Samsung’s newest top-of-the-line phone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, is all in on “AI,” particularly the generative kind that’s been all the rage over the past year. In fact, during its introduction keynote, Samsung execs didn’t even talk about the phone’s hardware until 20 minutes into the presentation.
But while the AI stuff does indeed work, and has made my experience using the S24 Ultra a very enjoyable one, I think Samsung has made some crucial changes to the hardware that makes the phone feel more premium and mature than other phones, including its own. As a result, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is the best Samsung phone I’ve tested in a couple of years.
I still think the absolute best Chinese phones have superior cameras for still photos—those devices have newer and larger image sensors—but the overall package Samsung is offering is more polished and fully featured. Plus, the S24 Ultra is widely available worldwide, while those Chinese phones have limited availability. This means if you want the absolute best Android phone right now, the S24 Ultra is it.
What are the new AI features?
Let’s start with the headline features of this phone: the S24 Ultra are just the second phones (after the Google Pixel 8 series) to have generative AI capabilities on-device, this means the phone is able to generate original text and pixels using machine learning algorithms and neural processing baked into the phone, without needing the internet (mostly, anyway).
To that end, the S24 Ultra can do things like real-time two-year translation and interpretation. For example: I speak Chinese to the phone, it can turn those words into Japanese or German within seconds, without needing to connect to the internet. This works the standard way, showing the translated text on the device for face-t0-face interactions.
But what’s more impressive is the S24 phones can do this live interpretation during phone calls. There’s a button you press on a call to activate the function which allows an AI voice assistant to take over the conversation between you and the other party, and converts what each of you are saying into the other language. There’s a 5-7 second wait to process and output the new words, so the other caller would need to be patient.
Another AI feature is the phone can quickly summarize entire chunks of text, be it an internet article or a long word document. It takes a tap of a button built into Samsung’s internet browser or notes app, and from there, the AI will produce a cliff notes version of the document. I tried it and it worked pretty well.
There’s also generative AI photo editing, which allows you to remove or resize things inside photos, and the AI will create entirely new pixels to replace the missing space. This means you get a real life image with chunks that are entirely an AI creation. Like on the Pixel 8 series, this feature is very fun to play with for an aspiring photographer such as myself. The results can be hit and miss, but when it hits, it’s jaw-dropping. In the collage below, I used generative AI to move my dad closer to me in a photo. The AI magically created original pixels to fill in the missing background left behind in my dad’s original spot. Artificial intelligence created that entire brown counter in the right shot.
There are, of course, real ethical concerns about the rise of AI generated content—we may not be able to tell a real image from a fake one in a few years—and I remain uneasy about what this tech can do, too. But the tech is here to stay, and at least Samsung (along with Google) are giving us a glimpse at something that will be a part of our lives going forward.
There are several other AI features, such as circling a part of the screen to immediately begin a Google image search, that have been very useful for me day to day. Overall, the software experience of the S24 Ultra feels smarter than other phones.
Hardware is nice, too
Samsung’s S24 Ultra at first glance looks very similar to the last two Ultra phones, but the Korean tech giant has made some small changes that add up to more than the sum of its parts to make for a device that looks and feels better.
The new phone switches to a titanium frame instead of aluminum, and it’s a bit flatter than before, giving the phone more grip. The phone can also stand up on its own because all the sides are flatter. The display gets a bit brighter and has a new matte, anti-reflective coating that I had not seen in a phone before. These are small changes on paper but add up to make the S24 Ultra more enjoyable to hold and look at than the S23 Ultra.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra packs four rear-facing cameras (that fifth circle houses a sensor that doesn’t snap images). You have a 200-megapixel main camera, a 12-megapixel ultra-wide, 10-megapixel 3X zoom lens, and a 50-megapixel 5X Periscope camera. The latter 5X camera is brand new (the other three are not new) and does a good job capturing 5X zoom photos with great details and decent natural bokeh. Below are three images snapped from the same spot: main camera (1x), 5X using the new Periscope zoom, and 10X using in-sensor cropping.
In the set below, I snapped a 10X photo and a 30X photo. We can see the 30X shot is starting to show alot of artificial over sharpening, but it’s still a decent shot. The 10X is clean and impressive.
The other cameras are good, but nothing that blows me away considering I have access to Chinese phones with better camera hardware. These other cameras are also not new, carried over from the S23 Ultra, and in some cases, the S22 Ultra.
The overall camera experience with the S24 Ultra is very good, with great focal length versatility and strong video stabilization and image processing. But if we’re talking about raw camera hardware prowess, something like a Oppo Find X7 Ultra’s larger sensors will produce images with more details to play with in the editing room.
Elsewhere, the S24 Ultra’s large 5000 mAh battery provides excellent battery life, likely thanks to the improved efficiency of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Haptics are precise, and the included stylus (S Pen) adds value to the phone. I don’t always use the stylus, but when it’s needed, like when I need to sign an e-document or make some fine edits in a photo editing app, that finer tip of a stylus is much appreciated.
Overall, I really loved using the S24 Ultra, in more ways than previous Samsung phones. As I’ve said, I am very nitpicky with cameras because I am an aspiring (or wannabe) street photographer, so I am snapping close to 100 photos a day. I still think the Xiaomi 13 Ultra with its larger sensors and Leica processing produces images that appear more organic and raw, and Vivo X100 Pro’s portrait lens remains my absolute favorite smartphone lens to use.
But neither of those phones can match the S24 Ultra as an overall phone: they have shorter battery life, fewer years of software support, none of the new Google-driven AI features, and in the case of the Vivo X100 Pro, an extreme lack of availability. The S24 Ultra is pricier than both phones, however. It starts at $1,300 in the U.S., and HK$9,898 in Hong Kong. But there are trade-in deals and pre-order deals at both Samsung stores worth checking out.
