it, and then some.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Samsung’s best phone yet

Samsung's 'single-take mode' helps you answer an everyday question: should I take photos or a video? Seeing a timer ring form around the 10MP selfie camera punch hole, rather than having to badly guess where the camera lens is inside the display – invaluable for group selfies. There's a 25W charger in the box, and the Ultra is compatible with an optional 45W charger and 15W wireless charger

However, adding 120Hz doesn’t come without some slight downsides. The biggest being its dramatic effect on battery life. Even though the S20 Ultra has a 5000mAh cell, enabling the smoother motion left me with a phone that only just about made it through the day, heavily cutting my screen-on time compared to 60Hz. This is likely the main reason why Samsung has decided against letting you keep the resolution at WQHD+ (3200 x 1440), with 120Hz instead restricted to FHD+ (2400 x 1080). While Samsung phones, those with Exynos chips at least, are fast to begin with, it is months and years down the line where things start to fade. Apple’s phones are so good at staying fast for years that I always feel let down by Samsung in this regard. My Note 10 Plus, for example, takes an extra second longer to load apps now than it did at launch – will the same happen here? This is a section where there could be some differences if you have the Qualcomm version of the Galaxy S20 Ultra or the Exynos one. There were huge gulfs in battery life between the models of both the S10 and Note 10, with the Snapdragon variant seemingly lasting a lot longer. All my thoughts here are from the European Exynos version. We still found that some iPhone 11 Pro Max and Google Pixel 4 photos retained more detail in low-light situations, although Samsung seems to have improved its Night Mode over the last year, and side-by-side, no one is doing telephoto better than Samsung – unless you count Huawei’s non-Android phones.