Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review: big phone, small updates

Samsung had settled into a new routine for its Galaxy Note line of smartphones. The company would take some of the major new features from the flagship Galaxy S updates from earlier in the year, improve on them slightly, and add a stylus. Instead of being the first with new technology, the Note had become the phone that refined it. If there was something new for the company’s routine, it was this new “Ultra” moniker at the end of its flagship S and Note phones.

The market was used to phones coming in small and big, but now Samsung wanted to introduce yet another tier. “Ultra” mostly meant going all-out on every possible spec and making the camera bump gigantic. The company had long felt the likes of OnePlus and Huawei nipping at its heels, and the Ultra tier of its phones was its answer to anybody who thinks it could not make the highest-level Android phone.

Ultra also meant ultra-pricey, as the Note 20 Ultra started at $1,299.99 for a model with 128GB of storage, and all the way up to 512GB for $1,449.99. The good thing about routines was predictability, they were comfortable and familiar. But routines could also lead into a rut. The Note 20 Ultra avoided that trap, not because it had new ideas, but because it did such a good job with the same old ones.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra was a huge phone with a 6.9-inch screen.

It was so big that it was large enough to cross some hazy line where it began to feel like a little tablet instead of a large phone. The Note 20 Ultra’s most prominent hardware feature was a promontory. It had this massive, mesa-like camera bump on the back that housed the three cameras, a laser focus sensor, and the flash. It was not just that it was huge, it jutted straight out of what was otherwise a vast, flat expanse of phone.

Camera bump aside, nobody was designing nicer phone hardware right now than Samsung. The Galaxy S20 had the cleanest lines. The Note 20 Ultra did not quite rise to that level because of the camera bump, but it was an otherwise flawless execution of what a Note to be. That meant it had a big screen, squared-off corners, minimal bezels, and was symmetrical front to back.

Samsung had a new finish on the back that was matted instead of glossy. That hid fingerprints, but it made the phone a little more slippery. One oddity was the S Pen stylus silo was on the left-hand side of the phone instead of the right. There were not a lot of surprises with the Note 20 Ultra when it came to its specs or performance. The screen, in particular, was excellent.

It was big, obviously, but all of the little technical details were spot-on.

The color accuracy, viewing angles, and brightness were all superb. It was a quad HD + OLED at 496ppi, supporting HDR10+ and a few different color options. It was also using Corning’s latest, named Gorilla Glass “Victus”. But the reason the screen was so great was not the resolution nor the glass, it was the refresh rate. It could hit 120Hz, and it was a variable refresh rate.

The screen dynamically adjusted based on what was being displayed and could ratchet all the way down to 10Hz if nothing was moving. The trade-off was better battery life, and the battery life on the Note 20 Ultra was excellent. The battery life out of that 4,500mAh cell was all the more impressive because it was powering a lot. The Note 20 Ultra had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor, which had a separate modem for 5G.

There was 12GB of RAM, in-screen ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, wireless and reverse wireless charging, expandable storage, stereo speakers, Bluetooth 5, NFC, MST, IP68 water resistance, and wireless DeX over Miracast. Samsung even tossed in a UWB radio just like the iPhone. It supported both sub-6 and mmWave versions of 5G. Overall, general performance on the Note 20 Ultra was top-notch.

Apps never seemed to close in the background, stutters were nonexistent, and the refresh rate on the screen made everything felt that much smoother.

There was one spec that was genuinely impressive, the company had reduced the latency on the S Pen stylus. It was down to 9ms through a combination of faster processing, a higher refresh rate screen, and some predictive machine learning that could intuit where the stylus was going ahead of time. It was impressive because it was tangible. Latency when drawing and writing with the S Pen was the best on a Samsung phone.

The virtual ink flowed right out from the stylus tip with nary a gap. Generally speaking, if anyone definitely wanted a stylus, the only choice was a Note. Samsung Notes was the best notes app on a phone. The company’s notes app already did stuff that Apple Notes was just catching up to and Microsoft’s mobile OneNote app still could not pull off. It also exported out the notes to a Word doc, PowerPoint, plain text file, image, or a PDF.

The Samsung Notes app was well-designed, handling quick lists and longer notes equally well. It had just the right amount of text formatting, and this year, it added the ability to organize your notes into folders. Its handwriting recognition was as good as on any gadget and your handwritten notes were searchable, too. New this year, the company’s Notes also could directly annotate PDFs.

Tap a button to straighten your handwriting so it flows naturally down the screen.

It made your notes much more readable. Notes also could record audio as you jot down notes so that you could go back later and tap on your jotting and hear what was said at that precise moment. There was a problem with Samsung Notes, though. It was only that good on the Note 20 Ultra itself. Later this year, the company’s Notes would be able to one-way sync to Microsoft OneNote.

Samsung’s love affair with Microsoft was getting really serious this year. In addition to Notes’ one-way sync, reminders and tasks would sync both ways with Outlook. Later this year, Microsoft’s Your Phone app on Windows will allow you to mirror multiple apps at once from the Note. The company was also pushing Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service.

Playing an Xbox game on the Note’s big screen felt completely natural. It was a bigger screen than even a Switch Lite. Stadia was fine, too. But Stadia would not have Microsoft’s game library. The rest of Samsung’s One UI version of Android was par for the company’s course. Lately, the company had lost a bit of discipline when it came to software design.

Samsung was always tempted to lade on too many weird features.

The experience on the Note 20 suffers as a result. With a camera bump this big, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra had an impressive camera system. The actual photos out of Galaxy Note 20 Ultra were not always great. However, Samsung had largely recovered from the problems that beset the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The Note 20 Ultra had a camera system that was on par with the best phones out there, except for the selfie camera.

There were three cameras: a 12-megapixel ultrawide, a 12-megapixel telephoto with a periscope assembly, and a 108-megapixel main wide-angle. Generally, the ultrawide sensor on any phone was the weakest of the bunch. However, the ultrawide on the Note 20 Ultra was better than that average. The dynamic range was important for landscapes. For the telephoto, Samsung went with its folded periscope system.

So the sensor sat behind a set of mirrors that extends its real optical zoom range to 5x. Samsung also had this thing it called “Space Zoom” that combined the optical and digital zooms to get into 50x. Interestingly, the S20 Ultra had a higher megapixel count and offers 100x zoom, which meant the company dialed it back for the Note. The S20 Ultra was never anything more than a parlor trick over 15x zoom, and it was fairly impressive at 15x.

The same applied to the Note 20 Ultra.

But at 10x or so, it was better than the iPhone 11 Pro and competitive with the Pixel 4. Those phones could not zoom farther than that, but the Note 20 could. Then there was the main 108-megapixel camera. This sensor was Samsung’s own, and the company’s whole project with cameras this year was to make a generational leap over the Sony sensor-using competition by utilizing all of those megapixels.

Samsung stumbled out of the gate with the S20 Ultra, which had serious focusing problems that were only partially mitigated by a software update. The Note 20 Ultra had that update, but, more importantly, it also had a laser autofocus system. It was a brute force hardware solution, but it worked. Closed up, the focusing was much quicker and far more reliable than the S20 Ultra’s.

Samsung had fallen a step behind the iPhone in terms of color and still had not caught up to the Pixel in terms of detail, but it was ahead of most of the rest of the Android pack. At least, the company’s penchant for smoothing made for a more pleasing image in extremely low light. The interface for its Pro Mode was clean and clear. And the company had added lots of microphone options, a relative rarity on phones.

Users could switch between the front mic, rear mic, or the omni mic.

Users could also plug in a USB-C mic or record off a Bluetooth headset. It was fair to call the Note 20 Ultra an iterative update. Doubly so, it was a refinement of the same Note design that Samsung had been refining for half a decade, and internally, it was a bunch of tweaks to the Galaxy S20 Ultra from earlier this year. Streaming Xbox games on Galaxy Note 20 Ultra was truly immersive and fun, and the battery had the stamina to hold up for hours of it.

Even the gimmicky Space Zoom sometimes paid off. The Note 20 Ultra was a very ostentatious, flashy phone. But this year, it did not get a flashy update. It got what amounts to a spec bump. But that was enough to make it perhaps the best flagship Android phone anyone could buy right now.