Living With Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: 3 Months Later
Phones
Speaker 1: I spent three months living with the Galaxy S 24 Ultra and there's a lot of things that I am totally in love with about this phone and a couple of things that miss the mark. I'm Lexi. Welcome to your weekly dose of all things mobile. Make sure to subscribe for lots more. Let's
Speaker 2: Go.
Speaker 1: Samsung really buried the lead with this phone because you can give me ai, you can give me a 200 megapixel camera, but the thing that really matters that I use day in, day out is the screen. And the screen on the S [00:00:30] 24 Ultra is pretty special. It's using the new Corning Gorilla Armor and it significantly reduces screen reflections and glare. So each layer of that Gorilla Armor is thinner than a human hair and it supposedly reduces reflections up to 75%. I really don't know why Samsung waited so long to give us details about the construction of this coating and this screen three months after launch. I'm glad that we know about it now. Maybe it was something to do with the vivid [00:01:00] standard screen issues that some users were experiencing when they found that colors were washed out and a little bit grainy. I wasn't one of those users. I'm being very, very happy with this screen, but do let me know your experiences. Just suffice to say this is probably the best phone I've ever used for experiencing media outdoors. If I'm watching staff waiting for the bus, if I'm trying to take photos outside on a bright sunny day like today, this screen is so underrated and I really, really love using it.
Speaker 1: [00:01:30] Coming from my last Galaxy phone, that was my daily driver for such a long time, the S 22 ultra, the S 24 Ultra, and that flat display feels really nice to use. It's super practical and the design overall is really nice to hold in my hand without a case, but let's be real, I put a case on my phone clumsy. This thing is expensive and I don't want to be the one to test out the drop and scratch resistance. Now, I'm not an inspirational [00:02:00] quote person, but I kind of like the message on this serial case that I've been using. It's been super sturdy as well. I've also been switching it up with the Peak Design MagSafe case. Yes, MagSafe on Samsung is a thing now apparently, and no spen magnetic issues to report using that case. It's also got that nice little loop so I can keep it super secure in my hand.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the spen, the flat display also makes the Spen experience nicer to use for me. I am a huge fan of using [00:02:30] the spen to take notes with the screen turned off, and I do find that it gives me a little bit more usable area with a flat display as opposed to the curves on the S 22 and S 23 Ultra. So three months in I using all of those AI tools, no, only a couple, the best one for me has been circle to search and according to Samsung, it's actually the most used feature. I can definitely get on board with that. It's super useful. I'm also using it within the camera as kind of like a makeshift Google lens [00:03:00] and every time I switch back to say an iPhone, I really, really miss having circle to search. But it's not an S 24 Ultra exclusive anymore because all of these AI features have also come to older phones, like the S 23 Ultra, the Z fold five and C flip five, and of course some of the pixel phones too.
Speaker 1: With Circle Research, I've also been using Gemini AI instead of the Google Assistant, which has been surprisingly way more helpful than I first anticipated. So let's just say I want to create a Instagram post to promote [00:03:30] this video. I'm going to snap a photo and get Gemini AI to come up with a caption. Let's see. I don't know, would you click on that? So on the photo and video side, the things that I'm using the most is actually the shadow and reflection removal tool, which works pretty well and also sometimes the object removal tool is pretty helpful as well. I also find that the out painting result when you're rotating the canvas and trying to extend it is pretty decent. And I do use this quite a bit, but it's not a hundred percent. Take for example, this photo of my dog, it gets the leaf super [00:04:00] nice and crispy and generated into something that looks like it could have been there, but then look at my dog's tag and it's a total mess.
Speaker 1: So there's still a lot of work to go, but for most things it's actually pretty decent. And also the slow motion video is not quite there for me as well yet. I'm not really sure of the practical solutions that this is solving. It's kind of cool to see it at action by being able to press and hold on an existing video, but then trying to save it as a slow motion video isn't as intuitive and you can see quite a bit of that artifacting [00:04:30] detail. So you can tell that it wasn't natively shot in a slow warm bone. But the key with all of these AI photo editing tools is who's actually using them are you let me know,
Speaker 1: This is the first time in a long time where the camera isn't one of the key big features of the Galaxy phone for me, and that kind of indicates two things. Number one, it's plateaued and number two, it's just not that interesting anymore. I still think that Samsung [00:05:00] removing the 10 times optical zoom and opting for a pixel spinning approach to get 10 times reach is a mistake. I would've rather them taken that approach with the three times camera and use the pixel bidding approach so we could get a five times equivalent and kept that 10 times optical zoom length. From a consumer standpoint, that was such a huge selling feature and I'm always going to be team optical zoom over team hybrid digital Zoom, especially when it comes to video at 10 times. [00:05:30] I can definitely tell the difference and I know a lot of people love to take videos at 10 times optical zoom.
Speaker 1: It just makes sense. I hope that it's going to be added back in the future because it just seems like a huge missing piece for me. And speaking of video, if you are going through these different lengths, you can see the camera is kind of a little bit jumpy, especially when you're hopping between say the wide to the three times to the five times the 10 is not that bad, but I really do notice [00:06:00] that it's not particularly smooth when you're going between all these cameras. Sharing between devices is something that I do pretty much every day and I've always wanted I guess the universal airdrop and I think we are very close with Quick Share. So I can go and say, share a photo of my Delicious lunch, go to the share tab and then find the quick share option. Look at either the link or the QR code, scan that with my other phone, send that link to say my work computer, and then almost instantaneously [00:06:30] I have that file.
Speaker 1: Love it. No more fiddling with Android file transfer, which is long overdue for an update and lots more tips and tricks. You can find those on my other video about the S 24 Ultra right up there. And this is my annual complaint about Samsung Pay now known as Samsung Wallet. Yes, they removed MST or Magnetic Secure Transmission about three years ago. I'm still not over it. That was the technology that let you tap to pay it any terminal regardless of whether or not [00:07:00] it supported NFC. Still miss that. The app has also got much more confusing. They've taken away the Samsung rewards points, which I loved, so I might as well just use Google Wallet at this stage.
Speaker 1: Isn't it nice to not have too much to say about the battery because I've been pretty impressed with this phone and I end the day and anywhere between 40 and 50% generally left on the phone. That's a day that involves maybe four to five hours of screen on time, [00:07:30] so streaming music, social media apps, and just general phone use. Obviously I don't do a lot of heavy gaming on my phone, but always want to know your experiences in the Battery Life Department. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this was really helpful for you. As always, drop me a note with your experiences using the S 24 Ultra down below and I'll catch you next time. See you.
