Galaxy S24 Ultra: Everything New vs Galaxy S23 Ultra

All right, you have $1,300 to spend on a phone in 2024. Why would you get any other phone? No, seriously, why would you get any other phone than the Galaxy S24 Ultra? This phone has taken the best things from every other ultra-high-end phone and stuffed them into one phone. This phone sets the tone for 2024.

The formula for Samsung’s Ultra phones has evolved slightly over the years. At first, it was just the most numbers, the biggest megapixel count, the most zoom, and all that. Then it added the S Pen and got a little more refined and it replaced the Note. Now it’s just everything in one place. It has the best hardware and software you can think of all in one phone. So, on the outside, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra looks very much like the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which is one of the most fascinating phones of the last decade. This phone is going to reignite the entire Battle of the smartphone. Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is the first phone to come with Galaxy AI which is a lot cooler and more useful than the expected gimmick.

The more you use this phone, the more you look for weaknesses and the more impressive it gets. So maybe you were thinking about getting one of the ultra-high-end Oppo or Xiaomi phones just for an amazing screen. All right, well, look no further.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: Everything New

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – Full Specifications & Price in Nigeria

Galaxy S24 Ultra: Design

The design of the Galaxy S24 Ultra is kind of like a Galaxy S23 Ultra dressed up for the red carpet and it’s a beauty. The Galaxy S24 Ultra is flatter and less curved and the end of the S Pen is now squared off.

The phone has a new satin finish that hides fingerprints better than the previous model. The side rails texture is matte instead of the high gloss of the S23 Ultra.

Colors

The Galaxy S24 Ultra comes in new colors:

Titanium Yellow Titanium gray Titanium black Titanium violet Titanium green Titanium Blue Titanium orange

These phones kind of change color as the light catches it.

Material

The material used on this phone has been swapped from the previous aluminum to Titanium. The titanium material makes the phone stronger and better at conducting heat from the inside of the phone to the outside. The weight of the phone has slightly reduced because of the titanium material.

Display

The display of the S24 Ultra is flat which is the first time on a Premium Samsung device since 2015. There is a practical benefit of a flat screen over a curved screen (Galaxy S23 Ultra):

The screens are strong and solidly built. It’s easier to apply screen protectors.

The benefit of the flat screen is that the borders are even out and the bezels are thin. Looking at symmetry on the display is the most beautiful thing especially paired with a front camera which is smaller and even less of an interruption like on the S23 Ultra.

Galaxy S24 Ultra: Hardware

This phone has a bunch of Hardware upgrades from the S23 Ultra:

The base amount of the RAM has been upgraded from the previous 8GB to 12 GB.

The S24 Ultra internal speaker funnel is improved to give the sound more space and improve the clarity of audio.

The phone supported Wi-Fi 7 better than last year’s model Wi-Fi 6E which is four times faster than 6E.

The screen of the S24 ultra is big with a responsiveness up by 12% from last year’s model so inputs will feel a bit more real-time.

The max brightness of the screen has been improved from the previous 1715 nits to 2600 nits which allows you to see what is on the screen under direct sunlight. What makes the screen special is that it preserves the high contrast and dynamic range experience of what you are viewing even in bright sunlight.

The screen of the S24 Ultra is made of a new material, the glass protection is upgraded from Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on last year’s model to Gorilla Glass Armor which is four times more scratch-resistant. The interesting aspect of this gorilla glass armor is that it reduces screen glare by up to 75% which makes the display look drop-dead gorgeous.

Chipset & Performance

The best upgrade of the S24 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. This is the first time in recent memory you can say it is more powerful than any latest iPhone. What makes this the biggest upgrade?

Samsung used a custom version of that chip called “The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 For Galaxy” which gives you even faster speeds than all powered Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices.

With this, no doubt apps will Perform faster. Apart from having a faster processor, the main focus should be how well it controls temperatures and battery life. The device is built with a 1.9 times larger heat sink than S23 Ultra, meaning a bigger surface area of heat is conducted away from the chip. For battery, it has a 15% increase in battery life over the S23 Ultra.

There is one more important aspect of this new chip, is the involvement of AI in this device. Now this chip is powerful enough to run entire large language models completely on the device without internet.

Camera

The cool thing about the camera is the main 200-megapixel camera that has been refreshed. It has been refreshed with a new camera sensor.

The camera has a faster technique for capturing photos with a little help from software that reduced the capture time from 333 milliseconds to 238 milliseconds. Now, the S24 Ultra camera software lets you select an option to shoot even faster. The front and rear cameras, now have better noise reduction algorithms because noisy videos are a big issue for Samsung cameras. The camera improvements have a decent improvement to color reproduction, the smoothness, and Clarity of the photos.

The New camera AI model has been trained on millions of different photos to understand what things should look like and improve its color accuracy. The smoothness of the camera app feels one generation off from perfection than the S23 Ultra.

Zoom Quality

The Galaxy S24 Ultra has the slickest Samsung camera, you can Zoom from 0.5 times to 10 times without your phone lagging.

The major camera change is a little different from last year’s. The S23 Ultra quad setup has a main camera, an ultra-wide, a 3x zoom, and a 10x zoom camera.

Now this year with the S24 Ultra, the 10x zoom lens has been swapped to a 5x zoom lens, which has a clear perk. The previous model had a problem with the 3 times lens and the 10 times lens, when you’re zooming in and you’re at six times to ten times your photos look pretty rubbish. On the S24 Ultra, photos on the standard Zoom range from 0.5 times to 10 times look very good and you can use the new five time zoom to take the prettiest portrait mode shots.

The main question of the S24 Ultra is if photos will be worse in 100x zoom like the S23 Ultra. Three things make the 100x zoom photos better:

The new 5x zoom camera is a better quality camera than the 10x in the previous model. It has a bigger sensor with two times the optical image stabilization and five times the resolution. It has a smarter AI that after you’ve taken your Zoom shots goes back and intelligently upscales them.

Videos

You can take 8K videos at 5x zoom and 4K videos at 10X times.

Now, videos can be recorded in both 4K at 120 frames per second at the same time. When you realize that 120 FPS is the same frame rate for slow-mo, you can take 4K slow-motion video.

Software

The Galaxy S24 Ultra is coming out of the box with Samsung’s one UI 6.1 based on Android 14 which is better than the Android 13 on the S23 Ultra. The UI on the Android 14 has been completely redone:

The drop-down menu is more organized. The brightness slider is One Touch Away. There’s a new Always-On display. You get Dynamic widgets like live animated weather and you get camera widgets to instantly open up your camera. When you listen to music you have a real-time visualizer.

It’s just so much more aesthetically pleasing to use the UI.

Samsung has increased software support on the S24 Ultra, from the previous 4 years to 7 years of security update and software updates.

Artificial Intelligence

This phone is now supercharged with artificial intelligence which is the first galaxy from Samsung. Here are the different AI features:

Instant slow-mo

To use this feature:

Go into your phone’s Gallery, Play, and hold down on any video in it and immediately it halves the playback speed while keeping it smooth using real-time frame interpolation.

The instant slow-mo analyzing your video’s motion and inventing extra in-between frames. Another cool thing is that this effect can also double up with videos already taken in slow-mo. so if you are watching a 4K video shot at 120 frames per second, hold down and those 120 frames become 240 frames.

AI Generative Wallpaper

This AI gives you three different parameters that you can tweak on a wallpaper to create a continuous stream of One-of-a-kind images that you can apply as wallpaper.

AI Image Editing

This comes in two flavors:

Instant effect Generative AI editor

With instant effects, you apply with just one tap to photos while browsing in your gallery like the portrait mode effect, Auto framing, and background blur.

The main new editing feature, the generative AI editor lets you do mostly three things:

You can move your subjects. You can erase distractions like people who get in the way. You can expand things or even straighten the image if it’s crooked and AI will fill in the blank space.

This feature achieves a whole lot that it was set out to do while being a polished, accessible, easy-to-use entry route into AI editing. A good decision on this feature by Samsung is that it doesn’t make you wait in between each editing action and hitting the button “Generate” fixes up the whole image immediately.

Upgraded Voice Meeting App

This feature works when you drop your phone down on a table to record and it figures out who the various speakers are within the conversation and even summarizes it as well as translates it into other languages. This works for up to 20 people in a conversation.

AI Summarization

This gives the phone the ability to summarize things and this has many benefits. For example:

You download a PDF on your phone with one tap you will summarize it. If you’re browsing a website on the internet, you now have a button that can read the entire page for you and give you a perfect summary in 2 seconds. If you’re making notes in the note app, you can use AI to organize the entire document with headers, subheaders, and bullet points. This feature can summarize any points and even add an automatic cover page so that you can easily navigate through them afterward. This feature is an absolute magic at your fingertips.

Live Translation

A brilliant concept. With live translation, you talk to any person in any language and they will be able to hear you in their native tongue without having an S24. This feature changes communication and shows Samsung spent time figuring out how people will want this AI feature. There is an option to decide to mute what you or the other person is saying so that you can just hear only the translated portions. What makes this feature special is that it happens in real-time as you talk & works seamlessly in moments when you forget the cross-language barriers.

Circle to Search

The Circle to Search feature works when you see anything you want. You just hold down the home button, Circle it, and your phone will Google that exact thing.

Smart Keyboard

The new smart keyboard has a chat assist built into it and that does three things

Chat Translation Writing style Grammar

For translation, when you’re typing out a message but you want to swap the language. Tap “Chat translation” then just pick the language you want and instantly it will change the text language.

The spelling and grammar check works very well if you’re using your phone to type out a message and you want a second pair of eyes to have a full scan when you’re done. Just click on the Spelling and Grammar on the keyboard and it will check it. This is a powerful tool a level of reassurance at your fingertips.

For Writing Style, tap “writing style” and get back what you’ve written but in every possible different tone from casual to professional.

The smart keyboard is not just able to control what you send but also what you receive. In your phone settings, you’ll set up your native language and then this keyboard makes sure whatever application you’re messaging in any incoming message comes with both the original and the message in your language. This will solve the International Communication barriers.

Final Thought

At first, you will be skeptical about Galaxy AI because many powerful AI applications are available. To think Samsung will create a bunch of new Samsung-branded apps that would do the same thing as what already existed. What they’ve done is weave AI features seamlessly into the apps you already use. Having the Built-in AI features means you have it all the time and make things quicker versus the alternative which is using another app or website.

What AI companies don’t tell is that AI is done in the cloud but the difference is massive if you have an AI feature carried completely in your device. Built-in AI, works faster because it doesn’t need to connect to the internet, you can use it anywhere on the planet, and none of your data is leaving your phone at all. so, Samsung has added an option that pivots the phone to only performing AI tasks offline.

Galaxy S24 Ultra has a solid Hardware upgrade even though it is already a top tier. The Hardware and software are not just incredible but it fun to use. Even though Galaxy AI is not perfect, a little rough around the edges about 50% of the AI is on devices which is a good start. Most features are available on day one and work in every region which is how you should launch a feature.

There’s no denying that Galaxy S24 Ultra has come in and set the terms of what’s going to now be a very quickly evolving new Battlefield for smartphones.