Review of Samsung's Galaxy S24, S24 Plus: Battery Life Is Where It's At

Speaker 1: This is the Galaxy S 24 and S 24 plus. You know the Samsung phones that aren't the ultra well, I've been using them for a week to make calls, group chats in different languages, transform photos into Monty Python levels of ridiculousness and even participate in a Zoom video call for work. Hey, it's not all glamorous reviewing a phone, but let's dive in. Speaker 1: Hey, good morning. I'm recording myself on the Galaxy S 24 [00:00:30] plus headed to our video shoot and I thought it might be fun to check in on how the battery life does today. So right now at 11:30 AM yeah, we're getting a late start. It's 97%, so I'll come back throughout the video and let you know how the battery life does. The S 24 and S 24 plus are wonderful. Well-built phones that are excellent right out of the box, just like the nearly identical S 23 and S 23 plus were before [00:01:00] it. Now this similarity can be viewed as either a strength because the design reflects years of refinements or a weakness because features like the camera hardware are essentially identical to what came out on the S 22 in 2022. Both phones keep their squared off aluminum design with rounded corners from last year's S 23 and S 23 plus, but they're taller and you'd have to be Antman or Rick Baras to actually notice both phones [00:01:30] have new, slightly larger displays. Speaker 1: A 6.2 inch screen on the S 24 and a 6.7 inch one on the S 24 plus, like the S 24 Ultra, both screens reach a peak brightness of 2,600 knits. Now Celso set up a bright light in the studio and we aimed it at the phones, and as you can see next to the Galaxy S 21, the S 24 is brighter. The displays are easier to view whether taking photos outdoors under direct sunlight [00:02:00] or in a video game arcade checking text messages. The S 24 plus the screen has a higher resolution and can max out at Quad HD plus. That's the same resolution as the Ultra. In fact, since the S 24 plus has a smaller display than the Ultra, the Plus actually has a higher pixel density. Yeah, you can't really see the difference, but knowing it's there makes me happy. Hey, it's Patrick. Speaker 1: I'm on the rooftop of seeing that right here. It's getting ready to rain and we [00:02:30] did some videos downstairs. We just did a shoot out here, but I want to update you on the battery. We are at 87% and now back to me, I can't believe I've made it this far into the video without saying ai. Now artificial intelligence is nothing new, but it's a generic term. It's a bit like asking someone what they're wearing for them to reply. Clothes, AI shows up in a variety of ways on the S 24 and S 24 plus out of every AI feature I tried Circle the search is the most polished [00:03:00] and compelling. It lets you search for anything on the screen just by circling it with your finger. So circle the search can work with a photo on a website or in an app or even like Google Lens in your gallery. Speaker 1: So let's do some searching to get it to work. I press and hold on the home button for a second, then the sparkly overlay pops up and then I circle part of the photo next, it dubs its magic and puts search results at the bottom of the screen. Now if you've used a phone for a while, you might remember [00:03:30] a time when pulled a refresh wasn't a thing and then bam one day it was everywhere. I feel the same will be true about Circle to search right now. It works not only on the S 24 series, but also on the Pixel eight and eight Pro and will come to the S 23 line as well, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Circle to Search, make it to every phone eventually even the iPhone. The AI translation tools are also impressive, even though language translation itself isn't new to phones, but the implementation [00:04:00] here is compelling and the new angle is that it's done all on device. Speaker 1: I had a phone call translated in real time between myself speaking English and a friend speaking Spanish. The accuracy was just okay, but I found the text message translation more useful than calls. The interface looks clean and is intuitively built right into the keyboard. Now here's a conversation I'm having with Celso who's typing in Portuguese, and you can see as I type, it translates things in real time and the accuracy is better [00:04:30] than the phone call, but still, well not perfect on the whole. None of these AI power tools are the reason to buy this phone or really any phone. Right now. We're still on the generative AI germination phase and I'll come back to a few more AI features and the camera section. Hey, it's Patrick and I'm in front of the high scores video game arcade here in Alameda, California. If you haven't figured it out, we've shot a lot of the review video here. I'm guessing you've already seen it at this point, but I just want to do a quick battery check-in [00:05:00] it's 3:30 PM and my battery is at 84%. Yay. Both phones have a T of wide ultra wide and three times telephoto lenses. The main camera has a 50 megapixel sensor and can capture 50 megapixel or 12 megapixel photos. In good lighting. Photos look great with decent dynamic range and image quality, but in mixed or dim lighting when night mode isn't triggered, details look soft and processed. Now take a look at some of the photos of videos [00:05:30] I shot with the S 24 and S 24 plus Speaker 1: When it comes to camera quality. The Galaxy S 24 and S 24 plus can keep pace with the Pixel eight and iPhone 15, but barely. I mean here take a look at some photos I took of an espresso bar at four coffee here in San Francisco. Now it was dim [00:06:00] enough to challenge the cameras on all three phones while not dark enough to actually activate night mode. All three photos look good. Now the Pixel eight and S 24 plus expose their photos similarly and look the closest to real life. The iPhone 15 brightened everything up, which results in a nice looking photo, but also throws off the color temperature. In terms of details, look at the coffee beans in the hopper here. The S 24 pluses photo looked a bit soft while the pixel eights image was [00:06:30] a bit over sharpened and the iPhone fifteens snapped was well, somewhere in the middle. Speaker 1: These results bode well in particular for the regular $800 S 24, but the S 24 plus having an a thousand dollars price tag and competing against the likes of the Pixel eight Pro, an iPhone 15 Pro. Well, it's hard to be excited about what the plus offers in terms of photography. It's definitely capable but not the best, nor does it come close to what's considered [00:07:00] the best cameras on phones today. There's another thing you should know about taking photos and videos, and that's some of the photo editing tools that are powered by AI in the gallery app. I can tap and hold on any video while it's playing and turn it instantly into slow mo even if it wasn't filmed in slow motion. Degenerative AI adds frames to the video and the experience is fun and like the saying goes, everything looks better in slow motion. Speaker 1: Then there's the over the top generative edit [00:07:30] tool similar to the Pixel eight's magic editor and actually based on the same underlying technology, this tool can delete objects and people from a photo and fill in the empty space where they were. Now, I haven't seen a flawless result as there's always some visible remnant or halo indicating that something is off. I find the mundane photo fixes are actually the most useful and I could use the same generative edit tool to straighten photos. Now I enjoy leveling a photos horizon. Hey, my dad was [00:08:00] an architect, so yeah, I'm that guy on most phones. This usually means cropping in on the photo to get the desired straightened result. Now on the S 24 and S 24 plus generative edit can actually fill in the missing parts, the edges of the photo beyond the original frame that weren't even there. Speaker 1: When I edited the photo and the results look good, the gallery app has another trick I can swipe up to see a photo's metadata and little buttons and tags appear with recommendations [00:08:30] to fix things. Nearly every photo seems to get a remaster tag, which in my testing just means brightening the photo or parts of it. The Erase reflections Fix works well enough. Now take a look at this photo I took of a tabletop Pacman game and notice the reflections across the glass. I can tap, erase reflections and bam, the reflections are reduced. They haven't gone away completely, but results can sometimes be hit or miss and the tool works well enough and should really be called reduced [00:09:00] reflections. Instead on the whole, the AI photo and video features feel more experimental than dependable. All three Galaxy phones have a Snapdragon eight gen three chip, which combined with eight gigabytes of RAM on the S 24 and 12 gigabytes of ram on the S 24 plus yielded peppy performance, the under screen fingerprint reader is blazing fast to unlock the camera. Speaker 1: App opens like a spring that's been sprung and gaming is [00:09:30] fantastic with both phones handling everything from Mario Kart to Diablo, immortal to Ian Impact. Now the regular S 24 did get warm to the touch faster than the S 24 plus, but neither became too hot to hold in benchmark testing. Both phones are right up there with the S 24 Ultra Theuse, ROG, phone eight Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The S 24 series runs on Android 14 and perhaps the sleeper feature [00:10:00] on all of these phones is the fact that Samsung promises seven years of Major OS upgrades and software support. That means you could be holding onto a Galaxy S 24 until 2031 and still have an up-to-date version of Android on it, though I kind of have to imagine you might need a battery replacement before then. Like the screens, the phone's, batteries got bigger. Speaker 1: The S 24 now has a 4,000 milliamp hour battery while the S 24 plus has a 4,900 [00:10:30] milliamp hour battery in everyday life. That shows up in the S 24 making it through a day on a single charge, no problem. In the week I have the S 24 plus, it lasted two days on a single charge twice, ending the second day at 11% and 9%. Now we'll have to see where it's at after today and we're done filming, so wait till the end of the video to find out. Also, if you're enjoying this video, please let us know, but I want you to do something special. Look at your phone, write down and write in the comments [00:11:00] what percentage your phone's battery life is at. Thank you. Alright, everybody, here's my last checkin. It's 7:30 PM we're about to leave high Scores Arcade here in Alameda. Speaker 1: Also, first of all, thank you Jonathan at High Scores Arcade for letting us film here. So we started the day at 11:00 AM filming and the battery's at 97%. We're ending the day at 7:30 PM and the battery is at 63%. So keep in mind it's eight and a half hours. We were filming the screen was on a full brightness. We were playing [00:11:30] video games, I was taking photos, I was shooting video. So a lot of heavy use in that time and the battery held in there like a champ. So let me wrap up the video by throwing it back too me. After days of testing the Galaxy S 24 and S 24 plus by playing games, texting and calling in multiple languages, taking photos, recording videos, and trying out all that Galaxy AI has to offer. I'm happy to say that both of these phones are outstanding. Samsung didn't reinvent the phone, [00:12:00] but it did take two great phones and make them better. The challenge for the S 24 plus is that Google's Pixel eight Pro has the same price and well slightly better cameras. I do think the S 24 plus is an overall better phone in nearly every other respect though even software, which in my testing has been rock solid. So this is my review. I'm done now. I'd like to hear from you guys. Make sure you put those battery percents in the comments [00:12:30] and thank you for watching.