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The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is finally here.
So let's take it for a spin.
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When you first take the note 20 Ultra out of the box there is no doubt that this is Samsung's flagship phone for a reason.
It just looks and feels incredibly premium.
A head of our full review I wanted to share with you some thoughts and first impressions after having used the note 20 Ultra everything from the S Pen.
To the camera tricks and the display, so let's dive in
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The note 20 Ultra, shouldn't provide too many surprises if you're coming from an earlier note device.
A few things that I did notice compared to last year's note 10 plus Which incidentally is one of my favorite phones of all time.
So this phone definitely has a lot to live up to in my eyes.
The configuration of the buttons was the first thing I noticed.
So instead of being on the left hand side as they were on the Note 10 Plus, they are now on the right hand side so they fall really easily on the thumb.
If you are right handed, I prefer them on the right hand side.
The next thing you'll probably notice is where the S Pen is located.
It's no longer On the right hand side, as it wasn't all of the previous Notes, now it is on the left hand side underneath the screen.
It's actually advantageous I think for left hand users.
Because I'm actually right handed and when I'm not using the S Pen, the phone is usually in my right hand.
But when I need to use the S Pen Take it out using my left hand, swap the phone over to my left hand so I can have the S Pen in my right hand.
Just a little bit of extra muscle memory that I know I'm going to have to get used to given that the pen has changed locations.
The other thing you will Really gonna notice is the camera bump on the back which is significantly larger than any other note phone that we've seen in the past.
It's more on par with the Galaxy S20 Ultra from earlier this year, which also had a A much larger camera bump and there's a reason for that it is housing, a lot more camera, it is got a 5 times optical zoom, which then goes out to 50 times digital which I will talk about in a little bit in the camera section.
Overall, the bump itself is doesn't really make the phone feel too heavy one way or the other.
I didn't find that it was like counterbalanced.
Oddly when I was holding it at all, the only thing that I did notice about the camera bump was that if I was lying the phone on a flat surface, it did cause the phone to be a little uneven if I was using it while it was lying flat or using the S pen to write without holding the device.
To get around that obviously you can put a case on and I did find a case provided a little bit of a better balance on a flat surface.
But if you put a case on it, you are gonna lose the nice effect of whatever color you choose either the mystic bronze or the black.
The mystic bronze actually looks really, really nice in person, and I found that it was much less of a fingerprint magnet than last year's Note 10 Plus.
Which really look like a crime scene each time I used it.
So, I'm really grateful to see that's there's less finger print residue left on the Note 20 ultra.
The other reason why you might not want to put a case on this is because it's covered in Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and back.
Now, this is the first phone to use the brand new Gorilla Glass Which promises drop resistance from heights up to 6.6 feet, that is 2 meters.
So, we are yet to do our durability and drop tests on this phone.
Stay tuned because it's going to be really interesting to see how this new glass performs and whether or not that camera bump is gonna be affected at all.
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Let's talk display because that flagship feature of the 6.9 inch dynamic analyt is the 120 hertz refresh rate.
And it looks great on the NERC 20 Ultra.
If you've used a high refresh rate phone before you'll know what I'm talking about.
Unfortunately, I can't really show it to you on camera.
But you'll see incredibly seamless scrolling, going through menus, reading articles, social media, and especially gaming.
It all looks great on this phone and the screen is bright and dynamic.
It's set by default to be 120 hertz or Adaptive screen which is in the settings, you can actually switch it back to 60 hertz if you want.
And it is interesting that Samsung clearly said in that menu item that using 120 hertz will detract from battery life.
Now this is just a preview.
This is not our full review.
So do stay tuned.
We will be doing full battery tests and performance analysis for you really soon.
All right, time for the S Pen because that is the big reason why you want a Galaxy Note.
So first off the actual S Pen itself is not any different to the S Pen that we saw on the note 10 plus from last year it is pretty much exactly the same What is different is obviously with a higher refresh rate, there is slightly more accuracy and more realism when it comes to using the S Pen.
Now what I mean by that is that when you're using it to say take notes, it is so like this so little latency It feels like you're actually almost riding on a real piece of paper.
Air actions are also a new feature of the S Pen this time around.
So what that means is you'll be able to press and hold the button and then move the pen in a certain direction to do things like Navigate back forward, make a scribble in order to take a screenshot and then you can annotate over it.
And you can also navigate between music and media apps.
And also use the pen in the camera to do things like take selfies or start the remote shot of when you got the phone sitting on a bench and you wanna start shooting remotely using the S Pen.
So I really like those extra bits of functionality although whether or not they are a little bit gimmicky only time will tell.
I have so far found that I have to be very deliberate with the air actions.
So by that, I mean I can't just furiously press and hold the button down and just like conduct an orchestra virtually.
I actually had to be very deliberate and slow with the action in order to get it to register.
There are also some tweaks to the notes app, so you'll be able to attach and time sync recordings, using your voice and then playing back and seeing them play back in real time with the notes that you've written.
You'll also be able to change the style of the text.
After you've written it with the S Pen, just tap the A icon and then you can do things like change the color and the stroke width as well.
And you'll also be able to straighten your handwriting to just tap the icon with the arrow and the lines and it should straighten your very crooked handwriting.
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All right, camera time one of my favorite things to talk about when it comes to new phones.
Now the camera bump, as you've probably mentioned means that there's a lot of new camera functionality available.
But really the thing that you're interested in probably is the 108 megapixel wide angle camera.
Now that's very similar to what we saw on the S 20 Ultra from earlier in the year.
Essentially what it means is yes, you can take 108 megapixel shots, but really the key is the pixel binning to be able to get the most detailed and less noise in the image when you are shooting at the 12 megapixels by default on that main rear camera.
The other important thing about the still images is the Zoom functionality.
So we did say the es 20 Ultra have that hundred times- Space soon.
I think Samsung realized that it was a little bit too out there.
And it wasn't particularly good quality at 100 times either, as you would expect.
Now on the note 20 Ultra, it is now a 50 times maximum zoom, that's digital and 5 times optical zoom Really for me the sweet spot in my limited testing that I've done just recently with the knight 20 Ultra is that 10 times zoom that is just seems to be like a really nice compromise in between the hybrid of optical and digital zoom.
Now, you might also remember that the S 20 Ultra use a phase detection autofocus system and that had some problems when it first rolled out, namely.
It just wasn't getting the focus right in a lot of situations, there was a lot of hunting.
The Note 20 Ultra is hopefully gonna fix this with it's laser auto focus system.
I have done a little bit of testing along side the S20 Ultra, I think it has been improved significantly.
So more testing to be done obviously, but I think it is off to a really good start.
There's also a pro video mode on the rear camera that gives you lots of extra control over your video recording.
I'm actually shooting this right now, 4k 30 frames a second using pro video mode, you get Full Exposure Control.
There's also a live histogram and live level monitoring.
You also can change the direction of where the audio is coming from from the built in microphones.
So it's either omnidirectional Coming from the front or the rear of the camera, I have it set to coming from the rear cameras to take a listen and see what it sounds like.
Apart from all those controls, it's also about resolution and frame rates.
So the note 20 Ultra also gives you the ability to shoot in 8k if you want to at 24 frames a second.
I can't show you what that looks like right now because This has been rented out to 4k, but you can also shoot an 8k and I'll show you lots of samples of that later on, the frame rates and aspect ratios you also get a quite exhaustive,there is 21 by 9,16 by 9, lots of different frame rates within that.
Whether you're shooting 4k or 1080.
I really like the fact that there is The 1080 at 120 frames a second, it's gonna open up a lot more possibilities for some cool slo-mo effects.
So looking forward to diving into that more.
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Now let's touch on the things that you can't see but are still incredibly important.
The first is Android updates.
Samsung has promised that the Note 20 Ultra will receive three generations of updates.
The next is Android 11.
We know that the Note 20 Ultra is gonna receive the update once it's rolled out.
The phone also is ready to go with Android nearby share straight out of the box so you'll be able to use that.
And also it has the ultra wideband or UW v chip.
It's the first Samsung phone to have this.
Basically it's going to make transfers wirelessly to other EU web devices really easy, except the caveat is that there's only one Samsung phone with you web at the moment.
That is the note 20 Ultra, so Unless you send it to another friend that also has an AR 20 Ultra, you're really not gonna be able to make the most of that just yet.
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There's also a whole lot of other features that I haven't even touched on including decks, Microsoft support and so much more.
But don't worry because everything like that including battery life and performance we are going to cover off in our full review.
Thanks for watching.
If you have questions about the Note 20 Ultra, or if you want to find out more information, you can check put a bunch of our other videos.
Leave me your comments, and let me know if you are upgrading to the Note 20 Ultra.
