 Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. It is big. It's also pretty. It has a great screen. There is a huge camera bump. It's actually a bit like the Galaxy S20 Ultra version of the same phone. Like, like actually a lot. Like Galaxy S20 Ultra, Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, S20 Ultra, Note 20 Ultra. Sorry, look. We'll get into a few of the differences between these two phones later. The main point right now is that while I don't like that the Note 20 Ultra starts at $1,300, I do like this phone. And there's not some grand Samsung reinvented the Note story to tell here. It's just, you know, it's a big phone. But what I like about it and a few of the things that I don't really like about it turn out to be just a lot of little things. We should, we should just get into it. Let's get into it. So not every phone review is about specs. Some phones have kind of mediocre specs. Like here's the Pixel 4a. It's got mediocre specs, but it's a really good phone. But this is the Note Ultra with a capital U. And so yeah, people going for this phone are gonna care about the specs. So let's just talk about some key ones right at the top. It has a 6.9 inch quad HD plus display that supports HDR 10 plus. It is of course OLED and has 120 Hertz refresh rate. And a first for Samsung, it is a variable refresh rate. Samsung says that it can go all the way down to 10 Hertz if nothing is moving on the screen and that is supposed to save battery life. Besides a refresh rate, the screen is great. I love the colors. I love the pixel density. I don't even mind how it curves around on the sides. But I'm gonna talk about the refresh rate again. It really matters on a phone of this class and it really does look great. You can feel it just all over the operating system. Now one thing you should know is you can't have the max refresh rate at 120 and get the maximum resolution on the screen. But I don't care. Give me the refresh rate. It has 12 gigs of RAM, which to me is enough for an Android phone to do a bunch of multitasking. And the $1,300 version of this phone has 128 gigs of storage, which really Samsung? I know that it's expandable with microSD, but you can't spring for 256 at this price point? Come on. Anyway, the 512 gig version costs an extra 150 bucks on top of that. The processor in this is the Snapdragon 865 Plus and of course it supports both millimeter wave and sub-6 versions of 5G because Samsung wants US carriers to actually care about this phone and US carriers only care about 5G. So it's got 5G. 5G rand over. It's got a 4500 milliamp hour battery and I'm getting five and sometimes six hours of screen time with pretty heavy use of this thing. Overnight on standby it's draining like maybe 10%. So I think battery life is great. I mean it should be. This is as I've said, a big phone. It's got an in-screen ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, stereo speakers, IP68 water resistance, Bluetooth 5, this S Pen here, this huge camera bump here, and actually we're gonna save the camera on the S Pen for later because there's a lot going on there, but anyway you get the point. The specs on this phone are great. This phone is fast and the design of this phone, well it's very notey and it's very ultra-y. What I mean is galaxy notes are big but they're also like properly squared off at the corners here. They make you think of a slab and I think that's actually good for what a note is that it feels like a slab. There's this new matte finish on the back that I think looks better than glossy but it's also just a little bit more slippery actually. At least it feels that way to me. Now for this thing being ultra-y, what does ultra-y mean? Well here's what I think that means. This thing right here, this camera bump, it's a mesa. It is a huge flat outcropping rising spontaneously out of the vast desert that is the back of this phone. It's big and it's squared off. In fact it's even bigger than the gigantic camera bump on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. So what do you get out of this bump? We're gonna go from easy to talk about to complicated when we talk about the many cameras on the Note 20 Ultra. First is the ultra-wide angle camera and that one's simple. It's got a 12 megapixel sensor and the photos that come out of it are okay but not stunning which is kind of par for the course for ultra-wide cameras. Then there's the selfie camera which is just 10 megapixels and what is happening here Samsung? I have turned off every face filter option that I could find and it is still painting bad makeup all over my face. I literally look like a ham in this photo. I know that there's a good camera inside this phone here somewhere. Quit being so try-hard about doing all this face smoothing with it. Telephoto. There's good news for the telephoto lens. It is a 12 megapixel sensor and it uses a periscope to extend the range so it can do 5x optical zoom and up to 50x space zoom digitally. Now it's interesting is that is a smaller megapixel count and a smaller zoom than what is on the Galaxy S20 Ultra and you know what? Good. Even at 50x on this thing things don't look great but they still look better than they did at 100x on that other phone. It's still kind of a party trick once you get over 10 or 15x but you know what's great? Having a photo that zoomed in 10 or 15 times that I would actually be willing to post somewhere. I like the zoom on this camera. Okay so the main camera on here is your standard wide-angle lens but it has Samsung's 108 megapixel sensor behind it. Now usually those pixels get combined or binned into just a 12 megapixel image but you can take a 108 megapixel sensor image full-size thing if you want and you know what? This is the juice right here. Samsung's whole deal with the Ultra phones is it wants to take this big 108 megapixel sensor and do cool stuff with it. It is how Samsung wants to separate itself out from Google and Apple in the photography department. Now when I tried to do it before with the Galaxy S20 Ultra that didn't go so hot because this sensor just couldn't focus fast enough and I am happy to say that on the Note 20 Ultra that problem has been fixed with a laser. It's using lasers for auto focusing and I haven't had a problem with focusing speed at all. I just want to say that using this camera system here is a blast. You have so many options but they're all kind of approachable even in Pro mode it's kind of approachable and as long as you're in good light you can just mess with them all and get really good results. Like you can shoot video in 8k if you want to. I don't think you should but you totally can but what you can also do in the Pro camera mode is mess with the microphones. You can use the front-facing mic, the rear-facing mic, an omni mic that listens everywhere, a Bluetooth microphone like in your earbuds or whatever, or a USB microphone and typically I'm not the kind of person that thinks that shooting Pro video on a phone makes a lot of sense but it's actually starting to make more sense to me here. If they just up the quality a little bit get closer to an iPhone 11 Pro you can do some really interesting things with this thing. Oh yeah picture quality we should talk about the pictures that come out of the thing. The Note 20 is still a half step behind the Google Pixel 4 or the Apple iPhone 11 Pro. Part of that is just the color balance that Samsung likes and we can agree to disagree on color balance but I just can't get on board with the over sharpening and over smoothing that Samsung tends to do. Now interestingly sometimes that works in the Note 20's favor so with night mode I actually prefer the Note 20's photos to the Pixel 4's photos because everything just looks a little bit smoother in the dark in a way that feels actually kind of natural. So usually talking about the cameras is like the most interesting differentiated thing on a high-end smartphone but with the Note 20 that's not actually the case. The main reason to get a Note really is the S Pen and I think that Samsung has done something really special with it this year. Now I am NOT talking about the wacky air gestures that you can do to control your phone from far away. I'm not talking about the fact that the stylus is finally on the left hand side of the phone so lefties get a year where they feel special instead of righties always getting the year. I'm also not talking about the improved latency when you're writing on the screen although I gotta say that really is noticeable it really does feel really good to write on this screen. Now I'm talking about something else and I can't believe I'm gonna say this but I am talking about Samsung's Notes app. It might be the best Notes app that you can get on a phone. Yes I just said that but look Samsung's Notes app already did stuff that Apple Notes is just catching up to and Microsoft's OneNote on mobile can't do it all. Like lets you highlight your handwriting and then copy out the plain text. It also lets you export to Docs or like now you can export to PowerPoint. It has a really really good handwriting recognition even on my terrible handwriting and god I love this software. The hits keep on coming. It can realign your handwriting so that it looks nicer straight down on a page. It seems dumb but it really does matter when you're trying to come back to them later. It can natively annotate PDFs finally but still Samsung also added folder organization this year if you care about that. It can do the thing where it records audio while you're taking notes and then later on you can go look over your notes again tap on the spot where you jotted something down and you can hear what the phone recorded. That is great for interviews or for lectures or whatever. I mean at this point the only thing I don't like about Samsung Notes is that it's Samsung. That's a really mean thing to say. What I mean is that it's really really good on the Note and everywhere else... Did you know that there's a PC version of Samsung Notes? I just learned that because now they've added instant syncing for notes there so that's helpful but the really big deal is later on this year they're going to add the option to integrate with Microsoft OneNote. Now it's only an export from Samsung Notes to OneNote but what that means is all the work that you put into taking a bunch of notes in this thing won't be stuck on this thing or the next thing. You can actually buy a different phone someday and just use Microsoft OneNote. You might not be hanging with me on this one. You might not believe that Samsung Notes is great but I promise you it's great but even if it's great it doesn't mean that you should buy this phone to get Samsung Notes but you know what? Credit where due. And actually speaking of OneNote and Microsoft there are a bunch of integrations coming. Reminders and Tasks will sync both ways to Outlook. You're gonna be able to run multiple Android apps at once on your Windows PC and of course Samsung and Microsoft are touting the Note as this great Xbox Game Pass ultimate phone and yeah playing Xbox games on a relatively huge phone screen is it's pretty great. Also Stadia is fine too. So after all that yeah Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. I think it's pretty good but the things that make it good are all the little things like Samsung Notes, better low-light photography, all those microphone options when you're shooting video, the variable refresh rate, the variable refresh rate making battery life better, no fingerprint smudges on the back, the low latency on the stylus. They're all really nice but none of them are a reason to go out and buy this phone. If you've got a Note 10 or even a Note 9 I really don't think you should upgrade. You know one of the reasons that people buy a Note phone it isn't the stylus it's because it's a super nice kind of flashy phone but this is not a flashy update it's more like a spec bump. Bump. It's more like a spec bump over last year but that still makes it one of the best top-tier Android phones that you can buy right now and that that's not a little thing. Hey everybody thanks so much for watching let me know what you think of the Note 20 Ultra downstairs in the comments are you waiting for the fold or maybe you want to get a OnePlus instead talk about that down there if you're looking for another video to watch. Bekka just reviewed the Galaxy Beans. That's what they're called not the Buds Live the Beans. They're headphones and we're calling them Beans.