Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G is heavy duty tech in your pocket
Samsung’s new Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G smartphone is the most sophisticated Android phone on the market.
Samsung’s new Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G smartphone is the most sophisticated Android phone on the market.
It comes with enticing new software, delivers superb battery life, has one of the best displays in the business, and a powerful and fully featured back facing camera system.
Samsung’s Note series is about computing on-the-go as much as mobile communications. The phone’s signature feature is the S Pen, a stylus that fits snugly in the phone body that’s more than an electronic pen. Not only can you scribble handwriting and sketch on the screen, you can use the S Pen as a wireless screen navigation aid with air commands, and as a remote for triggering the shutter when taking photos.
The phone’s operating system is geared towards multi-tasking, allowing you to use more than one app simultaneously. You can be checking mail, writing notes, and filling a spreadsheet all at once. You can watch a video while doing other tasks.
This year’s Note20 models are the first premium handsets that Samsung has released since the pandemic. It released its other premium handset, the S20 series, just as COVID-19 was taking hold, and suffered a sales decline for what was bad timing.
The company will expect to make amends in the market with the Note20.
This series has four models, the Galaxy Note20, Note20 5G, Note20 Ultra, and Note20 Ultra 5G.
My review unit is the high-end Note20 Ultra 5G and has a bronze back. You pay $1999 for units in black, bronze and white with 256G of storage, and $2199 for black units with 512GB of storage.
The phone has a rectangular look with 90-degree edges at top and bottom. These edges are not tapered. There are however gentler curves around the sides.
The one strange design feature is the three-lens camera unit. The lenses are mounted on a piece of metal that protrudes like the Rock of Gibraltar on the back. The phone doesn’t rest entirely flat on a table.
There’s USB-C at the bottom for charging and for data transfer. The S Pen slot is beside it. There’s a tray at the top that holds both a single nanoSIM and microSDXC card. You can add electronic SIMS for multiple cellular network coverage.
There’s no 3.5mm audio port nor a dedicated Bixby button, which is Samsung’s personal assistant. It seems Bixby may be slowly on the way out but we’ll have to see.
Some of the most interesting changes to the Note this time involve software.
I could display and work with PDF files without needing other software. You import the PDF, open it with Samsung Notes, take out the S Pen and draw on it. You can circle and highlight text to emphasise sections of a draft you want changed. You can type on PDFs. When you’re finished, you can save it as a PDF, Word File or even make it part of a PowerPoint presentation.
The USB-C port supports external hard drives and USB flash drives. Samsung offers a USB-A to USB-C adaptor to help you, and a USB-C cable. The “My Files” app made data transfers between the phone and external drives simple.
If you are a handwriting fiend, you can scribble in Samsung Notes with the S Pen and in one press, the phone will convert your writing into typed text that you can save and copy into other applications. I found this worked, provided your writing is readable.
This phone has tighter integration with Microsoft products, which is useful if you have a Windows PC. Apart from using Office 360 apps, you can scan a QR code with your phone that lets you manage your phone on your Windows PC.
You can see your phone notifications, send text messages, make a call, view your photos and use your Note20 apps from your PC. You can copy and paste between the Note20 Ultra 5G and a Windows PC.
It’s very cool to run your phone apps on your desktop PC. Once I gave it the required permissions, the phone apps appeared in a virtual window.
Apple plans to have iPhone apps running on Macs when it rolls out computers with its new inhouse designed chips (Apple silicon) later this year. Samsung is offering this on Windows now albeit using a virtual machine. The set-up is straight forward.
There’s another way of doing this and you don’t even need a computer. In recent models, Samsung has offered a product called DeX which lets you run your phone environment on a monitor formatted as if it were a desktop machine. You used a special connection device, and later a cable, to connect a phone and monitor.
Now DeX can work wirelessly, which means you can wirelessly link your phone to a TV screen and operate it from the TV as if the phone was a desktop computer. I said the Note20 was a computer in your pocket!
If you’re not into handwriting on phones with S Pens, don’t despair. Samsung recognises that people are using voice-to-text aka voice typing more often for messaging, mail and for creating documents using dictation.
This phone has a “Live Transcribe” app where you can dictate messages or conduct interviews by voice. The app converts the voice to text. It seems to do a good job provided you speak clearly. You can copy and paste the resulting text into other apps.
This is a neat feature, although the idea isn’t new. The app Otter.ai is the doyen when it comes to voice to text conversions. That’s another conversation.
When you add other features such as multi-tasking, Samsung Knox enterprise and personal security, the Note20 Ultra 5G is incredibly well set-up for office work on the go.
The phone supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard, fingerprint authentication, face recognition, fast charging, fast wireless charging using the Qi standard, and Samsung’s reverse charging, where the handset itself can charge another Samsung device placed on it.
Images are crisp on the big, 6.9-inch, 1440x3088 pixel AMOLED display which offers better than 2K resolution with a stunning 496 pixels per inch resolution density.
Samsung devices support HDR10+ video which is the rival format to Dolby Vision, providing high dynamic range which retains the detail in images in bright and dark sections of a frame, and a huge range of colour choices.
This phone has a high resolution camera with a 108MP main snapper, a 12MP telephoto lens with 5X optical zoom, and 12MP ultrawide lens. It has a 10MP selfie camera.
The camera shoots 8K video at 24 frames per second, and 4K video at up to 60 fps.
Battery life is excellent. The big 4500 milliampere hour battery lasted 19 hours, 15 minutes playing 1080p video at 50 per cent screen brightness. That’s especially good considering the display resolution is beyond 2K.
This phone is suited to gaming. That’s good news as the Samsung-Microsoft deal allows you to play more than 100 Xbox games on your Samsung phone directly from the cloud, with Xbox Game Pass.
The phone has a powerful Exynos 8-core processor with its fastest cores rated at 2.73 GHz, and a Mail-G77 MP11 graphics unit. The phone score 524,014 using the AnTuTu benchmark. AnTuTu rates it as the eighth fastest Android phone in its July rankings. It rates the processor in the top 16pc and graphics in the top 11pc.
With power, versatility and great software offerings, the Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G is the most sophisticated Android phone on the market. It’s set-up to operate on 5G networks in Australia as well.
Why that Valentine’s Day gift might head back to the shop
Australians returned more than $11m in gifts, or 88,600 items, in the fortnight after Christmas and it could be down to people cashing in what they can to make ends meet, a data collector says.
CEO still MIA as Richard White is back with a vengeance
WiseTech says it is progressing with its search for a new chief, as Richard White wastes no time settling into his new $1m a year consulting role at the company he took some brief leave from.