Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Review

The 6.9-inch screen is class-leading and features a 120Hz refresh rate for a buttery smooth experience. Under the hood, the Note 20 Ultra is the equivalent of a muscle car: Snapdragon 865+ is perfect for gaming, and you have 12GB of RAM for effortless multitasking. Camera quality is also excellent and you have up to 50X zoom. Battery life, however, is just good, not quite great. You will need to charge it every night.Last but not least, at $1,300 we feel the price is a bit too high, but Samsung often runs deals, and chances are that you will be able to get it for less. S Pen lovers won’t be disappointed, but those looking for the best value-for-money or for a more compact phone might want to look elsewhere.

Design and Size

There are two things that you notice when you see and use the Note 20 Ultra: the first one is that it’s such a beauty, and the second one, is... oh my god this phone is big! The size thing is particularly bothersome this year as there is no smaller-sized Note around, and this thing barely fits in a pocket.
If a large phone is exactly what you are looking for, however, you will love the Note 20 Ultra. We love that the Note looks different too: it features a boxy, rectangular body that makes it instantly recognizable and sets it apart from all other phones that usually come with rounded corners.You have three colors to choose from. We have the Mystic Bronze one which comes with a frosted, matte finish, while the other two, a Mystic White and a Mystic Black version feature a glossy finish that attracts more fingerprints. The Bronze color was a bit of a surprise for us: we expected to see… well, bronze, but instead in reality the color is pinkish and actually quite similar to Rose Gold iPhones of the past.

The device is also meticulously well crafted: the frame is made of stainless steel, while the front and back are glass. This is not just any kind of glass: the Note uses the newest Gorilla Glass Victus, which is more resistant to scratches and can theoretically survive a head-high drop. The usual IP68 water protection is also present.

S Pen

The S Pen is the bread and butter of the Galaxy Note series, and if you use the S Pen a lot, we have good news for you: this might just be the biggest improvement to the experience since the very first Note. That improvement comes thanks to the reduced latency: it is now just 9 milliseconds, around four times faster than last year. What this means is that you have a true pen-to-paper feel while using the S Pen, there is practically no delay.

And this is awesome, especially for folks who use the S Pen to the fullest: artists who draw, architects, creatives, people who sign a ton of documents, this is just a short list of people who will really appreciate it. For common folks that just use the S Pen to jot down notes? Well, it’s a welcome new feature for sure, but it probably won’t be fully appreciated.

The S Pen also gets 5 new air gestures, but quite frankly, those seem like a gimmick and getting them to work is extremely difficult. The idea behind these new gestures is to use the S Pen to remotely control the phone: hold the button on the pen and flick it left or right to go back and forward in menus, for example. The problem is again that we just could not get that to work on the first or even second try. The only one that did work well was drawing a squiggly line to take a screenshot.