Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review: The most feature-packed, do-it-all phone in the world

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is a paradox. It is at once the smallest and biggest mobile upgrade for Samsung in years. If I go through the list of hardware upgrades over last year's S23 Ultra, I could do it with one hand. But the new generative AI features are not just fun to play with, but genuinely useful in real world use, and at times, it does indeed feel like this device is the first step into a new era of computing.

Still, the point I raised during my initial hands-on remains true: all these AI features will available on older Galaxy flagships sometime this year — the Galaxy S23 series, Fold 5 and Flip 5 have been confirmed — and one feature in particular will roll out to Pixel phones within days. So when I am raving about these AI features, am I praising the S24 Ultra, or am I praising Samsung (and Google's) software, which will be available on a half dozen other phones within weeks?

I suppose the best way to evaluate the S24 Ultra is to do what many mainstream tech publications do with iPhones: I have to assume the Galaxy phones have a loyal customer base (and they do), and focusing on year-on-year upgrades is not the right way to evaluate the product. The S24 Ultra likely isn't aimed at people who own the S23 Ultra, but rather people with the S21 Ultra or S20 Ultra who are looking to upgrade their phones. When I look at it from this point of view, then yeah, the S24 Ultra is awesome. But if you have the S23 Ultra, you probably shouldn't upgrade unless you have excellent trade-in offers or just have money to splurge.

About this review: This review was written after a week of testing the Galaxy S24 Ultra provided by Samsung, the company did not have input in this article.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: Price and Availability

The Galaxy S24 Ultra, along with the other two phones in the series, are available for purchase now practically everywhere that sells electronics worldwide. In the U.S., you can find the S24 Ultra in all carriers, along with the usual suspects like Best Buy and Amazon. You can also buy direct from Samsung's website.

Hardware and design

Familiar, with welcome subtle improvements

The Galaxy S24 Ultra mostly brings back the same design used since the S22 Ultra: a boxy rectangular slab with hard corners. I've said this the past two years and I'll repeat it here: I love this look — there's this intimidating, 2001: Space Odyssey monolith vibe which I think looks "badass" — but I don't love its in-hand feel. The 90-degree corners dig into my palm uncomfortably. I suppose if you use a case, it'll soften the phone's pokey-ness, but I tend to go naked with my phones (I'm spoiled, I know). When I picked up the OnePlus 12 after a few days of using solely the S24 Ultra, I immediately noticed the more comfortable in-hand feel.

I love the S24 Ultra's boxy look, but I don't love its in-hand feel.

There are two physical changes Samsung has made with the new phone: there's a new titanium frame (replacing the aluminum of years past), and its matte texture looks and feels great. The 6.8-inch screen is now also entirely flat — the first time in eight years Samsung's top phone did not have a curved screen. I never disliked the curved panels the way most of my industry peers do, but I am fine with Samsung's change because it smoothed the edges where the display meets frame. This isn't always a given: Google made a similar switch to the flat panel with the Pixel 8 Pro and I thought it was a downgrade over the Pixel 7 Pro in terms of build quality.

My unit is the grey titanium color, which is basically the same as the iPhone 15 Pro's "natural titanium" color, and I love how it looks. This is a very mature, sophisticated-looking Samsung phone, and makes something like the Galaxy Note 10, which had this shimmery reflective glossy body, look cheesy by comparison.

The 1440 X 3120 LTPO OLED display is brighter than before, reaching 2,600 nits of max brightness. There's also a new anti-reflective coating on the screen that I have not seen on a phone before. It has more of a matte texture, resembling Apple's iMac displays. As far as I can tell, this coating does not affect the display of colors: they pop every bit as much as previous Samsung OLED screens.

The latest Qualcomm silicon is here as expected — Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 — and that's about it in terms of noteworthy hardware changes. Everything else, from the S Pen to the volume rockers to the in-display fingerprint sensor to battery capacity and charging speed remain the same.

Cameras

New periscope zoom and better software processing

The Galaxy S24 Ultra’s camera hardware only sees one noticeable change: the 10X periscope zoom lens, which has been a Samsung Ultra stable since 2021, has been replaced by a 5X periscope zoom. This new zoom camera has larger sensors and packs more pixels (50MP instead of 10MP), so it effectively allows Samsung to still produce a very credible 10X zoom image, while gaining a new optical 5X focal length that’s likely more usable in day-to-day than a 10X lens. Below is a collage featuring three photos captured with the main camera (1X, about 23mm), 5X (115mm) and 10X (230mm).

We can see the 10X zoom shot is indeed near lossless quality, so this change is a welcome one. The 5X zoom lens is more practical for real-world use, including snapping portraits of humans. (By the way, the below 5X shot of myself, I managed to snap by putting the S24 Ultra on a table across from me, then used the S Pen as a remote shutter. The phone being able to stand on its own, with a built-in remote has made it a very useful camera for self shots out in the wild).

The S24 Ultra's 5X zoom is very good, and I'd rank it ahead of the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro's, but it isn't better than the Periscope zoom lenses offered by the best Chinese phones across the continent. Something like the Oppo Find X7 Ultra or Vivo X100 Pro have Periscope zoom lenses that have much larger image sensors, and as such, will produce shots with less noise in low light conditions.

Elsewhere, the main 200MP camera, 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP 3X and 12MP selfie camera are the same as before. But Samsung has changed its software image processing, in my opinion, for the better. The S24 Ultra cameras seem to produce shots with more natural colors, without the K-Pop-like saturated bright hues. Photos snapped in low light scenes are also purposely kept darker, with noticeable dark shadows, instead of artificially brightening up the shot via gratuitous use of night mode like the last few Samsung flagship cameras. I like this change. Images captured by the S24 Ultra appear more organic.

Samsung’s software also does a good job of keeping color and exposure consistency across all four rear-facing cameras.

I think the S24 Ultra’s 200MP camera is a fine performer, with the 16-in-1 pixel binning mostly making up for the fact this sensor has a smaller sensor than just about every Chinese flagship phone. If I really nitpick and pixel peep photos side-by-side, I’m still going to prefer shots by the 1-inch Sony sensor captured by Vivo or Xiaomi phones more than the S24 Ultra, but the gap isn’t huge, and those phones are a virtual non-entity in North America. Compared to phones available here from Apple, Google and OnePlus, the S24 Ultra’s main camera has no noticeable shortcomings.

Video performance is top notch as far as the main and even 3X cameras go, but video stabilization for the 5X lens is below par, with noticeable shakiness when I’m trying to record 5X videos in a moving car. The iPhone 15 Pro Max and something like the Xiaomi 13 Ultra definitely have superior zoom video stabilization.

But while my very picky self find the S24 Ultra’s camera system to be “very good, but not amazing,” I have found myself playing with captured photos a lot the past week, and it’s because this phone offers generative AI photo editing. But that’s part of the software-driven AI features, so let’s talk about this in the next section.

Software

All about AI

The S24 series ship with OneUI 6.1 based on Android 14. Performance is to be expected for typical Samsung phones, it's chock full of features and customization options, and Samsung's animations are more fluid than before. But the software experience this year is really about generative AI, which are baked into several aspects of OneUI. As I wrote in my first impressions, I found the AI stuff genuinely helpful, and after a week, I'm happyto say that's still true. Most of them, anyway. Let's go through them one by one.

Call Assist

As the name implies, this feature helps during phone calls. Whenever you're on a phone call you will see a button labeled "Call Assist" on the screen, tapping it allows you to transcribe the call, so you can read what the other party is saying in real-time. You can also do real-time two-way live interpretation, which supports 13 languages right now. I can, for example, speak Chinese, and Samsung's digital voice assistant will play another language to the other party (could be anything from Thai to German).

When the other party responds in their language, I'll hear the voice assistant in Chinese. This is done on-device, without the need of the internet, and the wait time between I've finished speaking and the other party hearing the translated message is only about 3-6 seconds, so it's fast enough to work in real-world scenario.

On-device translation across several apps

In addition to interpreting phone calls, the S24 phones can also quickly translate chunks of text into another language without the need for the internet. This works for text you come across (like an online article or even an Instagram image in a foreign language), or words you type. But the latter requires the Samsung keyboard. If you type with Samsung's first-party keyboard, you'll see an AI button that can immediately turn that text into another language.

Circle to search

This one is not a Samsung-specific feature, but a Google one. Basically, you can circle or scribble over any part of the screen to immediately begin a Google Lens search. I can quickly highlight a line of text in a photo and translate the text, or look up a piece of clothing someone is wearing. The search is scarily accurate, often showing me the exact item I'm looking for. It's been very, very helpful for me. In the below screenshot, I was able to translate a Japanese caption to find out what she was saying. Instagram app itself didn't offer to translate the text, so on another phone it would have taken a few more steps to do this.

Another example: I circled a mountain that was in the background of my friend's Instagram Story, and it correctly identified the mountain as part of Lake Annecy in France. This was part of an Instagram Story that was showing on my screen, I didn't have the original image, so I don't think there was location metadata.

Yes, you can currently do this on just about any phone by launching the Google Lens app, but this new method is faster, since it doesn't require you to launch another app or grab a screenshot of what you want to search.

Although Samsung made it sound like the S24 phones had this feature exclusively, the Google Pixel phones have received a software update with this feature too, and I think eventually, other phones launching in the US like OnePlus devices should have it too.

Generative AI photo editing

The S24 phone's native photo gallery can do generative AI photo editing, meaning it can replace existing pixels with entirely original ones. The S24 phones are the second devices to do this natively on-device after the Google Pixel 8 series, and in some ways, Samsung's AI is better. For example, I can make multiple edits to a photo before generating the result, while the Pixel 8 phones limit me to one change per image generation. The generative process takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds, so it has been time-consuming when I needed to make several edits on a Pixel 8 phone before. The S24 phones can do this process faster.

Often, I use this feature to remove something from an image, and use generative AI to fill in the missing chunks to keep the image looking realistic. For example, in the sample below, I moved my dad closer to me in a selfie. Samsung's AI was able to fill in the missing background that was previously covered by his body in the original shot.

Another sample: I made my friend's body smaller and bigger for fun. Notice when I shrank his body, that left blank space the AI had to fill in with original pixels. The final shots aren't perfect, but realistically enough they could be posted on social media.

These photo editing tricks have also opened up the S Pen use case for me. I'm someone who has never used the S Pen much in previous Samsung phones, but I've been using the stylus a lot more to do things like draw an accurate cutout of my friend's body.

So yes, I have found these AI features very useful, and they have improved my daily life. These features alone make the S24 Ultra feel like a fresh phone for me, even though in a vacuum I find the hardware a bit boring.

General performance

No weaknesses anywhere

The S24 Ultra is a top-notch performer thanks to the very efficient and powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Whether it's gaming or doing video editing, this phone offers about as much power as possible right now on a small mobile device, perhaps placing second only behind the iPhone 15 Pro phones. Even then, the difference is only noticeable in video editing and rendering. If you're playing games or scrolling through Instagram, it's not like Apple silicon is going to show much difference over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

The S24 Ultra just feels like a polished phone all around. The stereo speakers are loud and produce full audio. Haptics are precise and firm. The S Pen stylus, as mentioned, is handy for photo editing and acting as a remote shutter for the camera. Despite not having as much RAM as some Chinese phones (there's 12GB here) the phone never felt slow, nor did I have to wait even when opening an app that's backlogged.

I'm also very impressed with battery life, which has consistently finished entire 14-hour days outside. I live a very active, always outside lifestyle, and I shoot a lot of photos and videos, so I'm a heavier user than most. For me, only the iPhone 15 Pro Max and S24 Ultra can consistently finish even heavy days with some juice to spare.

Should you buy the Galaxy S24 Ultra?

You should buy the S24 Ultra if:

• You want the biggest and most feature-packed phone in the world right now
• You see the AI features bring genuine value to your life
• You want the most capable camera phone in North America right now

You should not buy the S24 Ultra if:

• You have no need for the AI features or S Pen. In that case, the OnePlus 12 is as good in every aspect at a much lower cost
• You have the S23 Ultra already

I think the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a supremely polished and well-rounded phone that excels in almost everything. The very nitpicky side of me who gets access to all the phones will want to point out that Vivo X100 Pro or Oppo Find X7 Ultra have better cameras, but the former phone runs on an inferior MediaTek chip, has worse software, and the latter is only sold in China. Plus, for people in North America, those phones literally do not exist. If my options are the iPhone 15 Pro Max, Google Pixel 8 Pro, OnePlus 12, or the S24 Ultra, I'd pick the S24 Ultra above all.

However — and this is a big one — I think only the S24 Ultra is a triumph. The non-Ultra S24 models bring back the exact same dated camera system and lack the new titanium frame or the S Pen features. So if you find the S24 Ultra too pricey or uncomfortable to hold, I would recommend you look at the OnePlus 12 or Google Pixel 8 Pro instead as alternatives instead of the S24 or S24 Plus.