I was talking to a friend recently and he asked me what phone I was using, and it was the galaxy note 20 ultra sitting right in front of me. So I said oh nice cool so how do you like it, and this is the moment where I have to try to distill all of my thoughts and my testing and my experience into like one sentence that's easily digestible to a.

Galaxy Note 20 Ultra




You know a regular everyday person that's not in the tech world and what came out of my mouth was, yeah it is. It's nice, but it's also 1300 dollar so it better be. So when I step back to think about it and to put together all my thoughts for this full review for you guys that thought just kept coming back to me over and over because at this price you only see like the crazy first-Gen experimental folding phones or flagships the bleeding edge absolute best. 

That a company has to offer and this is a 1300 dollar flagship so it's got to be top of the line at basically everything to even consider it worth buying. The note 20 Ultra for my kind of lives up to that. 

Design Section

First of all, In my opinion, this is the best looking and best-built smartphone Samsung has ever made. The matte sort of soft-touch finish on the back, the boxy flat top, and bottom razor-thin bezels the chamfers at all the metal rails and edges even this color. This mystic bronze is not normally a look I go for it's kinda pink from some angles, but also kinda rose gold from some other angles, but kind of like it and I like the contrast with the dark camera bump.


It screams quality and with Samsung’s flagships, there's always also a bunch of the little things that also add up to make that premium feeling experience things that we would be nitpicking and complaining about if they weren't here for this price.


The vibration motor is high quality, the same ultrasonic in-display, the fingerprint reader is back here and it's pretty fast. There's wireless charging that's here reverse wireless charging is here. There's ip68 water-resistance all the stuff we kind of take for granted to be in a Samsung flagship. It is all here again but, just no headphone jack here. Then I think the two main things that make this an ultra that is a display and the S-Pen.

Display Section


So the display at the risk of sounding like a display mate is a plus but it is an awesome screen. It's a 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X HDR10+ Display. It's got HDR certification. The 120Hz refresh rate and the tiny hole punch in the top of the middle. Outstanding maximum and minimum brightness, it's crispy, it's great I mean it's just a great screen. But there are, believe it or not, both pros and cons to this ultra screen. 

The main cons being it is massive and it has curved edges and yes I did experience accidental touches occasionally and I think that happened more often.


Thanks to the hand gymnastics that are required to handle such a big screen like this. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm on the side of preferring the flat displays, but this one is not flat. 

But also, of course, having a huge display that goes right up to the edges and a tiny hole punch cut- out I mean that makes a pretty solid media experience.

Although I'll say maybe my only hardware disappointment in this phone is the speaker system not that it's problematic it's not bad at all. It's just easy to block that bottom speaker and it is a stereo pair with the earpiece. But overall, despite its Dolby Atom support.

I was unimpressed with the actual quality or fullness of the sound from the speakers.


Hardware Section

If you didn't already know the Snapdragon 865+ and this unit has 12 gigabytes of RAM now you know and that combined with the 120-hertz display is everything I want in a smartphone.

Nowadays you've heard me talk about high refresh rates. It makes its way to yet another flagship here in the note and yes I still love it. There were no problems with performance and smoothness from my usage was great. Also behind the notes display is the same ultrasonic fingerprint reader. As we saw in the S20 ultra and it's ultra-impressive and ultra similar to last year's performance, nothing ultra special here. 

Battery Section

Then you got yourself a 4500 mAh battery with 45W fast charging supported. But the disappointment is that they give a 25W fast charger in the box. The 4500 milliamp-hour battery with a giant 120-hertz display using it all the time you can kill it even if it's not a Quad HD. But with typical use note 20 ultra's batteries are good. It's like six hours of screen on time ending a day with 15 to 25 batteries left regularly good. I have no problems with that especially when this phone also supports 45-watt fast charging and there's wireless charging here. 

It's quite good if you want the extra next level battery champ there are other phones, including the brother of this phone S20 ultra, which is kind of just like the same form factor minus the s pen that's a 5 000 milliamp-hour battery so that's better but this is good okay.

Camera Section

Let's talk about the camera. I have a lot to say about this camera system as you can probably imagine, but I’ll try to keep it concise here. First of all, this camera bump is huge. It's just a big block on the back of this phone that sticks out so much that it tends to gather dust in the corners around it. But I honestly don't hate it. It's like they're owning it; it's a character piece that you know, maybe has time to grow on you. The rings around the three cameras to me, I think is a good look and you do get a great array of cameras.

It's the 108-megapixel wide-angle standard camera that sort of rattles a bit when you shake it because it's so big and then there's a 12-megapixel ultra-wide and a 12-megapixel periscope zoom camera. In the front face camera, they used 10 MP, f/2.2, wide-angle camera sensor.

Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Camera Sample

So how are the cameras? They are great. First of all, the addition of the laser autofocus fixed the hunting problems the galaxy s20 ultra was having with this same huge camera module. Now it's not the same tracking autofocus as a pixel, but the hunting is gone close-up subjects are no longer problematic. 

But what it didn't fix it? The shutter lag. So there's still a pretty noticeable delay between tapping to take a photo and when the actual capture happens. Which is kind of a bummer? 

But I will say that with the caveat that you got to be a little more patient and hold the camera still and wait for the shutter lag, this camera turns out outstanding photos in all kinds of conditions in daylight, in harsh shooting into the sun shooting at night shooting indoors and outdoors. Thanks to having a good ultra-wide that's almost as sharp as the main lens. Of course, The massive zoom capabilities that you never have to use, but if you do, they're impressive still 50x isn't as insane as 100x but it's far more than. You'll probably ever need so you can rest easy that anytime you need a quick 4x or 8x zoom the photo will still be plenty sharp. The 10-megapixel selfie camera is fairly average. 


Thanks to the super steady mode and all the 8k options and the faster autofocus. But I was having most of my fun with the main sensor and taking photos that. I think would often rival what you take from any other phone. iPhone 11 pro pixel 4 Huawei phones this is right up there, well-done Samsung on these cameras. Just makes it feel like the gigantic camera bump is more worth it is you impressed that. 

We got this far into a galaxy note review without talking about the s pen yet.

S-Pen The Signature of Galaxy Note Series


So the S-Pen got some pretty dramatic technical improvements in the note 20 ultras this year. Mainly that the latency is now down to nine milliseconds on this better display. And that translates to apple pencil levels of realism and responsiveness you love to see it, you love to hear it also. There's this sound now when you write with the S-Pen that corresponds pretty well with how it would sound. If you were writing on like a chalkboard or a pen on paper or something it's pretty impressive.


But I could also see that getting annoying to someone who uses the s pen like a lot so you can turn that off but yeah technically speaking it is a big improvement. It's been for a while which, depending on who you are is either a fun optional accessory that comes along with this flagship or a vital tool for sketching or note-taking or annotation work you may remember. 


I’m not the biggest s pen person so for someone like me a galaxy note probably isn't the best use of money. But some people wait for every year for the latest galaxy note because this phone represents the absolute best stylist experience.

Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Features


If I tried to cover all of the features buried in Samsung’s software, then it will be a long article because they pack this phone to the gills. The edge lighting, the secure folder. Wireless music sharing. The air actions. The reverse wireless charging. The wireless decks are super impressive, even Bixby.

Bixby I mean I found there's always something buried in here that you've either never heard about or maybe you knew about it but just didn't use it. Because Samsung airs on the side of shoving in too many features instead of the other way around like trying to keep it super simple and leaving things out that aren't perfect. 

It's like the opposite of the apple strategy and you see that throughout using this phone from the launcher to the camera app to the settings. If there's any upside to that, it certainly makes you feel like you're more getting your money's worth. But at the end of the day are you getting $1300 worth of smartphone here honestly? That's probably pushing it, I’d say you probably aren't.


But the thing about Samsung launch prices is they're guaranteed to fall like this phone in three or four months will most likely cost a bit less than it does now at the launch. But if there's any phone that makes it feel like you're getting the absolute complete package from the spec sheet to the huge incredible display to the build quality of the cameras to the battery to the stylus you can't get anywhere else.


“With the software, it's probably this one, but I want to end it all with this what is a review? Well, it's given your opinion on something you've used to try to figure out if what you're buying is worth it or not right.”


So Samsung sent us all reviewers this galaxy note 20 ultra which is a great phone for 300 bucks. So we're all out since we have it early. We're all testing and enthusiastically giving this phone a shot. But none of us, as far as I know, have the note 20 which is the thousand dollar plastic 1080p 60 hertz. In my opinion, severely overpriced phones none of us are out enthusiastically testing and reviewing that one PSA that's probably on purpose. 

So note 20 ultra is 1300 bucks if you can swing it great. If you're looking for something similar but looking to save a bit of money I would hold off on trying to just go straight to the note 20, for now, I would wait for some reviews of that at least or maybe look to some other phones some other galaxy s20 plus or even some non-Samsung phones. 

Because this is a new thought to have now in 2020 just attaching the note name to something doesn't necessarily mean flagship quality anymore as it used to.

It's not now the word you need to look for is ultra the ultra it's a nice phone yeah, but for 300 bucks it better be that's been it.