Samsung Galaxy S24 Extremely overview: Spectacular(ly boring)

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, the corporate’s newest flagship smartphone, checks almost each field for what you’d need in a high-end smartphone in 2024. It boasts the newest Qualcomm processor for easy efficiency, has an enormous, brilliant show and a digicam setup that turns anybody right into a budding photographer. Oh, and the battery life — it goes for days. Actually.

Over the past two weeks, I examined the S24 Extremely, utilizing it as my important cellphone day by day. Outdoors a number of refined adjustments to the design and a handful of software program options, I am not satisfied I might have instructed the distinction between it and final yr’s S23 Ultra if I did not know any higher. Certainly, the S24 Extremely is a boring replace. However, perhaps that is not a nasty factor? Let’s take a better look.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Extremely

Advisable

100x Area Zoom, a vibrant, curve-free AMOLED show, an S Pen with nice options, and much more wrapped up in a titanium package deal. The Galaxy S24 Extremely is Samsung’s assertion on what a conventional slab smartphone must be in 2024.

Professionals

• A totally flat show that appears nice
• A battery that does not know what give up means
• A powerhouse in efficiency

Cons

• A tried and true design
• The digicam tends to overexpose photographs

Value, specs, and availability

Samsung started taking preorders for the Galaxy S24 Ultra on Jan 17, with deliveries and in-store availability set for Jan. 31. Nonetheless, preorders began arriving earlier than the official launch date.

As ordinary, Samsung has a number of shade choices accessible, a few of that are unique to orders positioned via Samsung. The Samsung unique colours embrace titanium inexperienced, titanium blue, and titanium orange. Colours with wider availability embrace titanium black, titanium violet, titanium yellow, and titanium grey.

The S24 Extremely begins at $1,299 for 256GB of storage, with the 512GB and 1TB fashions costing $1,419 or $1,659, respectively. All three fashions include 12GB of storage

What I like in regards to the Galaxy S24 Extremely

Flat shows are again

There are just a few design adjustments between final yr’s S23 Ultra and the 24 Ultra, a few of which you may be hard-pressed to even discover. One such instance is the truth that the S24 Extremely’s housing is now made from titanium as a substitute of aluminum, making the cellphone barely lighter than its predecessor, however retaining the identical general aesthetic of being a flat-edged rectangular field.

Arguably the most important design change from final yr is the change from a curved edge show to a completely flat show. Samsung, together with different cellphone makers, have used curved edge shows to make bigger telephones really feel thinner and simpler to carry, however it has come at the price of errant touches and different usability points.

In October, Google made an identical change to the Pixel 8 Pro, and it vastly improved the general expertise. The identical might be stated in regards to the S24 Extremely — the flat show feels extra pure to faucet and swipe throughout. The S24 Extremely is not a lot thinner than the S23 Extremely, but I do not really feel prefer it’s any more durable to carry.

One other show enchancment I recognize is the enhance in general brightness to 2,600 nits, which is useful when viewing the display in direct daylight.

Nonetheless, my favourite design change is the brand new Gorilla Glass Armor that removes reflections from the display. Technically, it reduces the S24 Extremely’s show reflectivity by as much as 75% according to Corning. I can not vouch for the precise share, however I can say that overhead lights all however disappear from the display, and even utilizing the S24 Extremely exterior, below a brilliant solar, I not often discover any reflections or points.

Samsung has lengthy been an trade chief in smartphone show high quality, and the S24 Extremely continues to bolster Samsung’s declare to the throne.

Easy efficiency

Contained in the Galaxy S24 Extremely is Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon Gen 3 processor, 12GB of reminiscence and both 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage.

Qualcomm and Samsung tout varied efficiency will increase, all of which really feel correct and true after utilizing the S24 Extremely for a few weeks. For many who care about specifics, the Gen 3 chip is meant to carry a 30% efficiency enhance over the Gen 2, whereas being 20% extra environment friendly.

My S24 Extremely utilization has been a mixture of social media, inbox triage, Slack messages, streaming music, watching YouTube movies, sometimes gaming, and taking a bunch of pictures and movies.

I can not vouch for the 30% enhance in efficiency, however I can say that the S24 Extremely’s efficiency was easy and hiccup-free.

I did run Geekbench 6, a benchmarking app that exams single and multicore efficiency for a extra goal measure of the S24 Extremely’s efficiency chops in comparison with the S23 Extremely. In single-core efficiency, which is leveraged for extra routine and mundane duties like scrolling the net or sending a textual content, the S24 Extremely was roughly 8% quicker than the S23 Extremely. Multicore efficiency, used when doing extra resource-intensive duties like gaming, modifying pictures, and even utilizing the S24 Ultra’s new AI features, had an general efficiency enhance of 20% over final yr’s Extremely.

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Battery life is bananas

Over the past two weeks, I’ve persistently been in a position to get nearly two full days of use out of the S24 Extremely’s battery earlier than I needed to cost it. I might solely dream of doing that on my iPhone 15 Professional Max and Pixel 8 Professional.

Once more, my use consisted of duties that have been taxing on battery life — gaming, streaming video, watching Reels, and quite a lot of use outside in direct daylight with the show set to max brightness — together with extra mundane duties, like doom-scrolling Mastodon and Threads or replying to emails.

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For almost each cellphone I overview, I run the identical battery life benchmark that consists of setting the show brightness to 50%, turning off Bluetooth, enabling Do Not Disturb, and taking part in a 4K video on a loop. I monitor the cellphone utilizing a Wyze Cam in timelapse mode, capturing an image each 60 seconds. As soon as the cellphone turns off, I overview the timelapse video and calculate how lengthy the cellphone’s battery lasts.

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The Galaxy S24 Extremely powered via 20 hours and 47 minutes earlier than turning off, besting Google’s Pixel 8 Professional by almost 9 hours and half-hour.

Suffice to say, battery life will not be a priority with the Galaxy S24 Extremely.

What I do not like in regards to the Galaxy S24 Extremely

The design lacks persona

The design of Samsung’s Extremely sequence of telephones has adopted the identical fundamental method over the past couple of years, with flat edges on the highest and backside of the cellphone, and curved edges on the vertical sides.

The design of the S22 Extremely and even the S23 Extremely felt like extra of a transition design as Samsung tried to determine how one can incorporate the Be aware’s beloved S Pen into its flagship S-series cellphone, however with the S24 Extremely utilizing the design, it feels as if Samsung is simply mailing it in at this level.

Possibly my destructive emotions in the direction of the S24 Extremely’s design are indicative of an general downside with smartphone design feeling stale typically. All of them really feel boring and off, to some extent.

However the S24 Extremely lacks the identical form of persona you get from Google’s Pixel line or the identical degree of refinement discovered on Apple’s iPhone.

The S24 Extremely is an unapologetic rectangular slab of glass and metallic. That is it. To Samsung’s credit score, removing a curved edge show was the best name, however that is the place my appreciation for the S24 Extremely’s design begins and stops.

Galaxy AI is beneficial, however not essential

A serious a part of Samsung’s Galaxy S24 occasion was the rollout of Galaxy AI, a sequence of options and capabilities making their debut on the S24, S24+ and S24 Extremely.

Samsung’s Galaxy AI options embrace instruments to summarize notes you’ve got entered in Samsung Notes, provide the tl;dr model of a information story you are studying in Samsung’s Web browser, enhance transcriptions of conferences when utilizing the Voice Recorder app, or act as an interpreter for cellphone calls or in-person interactions. There are even a number of Galaxy AI options for serving to edit pictures and one other one which helps you craft a message by adjusting the tone of your writing.

Out of all these new AI options, the one one I discovered myself utilizing usually was Circle to Search. Now we have a complete guide detailing how and when you need to use the characteristic, however the gist of it’s this: when utilizing your cellphone, and also you see an merchandise in your display, be it in an Instagram Reel, TikTok video or on a webpage, you long-press on the underside of your show to set off the characteristic. Then you possibly can draw a circle across the merchandise and Google will present a sequence of search outcomes, all with out you ever having to go away the display you are on.

I’ve used Circle to Search to seek out random issues like a e book from a photograph of its backbone, or getting extra details about a selected sort of cheese I did not know the title of.

It is an interesting use of AI and Google search in an nearly addictive form of approach. When you get used to utilizing it, you may end up utilizing it increasingly. I do know I did.

Many of those AI options, nonetheless, aren’t unique to the S24 Extremely, though your choices are restricted to Google’s Pixel 8 lineup or any of the Samsung Galaxy gadgets, together with the S23 sequence, Samsung has said will obtain an replace that features Galaxy AI’s capabilities.

The digicam is nice, however…

The S24 Extremely has a four-camera setup on the rear of the cellphone, much like the S23 Extremely, however with some tweaks and enhancements. Arguably essentially the most notable change is the change from a devoted 10MP 3x telephoto lens on the S23 Extremely to a 50MP 5x telephoto shooter on the S24 Extremely.

I haven’t got sturdy opinions about whether or not a devoted 3x digicam is healthier than a devoted 5x digicam, particularly as a result of Samsung can use software program to offer you 0.6x, 1x, 3x, 5x, 10x, and 30x zoom ranges, however I’ll say that pictures taken at 5x and past seemed clear and sharp. The additional megapixels give Samsung extra flexibility for zoomed-in pictures.

However there appears to be a standard theme amongst all of the pictures I’ve captured with the S24 Extremely over the past two weeks — they’re all barely (or in some circumstances very) overexposed.

Samsung is infamous for cranking up the saturation on pictures captured on its smartphones, which generally meant that the publicity ranges have been additionally too excessive. However that latter a part of the equation was an exception, not the norm.

With the S24 Extremely, nearly each photograph I captured with S24 Extremely had some degree of being overexposed.

Do not get me flawed, the S24 Extremely’s digicam captures good pictures. Nice, even. I am being, admittedly, considerably nitpicky right here, particularly as a result of the publicity ranges are one thing you possibly can tweak with just some faucets within the Gallery app. However you should not should.

Verdict

Samsung Galaxy S24 Extremely

Advisable

The Galaxy S24 Extremely is an exceptionally good, however boring cellphone. The return of a flat show is welcome, however the design is dated and lacks inspiration. Granted, most individuals put a case on their cellphone, hiding the design.

The digicam takes completely acceptable pictures, however it does are inclined to overexpose some areas, so simply be aware of that. And the brand new AI options are handy — helpful, even — however not a large enough motive to improve to the S24 Extremely, particularly when you’ve got an older Galaxy gadget that can get them through an replace.

Efficiency, show and battery life are the S24 Extremely’s killer options, and as is normally the case for Samsung’s flagship cellphone, different cellphone makers are going to have their work reduce out for them in 2024 in the event that they wish to compete with Samsung. The S24 Extremely certain seems prefer it’s the Android cellphone to beat this yr.