[ad_1]
Carrying the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra for the past few weeks, I was convinced that it is perhaps the most capable phone I have ever used. But it is one that really suits those who really want to use the productivity features that set it apart from other Android phones better.
Like all members of the Note family, what distinguishes it from Samsung’s “flagship” Galaxy S20 family, and particularly from the Galaxy S20 Ultra, is the inclusion of a stylus, known as the S Pen, and accompanying software.
The ballpoint pen is useful in various situations. You can remove the pen from the bottom left of the device and immediately start creating a note. It is fast and very convenient. This works with the included Samsung Notes app. You can write or draw with the pen, and even convert your handwriting to text. My handwriting is not very good, but it was surprisingly accurate in doing this.
Similarly, you can easily select part of the screen to capture and annotate the entire screen or your selection. Now you can import a PDF file for annotation, which I found quite useful, and you can sync the audio with the written notes. You can also create an “AR scribble” that combines video with pencil annotations, although I’m not quite sure when you would use that feature. If you also have a Galaxy Tab S7 + tablet, you can sync notes between the two devices, which is good for people who want to stay within the Samsung ecosystem.
These are nice features, but I suppose that for most people the most common thing to do with the S Pen is to use it as a stylus. It’s a great option for drawing and annotating, and while I’m not an artist, it’s still very useful. This works with a number of apps and Samsung includes a simple app called PenUp for drawing or even creating short drawing videos. It won’t replace Photoshop, but it is very useful.
The S Pen also works quite well with applications like OneNote, and would be quite useful in various applications on the vertical market, such as filling out forms or annotating construction documents. In general applications, it is also a particularly useful method of selecting items in text, and you can even set the device to translate the words you select.
You can also use the stylus as a controller, using it to move back and forth while viewing web pages or running presentations in an application like PowerPoint. The latter feature works well with Samsung’s DeX interface. With that and a USB-C to HDMI connection, you can take the Note in instead of a laptop, plug it into a large monitor, and use the S Pen to run a presentation.
That brings us to what has always set the Note family apart. It’s a really good device for people who are always on the go and want some of the productivity features they get with a laptop, but without having to carry or at least take out the laptop. However, since I’ve been working from home, I didn’t find myself using as many of these features as before.
Beyond the S Pen, the Note 20 Ultra is still a very powerful phone and a good step up from last year’s Galaxy Note 10+.
It’s larger, with a 6.9-inch 3088-by-1440 AMOLED screen and measures 6.49 by 3.04 by 0.32 inches (HWD). That makes the phone perhaps the longest I’ve ever used. It also has a very noticeable camera bump on the back – again one of the largest I’ve seen. As a result, it is not the most convenient phone to carry and I would recommend a case to even out the camera bump. This is clearly a two-handed phone.
Like the Galaxy S20 Ultra, the Note 20 Ultra has a 120Hz display with a variable refresh rate option, which Samsung says uses less battery when it doesn’t need a faster update. The faster display simply makes scrolling through web pages and the like more fluid. While it’s not a big deal, it’s something I was able to see and clearly appreciate. The native resolution of the AMOLED screen is 3,088 by 1,440 pixels (WQHD +), although it is limited to 60Hz and also hurts battery life. I ran the phone at the default resolution of 2,316 by 1,080 (FHD +) with the 120Hz adaptive refresh, which I found best. Samsung says the screen is 25 percent brighter than last year’s model; it certainly seemed that way to me.
As with the S20 Ultra, the camera system offers a lot of power and a lot of options. The Note 20 Ultra has a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera, a 12-megapixel telephoto camera, and a 108-megapixel main camera that generally combines adjacent pixels in groups of nine to create a single 12-megapixel image. zoom system that according to Samsung can capture a zoom of up to 50X. (This is actually a 5x optical zoom with digital zoom on top.) This isn’t exactly the 100X claimed for the S20 Ultra, but I never got good images at that zoom anyway; And getting a clear image with a long zoom still depends on holding the phone steady. A new feature is a laser autofocus that allows the camera to focus much faster than previous models, and it seemed faster.
For example, here are photos that I took with the different cameras, in a range from ultra wide angle (“0.5x”) to standard, to 5x to 10x to 50x. Overall, I was quite impressed – the 50x version certainly looks like a digital zoom with a fair amount of pixels, but the other photos are pretty good.
As with the Galaxy, it also has many other modes, including a night mode, which takes a series of exposures and combines them while holding the phone steady. I still think that Google does a little better than Samsung, but it is certainly an improvement.
On the video side, it now offers 8K video at 24 fps and 4K video at up to 60 fps. New features in Pro mode allow you to control zoom speed, connect to a Bluetooth microphone, and control audio direction. While I’m not a videographer, the Note 20 would be a great tool for making mobile video, the popularity of which has grown tremendously over the past year.
It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor. PCMag benchmarks show this to be roughly five percent faster than the S20 Ultra in single-core performance, and it’s the best among Android phones. For me, it felt fast. It offers support for 5G bands of low, medium and mm waves. Where it was, I was able to get some 5G connections from T-Mobile, but it doesn’t support mmWave. I got speeds in excess of 125 Mbps down and 60 Mbps up with 5G, good enough for almost everything I did, but not particularly better than what I’ve seen on LTE-Advanced in the same locations.
There are other cool features. Samsung has attached great importance to its partnership with Microsoft. Some of this will be convenient for some users, but not a big deal, like having Microsoft’s apps preloaded on the device. But I was glad to see good integration with Your Phone app in Windows 10. This allows you to link to Windows so you can see your phone apps on the screen (even though they are actually running on the phone) and drag and drop files. more easily. between the Note 20 and a Windows PC. For me, the most useful thing about Your Phone is being able to view your phone messages on your PC. I realize this is common with Apple’s Messages app with iPhone and Mac, but good to see that it works with Android and Windows.
It has all the basics you’d expect from a Note, including support for Samsung’s Knox security. As I mentioned when talking about the S Pen, it also supports DeX, Samsung’s method of giving you a desktop-like experience when you connect it to an external monitor. You can also use an adapter that allows you to connect an external monitor and a wireless mouse and keyboard, and that really gives it a much more desktop-like feel. The phone apps are still not the same as the traditional desktop apps, but they work quite well this way. Samsung also supports Wireless DeX if you have a TV or monitor that supports Miracast, but very few TVs do.
As with the latest Samsung phones, the Note 20 includes the signature Bixby assistant, which you can access by saying your name or by double-clicking the side button. Bixby is still a second-rate option for finding most of the information. Bixby can do things like tell you how many steps you’ve taken if you’ve enabled the Samsung Health app, but you can get answers to general questions much better using the Google Assistant, which is also included. In practice, I preferred to configure the side key to quickly open the camera application.
Another common feature is ultra-wideband radio (UWB) support. If you had devices that support it, you could use UWB to lock or unlock your car, or to control other devices, but now there aren’t many devices that support UWB so I couldn’t test this. However, you can use it to quickly transfer files wirelessly to another Note 20 Ultra.
The Note 20 Ultra is an expensive phone at $ 1,299 for the 128GB version and $ 1,449 for the 512GB version, and I suspect people will be happier with the somewhat less expensive Galaxy S20 series. But the Note series has always been aimed at people who want to do more, be it drawing, taking notes on the screen, or using the phone as a presentation device. This is why the Note 20 is particularly impressive. Without a doubt, it is the most powerful and flexible Android phone I have ever seen.
Here’s the full PCMag review.
