With the launch of the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung boldly announced the end of the smartphone camera wars and entered the era of artificial intelligence. The $1,300 S24 Ultra is the torchbearer for a new era of mobile design.
While the S24 Ultra may not look like much has changed, there is a major design update as well as some smaller tweaks. The shift to titanium bezels (available in four colors: titanium yellow, violet, gray, and black) mimics what Apple did for the iPhone 15 Pro last fall. The biggest difference is that since Samsung’s previous flagships used aluminum chassis, as opposed to the heavier stainless steel chassis on the iPhone 14 Pro, the S24 Ultra’s weight (8.22 ounces) is essentially unchanged from last year’s device (8.25 ounces). That means there aren’t a ton of external signs of the S24’s increased durability, aside from some very subtle changes in texture, which includes the same IP68 dust and water resistance rating.
More subtle upgrades include a new Corning Gorilla Armor panel on the back (instead of Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the standard S24/S24+), thinner bezels (42% narrower than before) and a slightly boxier feel. The latter might not go unnoticed by most people, but it’s part of an ongoing trend for Samsung as it moves towards phones with flatter screens. On the S24 Ultra, it’s almost entirely rectangular, save for some faint rounding around the edges of the display. So for all of you who hate curved edge screens, congratulations, you win.
Inside the S24 Ultra is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip along with 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage. Samsung says it installed a larger vapor chamber that’s nearly twice the size of previous models to help control the phone’s heat dissipation. The Ultra’s screen is also slightly brighter, with a peak brightness of 2,600 nits for its 120Hz 6.8-inch OLED screen. The Ultra’s S Pen still has a storage slot and a flexible magnetic attachment system, and its core functionality hasn’t changed, so you can expect the same ultra-sensitive stylus input.
It’s worth noting that the S24 Ultra’s camera settings remain largely unchanged. You still get a 200 MP main sensor and a 12 MP ultra-wide-angle, but instead of a 10x lens, the S24’s telephoto camera is based on a 50 MP sensor (up from 10 MP) with 5x optical zoom. Samsung said the change was made based on customer feedback and usage patterns, with 5x being the most commonly used focal length. While its overall coverage appears to be down, the phone uses pixel binning and artificial intelligence to achieve what the company calls “10x optical quality” zoom, while still offering up to 100x spatial zoom. In our limited hands-on time, the Ultra’s telephoto camera still looked sharp even at shorter focal lengths, although as before, image quality begins to deteriorate rapidly beyond 20x.
Of course, Ultra’s zoom is only a small part of AI’s applications. The entire S24 series has a full set of machine learning-based features. Similar to the feature on the Pixel 8, Samsung is using artificial intelligence to help you edit photos and create new slow-motion shots. You can use the S24 Ultra’s stylus (or your finger on other models) to draw a lasso around a subject, then touch and hold to move it at any time. Then, all you have to do is hit the generate button and the phone will use artificial intelligence to fill in any missing elements. This isn’t limited to moving objects, you can also delete objects, resize, regroup, and more.
Samsung’s Photos app can also detect things like shadows and reflections and will ask you if you want to remove them from the photo. This is probably my favorite AI application because it helps simplify editing while also making more complex fixes incredibly easy. Although I only tested it using sample photos provided by Samsung, it worked surprisingly well. After finding a photo in the Gallery app, all I had to do was tap the News button to see a list of suggested edits, which almost instantly transformed a mediocre image into one I’d be proud to share on social media.
Samsung’s slow-motion feature is also impressive. It works with almost any native clip, not just footage shot on the S24. While the video is playing, just touch and hold. The phone then looks at the frame rate of the shot, multiplies it by four (e.g. from 30 fps to 120 fps), and uses AI to create the extra frames – all on the fly and on-device, so nothing is sent to the cloud .
It’s not all photo trickery, though. S24 leverages its artificial intelligence capabilities to help you communicate on your phone with new real-time translation capabilities, and in text with improved proofreading, summarization, and tone correction capabilities. During a call, initiating translation is as easy as clicking a button. From there, it recognizes your speech and automatically converts it into what other people are saying (or you can save a little time and choose the language yourself). Granted, this does mean that conversations will take longer, as you’ll need to pause to give your phone a chance to process and translate what you’re saying. But if you’re having trouble traveling, I wouldn’t hesitate to try it.
As for S24’s aggregation feature, it’s similar to what you get in services like Pixel or ChapGPT, Bard, and others. You can direct your phone to a website or file (including those in Samsung Notes) and the phone will condense the content into a few main points. But perhaps a more useful tool is the Tone Correction feature, which in addition to basic features like highlighting misspellings, also gives you options to reword words to make them seem more positive or inspiring.
It’s worth noting that because you have so many options to ignore or implement things as you see fit, it can feel less like policing yourself and more like adjusting your language to get your message across in a more effective way. Let’s be honest, this is something that everyone probably uses from time to time, even if it’s just to prevent an angry text or email from being sent.
One aspect of the S24’s AI capabilities that can’t be handled natively is a new loop-hunting tool.Developed in partnership with Google, this feature lets you highlight two pieces of text and The image before sending the query to the cloud and returning the results. In practice, it feels like a combination of traditional search and visual finding aids, such as the Google Lens app. From a general usability perspective, it’s a good upgrade, even if it doesn’t completely change the way the phone works.
Finally, following Google’s similar move with the Pixel 8 last year, Samsung will now provide a full seven years of regular operating system and security updates. This is something I’d like to see from every Android phone manufacturer, so I’m glad Samsung is taking action now.
My two complaints are that I think the S24 Ultra’s design is pretty simple for a device that starts at $1,300. It’s just a 6.8-inch phone with a bunch of sensors and camera lenses on the back. Not to mention, I don’t think Samsung’s special titanium-hued paint job is as eye-catching as the company would have liked.
Another problem is the lack of Qi 2 support. The S24 is in the second half of Samsung’s two-year product cycle, which means we probably won’t get any major refreshes or design changes until next year. But as the largest Android phone maker, it’s disappointing to see that the new flagship doesn’t adopt the potentially important multi-platform wireless charging standard.
To be honest, I’m a little surprised at how good its AI capabilities are. In fact, I had to stop myself multiple times from writing about how surprising one of the phone’s newest gadgets is. Unlike Google, which has been trumpeting machine learning for more than a decade, Samsung’s mobile expertise has always felt more about hardware than software. But with the S24, Samsung shows that it is taking the transition to the artificial intelligence era very seriously.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra starts at $1,300. Pre-orders start today, with a free upgrade available on Samsung.com that doubles the phone’s storage, with official sales scheduled for January 31.
This article originally appeared on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/samsung-galaxy-s24-ultra-hands-on-a-fresh-titanium-frame-combined-with-a-big-bet-on-ai -180050005.html?src=rss
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