Samsung’s Galaxy S line of flagship phones has always been touted as the Android phones-to-beat, setting a benchmark to compare other phones that launch later in the year. With this year’s Galaxy S24 series, Samsung has focused its energy on delivering AI-driven software enhancements.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra, which is the company’s new top-of-the-line phone for 2024, retains the core hardware cues from the previous S23 and S22 Ultra phones, but introduces subtle enhancements with a brighter flat display, an improved processor, and an enhanced camera system—making this phone a safe choice for users that need to upgrade.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
The phone to beat in 2024
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is a polished iteration that subtly enhances its predecessors' strong suits. It sports a more industrial, flat design with a titanium frame and a standout 6.8-inch display that’s brighter and glare-reduced, offering a top-notch viewing experience. The camera system, while showing promise, struggles with consistency, but in terms of performance, it’s a powerhouse with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and a solid two-day battery life.
Design: Subtle Enhancements
In terms of design, the Galaxy S24 Ultra looks nearly identical to the S23 Ultra, which was already similar to the S22 Ultra before that. However, this year’s design benefits from a couple of subtle changes that incrementally improve this recurring design.
Firstly, the phone is much flatter; the frame, screen, and back panel all lose their curvature from the S23 Ultra, and while this was a design consistency throughout the S24 series, it’s especially noticeable with the new Galaxy S24 Ultra with its already boxy Galaxy Note design. In terms of feel-in-the-hand, the side edges still do retain a subtle curve to them, making the phone relatively easy to hold, but the corners of the device feel much sharper and can be irritable if they’re jabbing your hand as you hold the phone.
That said, even without a major redesign, the new flatter aesthetic of the Galaxy S24 Ultra makes the phone look and feel very industrial, especially in its new Titanium Gray finish that mirrors the pro iPhones.
The next major difference in this phone’s design is the material choice. Samsung has finally differentiated the Ultra phone with a new titanium frame, as opposed to the armor aluminum found on the regular Galaxy S24 and S24+. Does titanium make that much of a difference or provide any immediate benefits? No, but it does finally mean that the metal band around the phone has a matte finish instead of mirrored, making the device feel that much more grippy in the hand. The titanium finish of the S24 Ultra picks up fewer fingerprints compared to the iPhone 15 Pro series, so that’s another bonus.
Samsung is also using the new Gorilla Glass Armor for its S24 series this year, and it is said to be the toughest Gorilla Glass Corning has ever developed—four times more scratch-resistant than the competition! But marketing aside, it should mean you’re getting a more durable device overall.
Aside from these key differences, the Galaxy S24 Ultra remains identical to the S23 Ultra’s design, which isn’t a bad thing. You still retain IP68 dust and water resistance, a slot for an S-Pen, and the same manageable footprint of a phone that has a massive screen but doesn’t necessarily feel unwieldy.
Display: Brighter, Flatter, Big and Beautiful
Moving onto the most notable visual hardware change, the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s display is by far one of the best Samsung or any company has ever shipped. This massive 6.8-inch panel is now completely flat and has uniform bezels on all four sides. Opting not to curve the panel this year, especially for the S-Pen-equipped Ultra model, makes a lot of sense—you get back an active writing area on the display, and you don’t have to worry about unwanted reflections on the edges.
Samsung is using a new anti-reflective film for this year, too, and while it does noticeably cut down on a lot of glare outdoors, it also makes the display appear slightly darker and less saturated. That said, this new panel goes up to a new peak brightness of 2,600 nits and looks great in direct sunlight scenarios.
Of course, just like the previous S23 Ultra, you’ll find all the other bells and whistles, including HDR10+, LTPO 120Hz variable refresh rate, S-Pen support, and a resolution of 1440 x 3120, making the S24 Ultra perfect for content consumption and gaming.
Overall, the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s display offers a premium viewing experience whether you’re consuming media, gaming, or using productivity apps.
Cameras: Inconsistent, Especially in Low Light
When it comes to the cameras, the Galaxy S24 Ultra yields somewhat of an inconsistent experience. It’s equipped with a main 200MP wide, a 3x 10MP telephoto, a 5x 50MP telephoto, and a 12MP ultrawide lens. The main difference to the Galaxy S23 Ultra is the telephoto camera has been bumped up from 10MP to 50MP, but with a shorter optical range of 5x compared to 10x.
In practical use, the camera system’s performance varies. Under optimal conditions, the S24 Ultra captures high-quality, detailed images with rich color reproduction. However, the consistency falters in challenging lighting situations—especially if you aren’t using the primary sensor, leading to over-processed images that lack sharpness and detail. This is most noticeable in how the detail and colors change as you swap between the different focal lengths, but generally, it feels like a step back from the more consistent performance seen in last year’s S23 Ultra.
I think the lack of consistency is largely due to software and not hardware, and can certainly be addressed down the line. Still, at the time of testing, these annoyances tend to take away from what was otherwise a competent flagship camera system.
Under most conditions, the Galaxy S24 Ultra takes photos that have a more accurate representation of real-world hues. New this year is the HDR mode, which tends to push everything to higher contrasts, but dynamic range is improved, and the phone does a good job balancing the lighting of a scene and the sky.
The Night Mode also shows some improvement with better light capture and noise reduction. However, it still struggles with maintaining detail in extremely low-light conditions, especially if you aren’t using the main 200MP sensor.
Portrait mode continues to still be Samsung’s strongest computational photography implementation, with the Galaxy S24 Ultra doing a great job of handling the difficult separation of subjects from backgrounds—and now even foregrounds.
Overall, while the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s camera system shows potential and versatility, it’s marred by inconsistency. With future software updates, Samsung could iron out these relatively minor issues and truly unlock the hardware’s potential, but as it stands, it’s a capable camera system that could use a bit of fine-tuning.
Hardware and Battery Life: Unsurprisingly Excellent
The S24 Ultra is equipped with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 For Galaxy chipset paired with 256GB of UFS 4.0 memory for the base level of storage (up to 1TB), with 12GB of RAM across the board. New this year is the inclusion of Wi-Fi 7, which can theoretically reach up to a whopping 46 Gbps. Until we get providers and other hardware that supports these speeds, it’s not much use to anyone (but nice to have for future-proofing).
In benchmarks, our Galaxy S24 Ultra scores 2,186 on Single-Core, and 6,659 on Multi-Core while plugged into power for GeekBench 6. In comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro scores 2,920 on Singe-Core and 7,186 on Multi-Score.
With these scores, the two phones essentially have the same level of performance, but what you might achieve with the Galaxy S24 Ultra is longer sustained performance thanks to its much larger vapor chamber, which should mean a better thermally-managed processor during peak performance.
When it comes to real-world testing, the Galaxy S24 Ultra functions exceptionally well; you can multitask with ease, keep multiple apps in memory, and never really have to worry about hitting any performance ceiling; it just works as it should, and that’s a wonderful thing.
This excellent performance extends to the battery as well, since this device continues to rock a 5,000mAh cell, which paired with the fairly optimized operating system and processor, means you’re getting a phone that will consistently last you up to two days of use.
At 120Hz, 1440p resolution, and adaptive brightness turned on, I got around 11–13 hours of screen-on-time for typical usage, which included YouTube, streaming services, and social media. With heavier usage, including camera testing, HDR streaming at max brightness, and gaming, you’re able to expect around 7–8 hours. Either way, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll kill this phone in a single day, and if you extrapolate this battery performance into the next couple of years as the battery degrades, you should expect to at least make it through a full day of usage long into the future, which is excellent.
When it comes to charging, the phone still only supports 45W PD wired fast charging and 15W wireless charging, but as you begin to use the device for a couple of days and get used to its battery life, you’ll notice that a 30-minute top-up in the morning should be enough to last you through the day. This difference in charging behavior speaks to the confidence this phone evokes with how well-optimized its battery is, because if you regularly end the day from 100% to 50 or 40%, then charging the phone back to 65% will be more than enough to last you through another day. All this to say, I’m very impressed with how well this phone handles its battery.
Overall, Samsung improved incrementally, keeping what was already great. You’re once again getting a very capable phone with the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Software and Galaxy AI: Finally, Something Actually Useful
Undoubtedly, the software experience on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is its most defining change compared to last year. Honestly, this is the first time it feels like Samsung isn’t just throwing mud at the wall with gimmicks, but instead, rolling out some genuinely useful features.
Firstly, let’s talk about OneUI. OneUI 6.1, which ships with the device, is mostly great—though you’ll still find the usual bloatware of Meta and Microsoft apps you may not use, as well as Samsung’s suite of its own apps. But other than that, it’s relatively clean in how it presents itself, and you may pick and choose which features you want to have around and which you don’t need.
The major software announcement this year for the Galaxy S24 series isn’t OneUI 6 itself, but the fact that the S24 series will get a whopping seven years of software updates, matching that of Google’s Pixel 8 series. This means you’re able to keep up with new software and (more importantly) security updates for much longer, making this an incredible win for anyone who plans on using their devices beyond their carrier contracts.
The headlining suite of software additions this year is Galaxy AI, and there are seven distinct new AI features included on the device that can be categorized into three categories: translation, summarization and formatting, and photo manipulation. All of them can be enabled or disabled individually within Settings if you choose not to use them, and Samsung even lets you opt for on-device processing—a huge bonus for privacy.
With the translation features, you can use them in three different ways. The first two are a Google Translate clone that does translation through an Interpreter mode, and the second is text translation within messaging apps. These are things we’ve already seen with Google, but the benefit with Samsung is that the AI processing is done completely on-device. You don’t need to be connected to the internet or data to access it and the translations themselves are noticeably faster because of this.
I tried the Interpreter with a friend of mine who speaks Hindi, and it works relatively well, with little latency. The more impressive AI-enhanced translation feature is what happens in the phone app, where the device can translate what you say to the person on the other end and vice versa. Of course, there’s a small delay in between the processing, but it’s still quite impressive, and if you want to, you can just get the direct translation spoken to you without the device showing it.
In my time testing, the Interpreter and phone translation features work relatively well, but like most AI-enabled experiences, there are certain edge cases where you’ll notice it hasn’t picked up the audio properly and gives an incorrect translation or, more commonly, mistakes certain pronunciations and dialects to have one meaning when it has another. You can give up any chance of understanding slang or swear words. That said, for tourists and travelers visiting different countries where you might not have consistent access to data or the internet, conversing and understanding the language of the place you’re visiting will be immensely valuable.
The next suite of features is summarization, within Samsung Notes and Voice Recorder. This intelligently gives you a synopsis of what’s written or recorded. On the recorder specifically, again, the edge cases of having a less-than-ideal environment tend to mess with the transcription and summary. More annoyingly, you have to wait a fair bit of time for the summarization to finish after the recording. Out of all the AI features announced, this one feels the most gimmicky.
Moving onto the more interesting photo-alteration features, you’re essentially getting Samsung’s version of Magic Editor found on the Pixel phones. In my time testing it to remove and alter people and objects, it works shockingly well, and I think it has a place in certain scenarios where you are shooting in imperfect conditions.
My favorite feature of the photo suite isn’t so much the photo manipulation itself, but the basic adjustments to exposure and contrast that Samsung applies when you hit the AI button. It usually fixed any processing issues I found with the original photo.
Finally, the most practical software feature of the Galaxy S24 Ultra has to be its Circle to Search feature, and unsurprisingly, it’s made by Google. Circle to Search allows you to long press the home button or navigation bar on any screen and circle what you want to search for. Believe me: this completely changes how you will search, shop, or micro-learn things from the context within your phone and the world around you.
Circle to Search is so quick and consistently accurate in finding what it’s looking at, that going back to any other form of search feels obsolete. It’s Google Lens on steroids, and I think it’s the first time you’ll find a new software feature on your phone that you will find useful daily. I can point the phone camera at a pair of shoes and get the same color and style from the official brand store. I can even Circle to Search for photos from my gallery of places I’ve been, without any obvious cues for the place itself.
Should You Buy the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
Samsung has progressively gotten very safe with how it handles its flagship phones—no longer do they change the design of the phone every year or boldly add every feature they can imagine. At first glance, contrasting the past Samsung to the one that made the Galaxy S24 series can make these phones feel uninspiring and boring—but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra feels like a Galaxy S23 Ultra boosted with AI. For a phone that costs as much as it does, it’s one of the best compliments you can give, considering the Galaxy S23 Ultra was one incredibly well-executed device.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra represents an iteration rather than a revolution in Samsung’s flagship lineup. It preserves the core strengths of its predecessors while integrating AI-driven enhancements that are genuinely useful, paired with subtle hardware refinements. The flatter design, improved materials, and brighter display are thoughtful upgrades that enhance the user experience.
The biggest deviation on the S24 Ultra is in camera consistency (or lack thereof). Still, because it’s likely due to software and not hardware, this is something Samsung could fix in a future update. Given Samsung’s new commitment to keep these phones updated for a long time, I’m hopeful it will.
Overall, Samsung once again offers a safe upgrade with its Galaxy S24 Ultra. While you don’t need to upgrade if you’re coming from the Galaxy S23 or S22 series, if you’re in the market for a big phone armed with the best hardware and robust software support, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a compelling choice.
