Samsung, Test | Test: Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra

When Samsung unveiled its new top model Note20 Ultra a short time ago, most things were as expected. All the news was known in advance, and the new “work flagship” of a Samsung mobile should again offer something good to the very marginal part of the market that wants a mobile with a pen and a little extra professional features.

Also read: Samsung unveils Note 20 Ultra – outperforms its own flagship

“Nice and nice”, most people would think, before they went and bought a regular mobile instead.

But this time it’s different. The new Note20 Ultra is straight forward the best mobile phone Samsung is currently making – and it makes the company’s existing Galaxy flagship – the S20 Ultra – completely irrelevant.

And that even if you give the bluff in the pen functionality.

Builds on the S20 Ultra – but makes it better

The new Note builds very far on the Galaxy S20 Ultra, but both expands the functionality and makes it better.

In terms of size, they are practically identical, but the Note version has slightly smaller round corners than the S20. This gives a really larger screen area, and it has also made it easier to include the pen itself.

The undersigned is not a fan of using a pen on a mobile phone, but can easily conclude that Samsung’s solution for pen is the best we have used. It was very good on the Note 10, and with the Note20, the delay is even smaller.

On the flip side, Samsung has made some extremely important changes to the camera. They have removed the not very useful “time-of-flight” sensor, and instead included a proper autofocus sensor.

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Galaxy S20 Ultra took very good pictures if you were to be able to get focus right, but slow autofocus made it often very difficult to get focus correctly. With Note20 Ultra, this problem is far from solved. Taking pictures of wild children actually works now.

Samsung has also stopped boasting 100X zoom, as they did on the Galaxy S20 Ultra, simply because everyone saw that only digital zoom ruined images.

On the Note20 Ultra, the zoom lever stops at 50X, which is more than enough – and prevents you from filling up your phone with useless images.

The phone still has 5X optical zoom on its telephoto lens.

Significantly better DeX function

For some years, Samsung has been trying to introduce a solution where your mobile works like a laptop, which you can connect to either a TV or PC monitor.

In the first generations, the limitations were so great that it was not useful in practice, but for the first time we now experience that DeX is now actually a function that can be useful.

DeX is now 100 percent wireless: All you need is a newer smart TV that supports Miracast, including 2019 models from Samsung or later, and the phone connects directly to the TV with 4K resolution. No cables required, no account registration required.

This will be incredibly convenient for those whose job it is to hold presentations and lectures around.

It is still the case that the mobile itself in this case acts as a touchpad for the mouse, while you should have a keyboard for proper keyboard functionality.

We do not think anyone will use this mobile phone as their regular PC, but it now covers real needs. Also, it is very important on another element we come back to further down.

A fabulous display

Samsung’s top models have been praised up and down in their minds for their good screens in recent years, and the Note20 Ultra is no exception. The screen is beautiful to look at, is bright with HDR10 support – and has a refresh rate of 120 Hz. This means that everything glides absolutely brilliantly.

However, we are still annoyed that Samsung is forcing you to choose between high resolution and high refresh rate. Out of the box, the screen has a refresh rate of 120 Hz and an active resolution in HD quality of 2316×1080 pixels.

If you want to take advantage of the panel’s full resolution of 3088×1440 pixels, you must lower the refresh rate to 60 Hz.

In practice, the high refresh rate is far more important than the higher resolution, which means that this mobile “only” has an HD screen.

Power

Rumors have it in advance that Samsung will upgrade the interior of the Note20 Ultra compared to the Galaxy 20S Ultra. Samsung has equipped the European models with its own processor, while the USA and Korea, among others, have the mobile delivered with a significantly faster processor from Qualcomm.

But they did not. The phone is therefore equipped with Samsung’s somewhat mediocre Exynos990 processor, which means that both the iPhone 11 Pro and, for example, the Huawei P40 Pro almost run in circles around the phone in performance tests.

It’s disappointing, but at the same time it’s nice to remember that today’s mobile phones have been more than fast enough for many years. So even though the performance tests show that the phone has something to go on, it is practically very fast to use. There is no annoying waiting, lugging and “nudging”.

And when your phone can shoot 4K at 60 frames per second, and supports game streaming from Microsoft, what more do you really need?

Yes, you read that right: The phone is a launch phone for Microsoft’s new Xbox game streaming service Xbox Games Pass, and you can purchase the phone with handheld controllers.

Then the wireless connection to the TV in the living room starts to get very interesting.

Camera

When it comes to the camera functionality on the mobile, it is top class. The Huawei P40 is certainly a better model in every way, but after US sanctions, the Huawei has become a rather uninteresting purchase.

The phone has a 108 megapixel main sensor with a brightness of f1.8, a 5X optical zoom of 12 megapixels and 12 megapixel ultra-wide angle.

We’re a little unsure if it’s a good thing to have as much as 5X optical zoom, because it’s especially indoors in most cases gets a little too much. Samsung solves this by having a main camera with such a high resolution that it can withstand zooming in to both 2X and 3X.

When you get outdoors, on the other hand, the 5X optics shine from their best side, and you can take pictures at a surprisingly long distance with high quality.

The super wide-angle camera is one of the better on the market, but you do not escape both distortion and blur in the corners. Fortunately, we see little of chromatic aberration.

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Samsung’s best mobile. Dot

There is no doubt in our minds that no one should buy the old Galaxy S20 Ultra after this mobile has hit the market. Note is a better phone in virtually every way, and it has a lower price.

What really matters is that you get a camera that you can actually take good pictures with, as well as a plethora of features that you may or may not use.

However, it is not a flawless mobile. At this price they should have chosen a faster processor, there are models on the market with faster charging, the sound from the integrated speakers is below average – and for many, the phone will probably be too big. Samsung then says that you can buy the smaller Note model, but it also has poorer features.

Brilliant grip

Otherwise, it is worth pointing out that while Apple is working really hard to connect the iPhone with other Apple devices, Samsung is now doing much the same thing – only with Microsoft products. An ever so small ingenious grip, you ask us, and which has been significantly improved since the last time.

This means that you can now connect your mobile and your PC together, and thus, among other things, receive notifications from the mobile on the PC, send and receive messages and view the phone screen. Thus, Samsung is now really about to become a completely different ecosystem choice – beyond the Android world.

PS! The phone is of course a 5G phone, and we measured a speed of 402/65 Mbps outside the Storting, where Telenor has one of its few 5G stations in Oslo.

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