Galaxy Note 20 Ultra vs S 20 Ultra Full detailed Comparison | Camera | Specification |

When i first picked up the galaxy Note 20 ultra i thought whoa ,it kind of looks like Samsung have

just dialed their already super phone S20 ultra to the next level.

But as it turns out the Note does have some interesting caveats.

So which one is actually better? Lets Find Out.

Design

I will say hats off to the design team,

The s20 ultra is a cool phone but wow does it look bland with its colorless plain glass back

so it's kind of cool that in one fell swoop Samsung have gone from quite possibly one of the weakest flagship phone finishes to my top three of all time.

The Note has color for starters and combines a grippy fingerprint resisting back with a logo that's embossed as opposed to just flush with the body and a high-gloss camera module.

Also I like the fact that the cameras now look defined and purposeful compared to their more floaty nature on the last phone.

My other first impression though is that this camera protrusion is enormous i was about to get mad about it but then i realized it's only because the phone itself is slimmer.

They've kept the thickness at the camera section the same but for the rest of the body it's fallen from 8.8 millimeters to 8.1 and in that process it's become lighter too.

Both are sealed against water and dust but what i think is really interesting is that the Note 20 ultra is the first phone in the world to be fitted with Gorilla Glass 7 which i'm told is 1.2 times more drop resistant and 2 times more scratch resistant versus the gorilla glass 6 on the S series and every other flagship phone now that doesn't mean it's going to be able to resist materials that are twice as hard but more than likely it means that something that would have previously given it a deeper gouge will now just give it a lighter scratch but still that is great news and will definitely mean less deterioration over time from sharing pockets with your other life essentials.

My only ergonomic complaint is that the Note phones have always had these razor sharp corners to make them look boxier and visually separate from the S series and also i guess to make them feel more like a pad for writing on.

But i just can't get used to them compared to the soft corners of their other phones this just feels a little stabby overall.

Though Note kills it in design, but possibly the most interesting thing about the way they've put together this phone is that this is the first Note that isn't any bigger ,

I mean thank god, it is a good thing it's just interesting it perhaps indicates that we're reaching the feasible limits of how big a phone should be watch how i get proved wrong in like a month's time.

Display

Both phones have a very similar and very beautiful 6.9 inch super AMOLED quad HD plus 120 hertz refresh rate display.

They both push the boundaries in every metric and the Note gets two wins here a small one in that its screen to body ratio is ever so slightly higher making it actually the highest screen to body ratio Samsung has ever put on a phone and a pretty huge one in the fact that it's 25 percent brighter while the peak brightness of the S20 ultra maxes out at around 1200 NITS, the new Note comes in at 1500 NITS.

I think that makes this the brightest phone display and Samsung did a good job at keeping the curved sides on these phones because they look good but turning that curvature down so that the whole screen area is still usable.

Camera

When the S20 ultra came out it was all about this camera it had every single spec imaginable

8K Video recording
108 megapixel main camera
100 times space zoom
An ultra wide camera
A depth sensing camera
It even had a 40 megapixel camera for selfie

But in actual real world usage it was only “GOOD”, The 108 megapixel sensor didn't get as much dynamic range in as more affordable phones and i just had a real hard time focusing on things the 8K video was super detailed but came with a whole load of compromises and that 100 time zoom was fantastic.

I did have a great time playing around with it but to be honest beyond 30 times it wasn't very good and i didn't find it a particularly useful feature so with that in mind the Note 20 ultra feels like a more considered approach to a similar camera system.

It's basically the same with a few key advantages,

It comes pre-baked with all the software improvements Samsung made for the S20 ultra which includes better dynamic range and better night mode and here's the crucial part even though they did somewhat improve the focusing on the S20 ultra through software it's still not great

So now on the Note, we have a hardware solution.

Samsung have swapped out the depth Camera for a specialized laser autofocus module.

They're saying it does everything that the depth camera did but now also means it's snappy at focusing and this I can verify there's also the pretty niche edition of just more options baked into pro video mode.

Like being able to select where you want your phone to pick up audio from are you all around you or just focus in front or focus behind and it lets you shoot 120 frames per second video at 1080p

We have technically seen a lot of phones already that can do this as part of their slow motion feature but the quality hit seems to be less here but it's not just additions in a sense the Note camera has almost scaled back the 40 megapixel selfie camera has been dropped to a 10 megapixel one although in real world testing it seems very comparable.

Also one of the S20 ultra's key selling points 100 times zoom has been dropped to 50, because the telephoto camera has been switched from a 48 megapixel 4 times optical zoom to a 12 megapixel 5 times optical zoom.

But interestingly when i tried both at 50 times the Notes photos did appear more detailed, So i'm not actually convinced that this is a worse telephoto camera it's probably just the fact that for this Note they're not marketing it as a 100 time zoom camera anymore because they don't need to!

So they've limited that feature with the marketing for this Note they'll probably focus on its productivity features and the benefit to that for the camera is that they'll only put things on there if they think they'll make it better.

So i'm giving camera to the Note.

Pricing

This whole thing definitely marks a transition when that first galaxy Note came out it was basically just Samsung's way of making a plus phone a bigger faster more extreme flagship but it's just not the case anymore if you've been paying attention to the marketing over the last few years what Samsung's trying to do with these phones is not to have one good phone and one ultimate phone it's actually just to make two different phones the S series for social media and sharing and the Note for productivity and sophistication and nothing makes this transition clearer than the fact that for the first time ever the Note is launching at a lower price than the S.

1179 pounds for the Note in the UK versus 1199 for the S when that launched
In India the Note 20 ultra with 12GB of memory and 128GB of storage will cost Rs 104,999.

But before i just hand the point for pricing to the Note a couple of things you should bear in mind in defence of the S20 ultra.

Because it's older you could probably find it for quite a bit less than that list price and almost definitely cheaper than the Note and that phone goes up to 16 GB of RAM compared to 12GB

But now in the Notes defence, the phone comes with two times the base storage

256 gigabytes versus 128

The storage is faster UFS 3.1 versus UFS 3.0

Samsung is saying that, because the storage is up to 60 faster you actually now need less RAM because after all all RAM is is your short-term memory after which things can be shifted to your now faster long-term memory but it's tough to say right now whether this faster storage actually compensates for how much less ram you're getting.

So this pricing section we're going to call it a draw.

Battery

Now probably the most confusing spec of this new Note that we need to talk about is its battery.

This is again something that i had my pitchfork out and was ready to run about but there is a silver lining on the face of it.

Though it's not good news the capacity has been cut from 5000mAh to 4500 mAh

The max charging wattage is now capped at 25 watts instead of 45 watts

And we need to talk about the Exynos in the room.

You probably know by now that Samsung for its flagship phones makes two different versions for different regions and for their s series earlier this year the Exynos 990 powered phones lagged quite a way behind the Snapdragon 865 powered phones.

I'm talking up to 20% lower performance and 20% worse battery.

That's enough of a difference that you're almost looking at two different phones depending on where you live and so you would think this Note phone would be the perfect chance for Samsung to put all that behind them to build a more powerful Exynos chip, to level the playing field

But the gap just got wider.

The regions that were already getting the superior Snapdragon get an upgrade to the 865 plus which is about 10% faster but if you're in the UK or India, the Exynos that we get has stayed the same so even though this isn't bad news performance isn't getting worse it kind of stings.

And the Exynos chip is not particularly friendly for battery life, however the silver lining is in this new display.

Hidden deep within the spec sheet of this new Note is a feature called adaptive refresh rate and it means that the screen can refresh anywhere from 1 to 120 times per second.

The s20 ultra can only flick between 60 and 120.

By having this full control of the refresh rate the Note is no longer wasting battery.

For example you're running an application that only refreshes 30 times per second on the S20 ultra the screen would still be running at 60 but the Note can reduce that to 30 and so according to Samsung if you combine this display with the faster more efficient UFS  3.1 storage and the new one UI 2.5 software, the Note battery will actually last longer.

Software

Speaking of Software , either way you're going to face the usual Samsung deal.

So fast responsive UI, Fantastic Haptics, the way the phone feels when you type or interact with it but also an absolute landslide of bloatware that you'll probably never use.

But the Note does have a few important perks.

Because it's a newer phone it'll probably get updates for longer and it starts ahead with a new one UI 2.5 which isn't anything big but definitely feels lighter.

I noticed things like app opening times and camera shutter times were just a little bit snappier.

And i'm told this software is also more efficient with RAM usage.

Both phones can connect to a display with Samsung DEX but the Note can now do that wirelessly and it's equipped with something called an ultra wide band chip it's a bit of a weird one it basically gives the phone a sort of special awareness that past phones didn't have it'll become more useful as more and more people start to get phones with it but even now what it can do is allow you to send a file to another UWB user just by pointing your phone at them and flicking it towards the.

So in this battle the Note 20 ultra is sitting pretty and we're only just getting to its trump card the S pen and i think it's quite a big win in fact every year as Samsung adds more and more stuff to it some useful some not it becomes a bigger win but this is the biggest upgrade in a while if you've ever used an S pen you might have been surprised how tactile and responsive it feels but with this one in particular they've cut the latency from about 42 milliseconds to 9.

It feels precise and instantly reactive to your touch and the subtle pencil sound effects make it a very enjoyable experience i was half tempted to just sit there drawing sketches instead of filming phones would i use it day to day probably still not but you might.

Conclusion

so to round off this absolute monster of a comparison neither has a headphone jack both have an a-grade set of stereo speakers and both support wireless charging as well as reverse wireless charging okay when i came into this i was expecting it to be a closer battle i saw

the Note spec sheet and i could see that it had improvements like the laser autofocus like the brighter screen but i could also see it had compromises like the smaller battery and the less amount of ram but in the end it's a bit of a whitewash this tally i've been taking isn't an exact measure but it should give you an idea there are a lot of improvements here a lot of subtle refinements a focus on carefully trimming things but at the same time improving efficiency and all of this nudges the phone in the right directions in almost every category.