Samsung S24 | Samsung S24 + | Samsung S24 Ultra - Review

Welcome to your first look at the Samsung Galaxy S24 Series. And they are way more interesting than they look on the outside. So we got three new phones from Samsung beginning in 2024: Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra. As expected, they look very similar to the S23 lineup, especially design-wise, but it gets way more interesting when you get under the hood, especially with software and the whole Samsung AI thing. So first, let me start with everything that’s physically new because the list is short. On the outside, the S24 and S24+ will look just like last year, with the same dimensions, body sizes, camera rings, and button placement

Design

Inside that body, the bezels are slightly thinner all the way around, making way for slightly larger displays on the S24 and S24+. So now it’s 6.2 inches and 6.7 inches, and these panels are sneaky major upgrades, especially the bigger ones. They’re both now a ridiculously bright 2,600 nits, and the Plus got bumped up from 1080 p to Quad HD, and it looks like you do have the option to use it at 120 hertz while it is Quad HD, just like the Ultra, which I mean, that’s pretty sick. It’s 1080 by default, but that’s an upgrade they didn’t have to do, and I appreciate that. The display up at the front is now completely 100% flat from corner to corner, and I like it.

So we went from having dramatically curved edges on the old Ultra phones and Notes from back in the day to a gentle curve to almost no curve. Still, now it’s no curve at all, which means it’s flat, and there’s much fewer bezels all the way around. And the screen goes to the very edges. And then it’s squared off, like an iPhone. Sometimes, people say this feature resembles or looks like the iPhone. No, these flat sides and the flat screen look exactly like the iPhone all around; I’m just being honest.

Battery

And then the phones also have slightly larger batteries, up to 4,000 milliamp hours on the S24 and 4,900 milliamp hours on the S24+. The big dog, the S24 Ultra, is even more tweaked. Ultra also has a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery with the S-Pen slotted in the side as usual.

Color

There are just new colors: black, grey, violet and yellow. The Ultra is matte in all its new colors, black like usual, but a new titanium color, violet and yellow.

Camera

Then, the cameras appear to be the same as last year with the Samsung S24 and S24+, but the S24 Ultra has shaken it up just a bit. So, with the Ultra phone, we’ve gotten used to having this space zoom. So it was the 200-megapixel main camera, but then it had two telephotos: a 3x and 10x.

But with this new S24 Ultra, you still get the 200-megapixel main camera, but then a 3x telephoto and then a new 5x telephoto, which is curious, but it makes sense here. The 10x is a huge jump in zoom, and Samsung is realizing that not many people are zooming to 10x. This is my theory anyway, so instead of having a 10x telephoto lens, which was only 10 megapixels, this new redesigned 5x is 50 megapixels. So the 5x, you know, that’s a much more common zoom range, and then the higher megapixel count should mean that when you hit the 10x button that’s in the camera, it crops into the middle 50% of the frame, and you should still have nearly the same quality of a shot as the old low-res 10x.

Processor

I wish S24 would start at 256 gigs in 2024, but anyway, we’ve got to talk about the new chip for a minute. So all these phones are running the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip across the board, g eat flagship chip, the beginning of its life cycle, so you know, there’s a couple of phones trickling out with this one now, and there will be way more. It’s also very clear that Qualcomm has built a bunch of AI processing features into this chip.

AI Features of S24 Series

So the big one most people will find the most useful on the Samsung s24 ultra phone is the instant visual search. So no matter where you are on the phone, whatever you’re doing, if you hold down the home button, or if you have gestures, hold down the gesture bar, you can tap or circle something on your screen to instantly Google search it. And it’s just, the few times I played with it, it’s really fast, and this whole visual search feature thing, it’s not like it’s new.

Image & Search

Like, we’ve had Reverse Image Search and Google Lens for years, but I love the convenience of just, you know, being on a website, seeing an image or something you want to know more about, and then just long pressing, Googling it real quick, and getting the info. Or even something in your gallery, there’s a landmark or something in a photo, and you just Google the image. It’s awesome. People are probably using it a lot. You have to spend a little time getting used to it because everyone knows you can type things into Google, but visual search Google stuff is super useful. Then basically, there’s a bunch of other little places in the phone where you see the little stars, the little barred stars. If you see those, you know there’s some AI lurking, ready to help you; press it.

Automatic Voice Translator

So the voice recorder app gets AI, so now it does much-improved speaker labels and transcriptions, and it can summarize your voice recording after you record it into a bunch of bullet points. The Notes app gets AI. Now, it can straighten out your handwriting, turn your notes into bullet points, or summarize your notes.
It’s just that you’ve got to find those little stars and press them.

And the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra feels like it has become more than just the ultimate note-taking device; now it’s even more useful on top of the already borderline magical handwriting recognition and all that stuff, so I love that. The phone app gets AI. This stuff might sound familiar, but let’s say you’ll have a phone call with someone who speaks a different language. It will do live transcription and translation audibly in real-time as you’re having the conversation.

Let’s say I only speak English. You’ll call someone who only speaks Korean, so you must go into the phone app and download the language pack before the call. It does all this transcription offline with a model stored on the device. The models are, you know when you get on the phone, you speak your language, and the phone will visually and audibly translate what you’re saying for the person on the other end. They hear their language. Then they speak their language and the same thing. You hear them, but then you immediately hear a translated version in your language. And it’s pretty fast.

Image Edit

This one’s not a shocker, but it’s also shocking how close it is to other things we’ve seen. So once you have a photo, you hit the info button with the stars, and you can do a couple of simple things like add background blur, erase an object in the background, or remaster a photo, which seems like it’s just doing some color and lighting and balance tweaks automatically. That’s cool. It works.

Many people will find that stuff useful immediately, but once you enter the editor, you’ll see a familiar group of stars in the bottom left-hand corner. It’s a full-on magic editor, just like the Pixel. So you jump in there, circle things, highlight things to move around, and of course, it’s even more precise with the S-Pen, but then it does the same thing. It takes a few seconds to generate to fill the background, it plays a nice little animation, and when it’s done, it spits out a few options of a new photo that is completely fake. Also, there are fewer restrictions with this one than Google’s because I remember the Pixel was very picky about letting me move people around.

Still, I encountered nothing that this one was unwilling to mess with, so the good thing is that the final result has a baked-in watermark at the bottom left-hand corner. So you’ll know in your gallery that if you’re looking at an image with those stars as a watermark, it didn’t look like that when you captured it.

Slow Motion Video

You can also turn a regular video into a slow-motion video as the AI generates new frames in between captured frames, which can slow down the video for you.
I’d like to know how well that’s going to work.

Again, if it’s as good as some of the generative AI stuff I’ve seen, it could be shockingly good, but that’s just another AI feature. Either way, a lot is going on.

Either way, let me know what you think of these new phone series, Samsung S24 Series, and what you want to see in the full review. Thanks for visiting our site; I’ll catch up with you in the next articles or contents.