Samsung has immediately billed the Galaxy S24 Ultra as spearheading the next generation of smartphones, and for once we're inclined to agree. Despite this marketing term being used in practically every smartphone that launches, it rarely actually means anything, as it often simply refers to more megapixels or bigger screens.
However, whether you like it or not, we live in a world of AI now, so it was only a matter of time before phones hopped on the bandwagon. Just last week at CES, LG made a big deal of AI Picture and AI Sound on its latest OLED TVs, and now it's the turn of its Korean competitor to add more AI features to its phones. This is the "next-generation" angle Samsung has opted for, as AI is deeply integrated into S24 Ultra, and for the most part, it works.
Ultimately, we care most about how this new phone performs when it comes to picture and sound, and thanks to a brief hands-on session in San Jose, California, we managed to get some time to test how it performs in the AV department. We'll have to wait until we've got our review unit of the S24 Ultra in to conduct a full review using our thorough testing process, but here's what we think of the phone so far.
Price and build
You'll be pleased to hear that the S24 Ultra has evaded the trend of yearly price increases, as it will remain at the same price as the Galaxy S23 Ultra it's replacing. All models come with 12GB of RAM and there are three storage variants with the following prices:
- 256GB: £1249 / $TBC / AU$TBC
- 512GB: £1349 / $TBC / AU$TBC
- 1TB: £1549 / $TBC / AU$TBC
That puts the S24 Ultra at a higher price than the Award-winning Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max (£1199 / $1199 / AU$2199), but slightly below the five-star Sony Xperia 1 V (£1299 / $1399).
The S24 Ultra looks a lot like the S23 Ultra, although it marks a significant point in Samsung's Galaxy S series design philosophy. The S24 Ultra ditches the curved display found on practically every generation of Samsung Galaxy S smartphone going all the way back to the Galaxy S6 Edge. While it was a revolutionary feature back in 2015, we certainly felt like we fell out of love with it some time ago, especially as it introduces awkward glare, picture warping and irritating accidental touches at times, so we're not too sad about its departure. The same can be said for the rear glass panel, which has been flattened and features a satin finish.
While we've lost the edge display, there is a noticeable upgrade to the edges of the S24 Ultra thanks to its new Titanium frame. Apple kicked this trend off with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and Samsung has followed suit by reinforcing the S24 Ultra with the premium metal. Holding an S24 Ultra in one hand and an S23 Ultra in the other, we did notice a slight difference, but considering the new model is a whopping one gram lighter than the outgoing one, it's not exactly revolutionary; especially if you're planning on covering said frame with a case.
This phone is also reinforced further with Corning's Gorilla Armour glass, which Samsung claims will make the S24 Ultra four times more resilient to scratches, as well as reducing screen glare and reflectivity by an impressive 75 per cent.
The S24 Ultra comes in four appealing new colours; Titanium Grey, Titanium Black, Titanium Yellow and Titanium Violet – we think Samsung really wants us to know this new phone uses Titanium. The grey and black are more understated and stealthy, while the violet and yellow offer more flashy tones of deep purple and gold respectively.
Features
Samsung has gone all-in on AI, even giving its new feature set the name of Galaxy AI. We managed to see each of these new features in practice and have to say, we were rather impressed by each one in their own right.
Live Translate, as its name might suggest, uses AI to convert phone calls and text conversations into different languages in real-time and seems to work quite well. Chat Assist includes a translation function, as well as using AI to re-write your messages before you send them to change the tone with five presets available including professional, casual, social, "emojify" and a summarise style option with bullet points. Transcript Assist can be used to transcribe voice recordings with intelligent subject recognition, as well as format written notes and summarise long voice and written notes alike.
However, out of all of the new AI features, our favourite was certainly the Circle to Search feature, which allows you to draw a ring around any subject on screen while holding down the home button in order to perform a Google search of whatever is highlighted. This worked flawlessly for everything from recognising buildings in a travel video of New York City on YouTube to searching for a backpack via the camera preview window.
All of these new AI features require a powerful processor, so it should be no surprise that Samsung has enlisted Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with the For Galaxy suffix on the end hinting towards a higher clock speed, as was the case with the S23 series. The S24 Ultra flew through the Android 14 operating system (with Samsung's One UI 6.1 skin over top), even when we attempted to catch it out by opening a quick succession of apps.
Samsung has always been hot on camera specs with the Galaxy S series, and the S24 Ultra is no exception. It retains the 200MP main lens, 12MP ultra-wide and one of the 10MP telephoto lenses, but swaps one of the telephoto lenses of the S23 Ultra out for a much higher resolution 50MP telephoto lens. It's capable of five times optical zoom, which should result in crisper zoomed-in shots. There is also a new host of AI photo editing features such as reflection removal, highlighting and moving subjects with generative fill backgrounds and even the ability to view your camera viewfinder in HDR, which gives you a better idea of how your photos will come out. We managed to conduct some camera testing during the hands-on session and the S24 Ultra seems to be a solid performer, but we'll need more time with it to finalise our thoughts.
Finally, we get onto the two most important aspects: the screen and speakers. The S24 Ultra features a 6.8-inch Quad HD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display. That's a lot of buzzwords, but in layman's terms that's an OLED display that's capable of a dynamic refresh rate from 1Hz to 120Hz, and a 1440p resolution. We also expect it to support HDR10+ like its predecessor.
This year, Samsung has cranked up the brightness to a peak of 2600 nits which was certainly noticeable in our hands-on test, as the screen was particularly dazzling. There are no two ways around it, it's a lovely screen in daily use; it's big, bright and buttery smooth.
Speaker information is a little bit more of a mystery. What we do know is that the S24 Ultra uses a combination of a bottom-firing speaker and earpiece to create a stereo pair, and as expected there is no headphone jack. Last year's phone supported Dolby Atmos for both speaker and headphone audio, so we assume that this year's model will be the same.
Picture
Now is a good opportunity to once again caveat; this is not our final review of the phone and we certainly did not get to use our usual testing process during this hands-on session. As is the case with all of Samsung's hands-on events, we couldn't log into our usual streaming apps we use to test phones, so resorted to using film trailers on YouTube to get an idea of what the S24 Ultra can do.
Starting with the trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, I was immediately struck by the S24 Ultra's punchy and vibrant image that lent itself particularly well to the oranges and blues of the trailer. The burnt sand of the apocalyptic wasteland were well suited to the S24's rich colour palette, while the contrasting blues popped through with spectacular vibrancy. A case can certainly be made that it looked a touch oversaturated but that can be remedied by tuning the display down to the 'natural' preset in the settings menu.
Carrying forth with the natural preset equipped, I moved onto the trailer for Oppenheimer. Overall, the S24 Ultra appeared to rein itself in with a more balanced look overall, although skin tones leant towards the warm side, and the grass of the baseball pitch seen briefly in the trailer was a touch oversaturated for my liking. That being said, details were crisp and the outlines of the subject on screen were very well-defined, which resulted in an impressive three-dimensional effect. We have the S24 Ultra's impressive contrast to thank for that convincing depth effect, although it doesn't quite reach the striking solidity of Sony's smartphone screens.
Rounding things off with the Dune Part 2 trailer, the S24 Ultra flexed its muscles, delivering an aptly cinematic experience. The enhanced brightness was appreciated during the numerous explosions seen in this trailer, while the large screen really helped to sell the scale of this film, from the all-out warfare to the giant sandworms.
While we are certainly keen to put the S24 Ultra through its paces in a more controlled environment and using higher quality sources, it's already made a strong first impression.
Sound
We'll keep this short and sweet; a loud room full of journalists and active product demos isn't an appropriate place to test sound performance, and Tidal wasn't downloaded on the device, so testing sound performance wasn't really possible. From the film soundtracks and dialogue that accompanied the trailers we watched, we can say that the S24 Ultra speakers can go quite loud, and there is noticeable spatial separation thanks to the combination earpiece and bottom-firing speaker.
Expect a full breakdown of speaker and headphone performance in our full review coming soon.
Early verdict
We'll need to put the Galaxy S24 Ultra properly through its paces to finalise our thoughts and feelings on it, but if we're purely going from first impressions, then we'd have to say Samsung has developed yet another impressive flagship smartphone.
Equipped with an impressive screen, powerful chipset, versatile camera and the very latest in AI smarts, the S24 Ultra will likely be a no-brainer for those that want a top notch smartphone but aren't willing to deal with the quirks and compromises of Sony's Xperia series. While we have reservations about its over enthusiasm in the saturation department, we're certainly looking forward to seeing what this new Galaxy can truly offer in the AV department.
MORE:
Read our full Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max review
And our Google Pixel 8 Pro review
As well as our picks for the best smartphones
