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Buy your Galaxy S24 Ultra here
According to Samsung, we’re entering the era of ‘mobile AI’, or, as they’d prefer us to call it, ‘Galaxy AI’. It’s their turn to attach those two letters to their smartphone brand. And, boy does the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra show they are serious about this.
Google weighed in last year with an AI-heavy update to the Pixel lineup. Apple is, apparently, readying some AI-inspired (remember – they appear incapable of mentioning that phrase publicly) updates for iOS at WWDC. Others will undoubtedly follow later this year.
For now, though, the spotlight falls on Samsung, and, in particular, on the S24, S24+ and S24 Ultra.
At San Jose on 17th January, Samsung unveiled its next generation of Galaxy devices. These don’t flip or fold, but they do possess some genre-defining features that demand our attention.
I was lucky enough to get hands-on with the Samsung S24 Ultra in Las Vegas during CES and for a second time in London earlier this week.
Trust me – there’s a lot to discuss.
Specs and pricing
You can pre-order the S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra today, with the devices arriving later this month.
The Samsung S24 Ultra (which is the device I’ll be focusing on during this first impressions review) starts at the same price as its predecessor – £1,249 for 256GB. The 512GB version has received a welcome discount of £50 over the 2023 model, bringing it down to £1,349. If you want the range-topping 1TB edition, you’ll need to stump up £1,549.
As always, Samsung is offering its usual pre-order incentives, including double storage and web-only exclusive colours, if you get in early.
Speaking of colours, the S24 Ultra comes in four shades of titanium – grey, black, violet, and yellow. If you fancy yourself an online exclusive (as I usually do), you can expect a choice from blue, orange, and green. In person, the stock colours are muted yet very premium-looking; the S24 Ultra looks every bit the fresh, flagship device it is.
Moving onto internal specs, and if you’re based outside of the US and you’ve been worried about rumours of the Exynos chip returning, I can confirm that it has returned. However, Samsung’s silicon can only be found in the S24 and S24+; the S24 Ultra gains access to the brand-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (albeit a version that has been specifically tweaked for Samsung). Twelve gigabytes of RAM as standard completes the package.
Design and display
The S24 Ultra is Samsung’s first titanium smartphone. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the iPhone 15 Pro Max was Apple’s first titanium smartphone. They’re all at it, basically, but for a very good reason. I’ve been delighted with Apple’s choice of metal for its latest flagship, and it makes total sense for Samsung to make the same decision.
In the hand, the S24 Ultra feels slightly lighter than the S23 Ultra, and the presence of brushed metal sides somehow immediately dates the shiny appearance of the latter. There are structural benefits to the titanium switch, too; according to Samsung, the S24 Ultra is now 56% more durable.
This is also the first smartphone on the market to feature Corning Gorilla Armor glass covering the display, which is, apparently, four times more scratch- and damage-resistant than the previous generation. I didn’t get to test that during the hands-on time, but it’s reassuring, nonetheless.
As for the display itself, it is, once again, a triumph. There are two changes worth mentioning. The first is the fact that this is Samsung’s brightest ever Galaxy display with a peak brightness of 2,600 nits (thus comfortably beating the 2,400 nits of the Pixel 8 Pro).
Secondly, it’s completely flat – gone are the slightly curved sides of the S23 Ultra’s display. That has never bothered me, but there has clearly been enough consumer data to the contrary for Samsung to make the change. It’s worth noting, however, that the sides of the devices are still curved, which means the S24 Ultra remains impressively comfy in the hand for such a large device.
While the S24 Ultra may not look much different when placed side-by-side against its predecessor, the switch to Titanium and meaningful, considerate design changes add up to more than you might think.
Camera
The S24 Ultra’s camera system is dominated by AI features, but there’s some other stuff that’s worth highlighting.
As noted earlier, Samsung is obviously listening, and that’s made abundantly clear when we look at the changes they’ve made to the optical specs of the S24 Ultra.
On the S23 Ultra, we had 1x, 3x, and 10x optical focal lengths. Everything else – including that huge gulf between 3x and 10x – was of the digital variety. It never made sense to me. As impressive as the 10x zoom can be in certain situations, I found those situations to be so fleeting that it seemed illogical to dedicate a hardware focal length to that range.
Then, in September last year, Apple launched the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which featured a brand-new 5x optical focal length. I cannot stop using it. Whether I’m shooting portraits, street stuff, or landscapes, the combination of just enough reach and some rather lovely compression make 5x so useful, day-to-day.
Good news! The S24 Ultra has followed suit with its fancy new 50MP adaptive pixel sensor. We still have 3x optical zoom, but the 10x has been swapped for 5x, and it immediately makes more sense as soon as you open the camera app. If you want 10x (I’m aware it was a favourite for some users), it’s still there, albeit infused with AI trickery to achieve the desired quality. I’ll be testing that out in my full review.
My good friend, Ben from LoverOfTech, also spotted a big update to the video specs of the S24 Ultra. You can now shoot 4K video at 120fps at both 1x and ultra-wide, without any cropping. The Ultra series has never been a slouch when it comes to video performance, but this is an impressive upgrade.
Galaxy AI
Let’s get onto the meat and potatoes of the Samsung S24 series – AI. Sorry, Galaxy AI.
During my hands-on with the S24 Ultra, I got to see and test all of the new AI stuff that has been baked right into the device. However, it’s important to note that everything I’m about to cover is available on all three S24 devices. Which is nice.
Let’s start with Live Translate. The Galaxy S24 is the first phone to offer live two-way translation, and it has 13 languages to choose from at launch (with more on the way soon). It’s simple, fast, and effective – you simply call the person with whom you need to have a translated conversation and turn on the feature (they’re informed via a recorded message that the conversation is being translated and transcribed).
As the conversation takes place, the S24 immediately translates whatever you say and speaks it back to the person on the other end of the phone. As they talk, their words are translated into your native tongue and displayed on the screen. Everything happens on-device, and, once the call ends, any trace of the conversation is destroyed.
This is joined by another feature called Interpreter, which is intended for face-to-face translation. The idea is that you hold your phone out in front of you so you can converse with someone in a different language. The display is reversed for both of you so you can see what the other person is saying. A super simple interface indicates when it’s your turn to talk, and AI takes care of the rest. During the test, it worked faultlessly.
Next up, we have Chat Assist, which is built directly into the Messages app and accessed via the Galaxy AI symbol (something you’ll see increasingly throughout One UI from this point forward).
Once in, you can lean on AI to translate your messages into different languages (and if you leave it in translate mode, it’ll continue to translate every message you send – immediately). There’s also a ‘writing style’ feature, which provides different tone options for your draft message – handy if you don’t want to piss off your boss, or if you want to be funny but can’t find the inspiration.
Web pages can also be summarised and translated via AI in the One UI web browser. The speed with which the S24 undertakes both tasks is impressive, and it’s one less step for anyone who regularly uses ChatGPT for such tasks.
Artificial intelligence has made its way into the Notes app, too. With a couple of taps, you can auto-format notes to save time doing so yourself (you’re presented with multiple style options), and you can summarise notes if you want a concise overview of large ramblings. Oh, and yes, you can translate notes into one of 30 different languages, as well.
One of the coolest AI features I got to play with during the hands-on sessions was Circle to Search, which has been developed in conjunction with Google. The premise is simple – hold down the home button and use your finger or S Pen to circle anything on the screen. Within seconds, Google tells you what that thing is.
You can do this with photos, Instagram posts, web pages – literally anything that appears on your S24 display. So, if you want to know exactly what trainers your mate is wearing, or where their latest Instagram holiday photo was taken, this feature should come to your rescue. It works very well indeed and even managed to figure out exactly what my trainers were from a hastily taken top-down shot of the laces.
There’s a huge injection of AI when it comes to S24 photography – too much to cover in detail here, but into which I’ll dig fully come my full review.
There are now editing suggestions available in the photo preview app, including the ability to remove shadows, erase reflections, add portrait effects, and get rid of noise. In testing, these features worked well – it’s at least as good as anything else I’ve used for those purposes.
There’s generative AI at work, too. For instance, if you take a wonky photo and need to straighten the horizon without cropping in, the S24 will fill in the resulting gaps for you – something it does very well after a quick roundtrip to the cloud. You can also move subjects around the frame, with the phone once again filling in the vacant space left behind.
Instant slow-mo was a particular highlight and reveals the true power of generative AI on a smartphone. It works by adding missing frames into video footage you want to slow down. So, if you shot something at, say, 24fps, hitting the instant slow-mo button will add up to 120 frames that aren’t actually there to ensure a smooth slow-motion playback.
For a kid born in the 80s, this kind of stuff remains utterly mind-blowing.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Conclusion
We are clearly in the era of Galaxy AI; the S24 series does enough to add weight to Samsung’s lofty claim.
The updates to the device itself are as welcome as they are unsurprising. We’ve got new chips, a slightly revised design, better durability, and improved camera hardware. As a result, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra retains its place at the top table of smartphones – this is an example of what you should get if you spend a boatload of cash on a portable telephone.
But the AI stuff will be the talking point. That’s what Samsung wants, and whether or not you’d find use for all or just one of the features I’ve covered today, it’s hard to argue that this doesn’t represent a significant moment in smartphone history.
Over to you, Tim. Samsung gets there first every year simply because of release cadences, but the pressure really is on to do something very interesting with iOS and the iPhone this year. And, yes, you may have to utter those two letters this time.
Buy your Galaxy S24 Ultra here
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