Review: On Samsung’s S24 Ultra you can search just about anything but Netflix

In a world where everything is connected, the Samsung S24 Ultra doubles as a visual search engine. But is it worth trading up?

Samsung S24 Ultra packs AI into just about everything.

It takes only two seconds to search just about anything on Samsung’s newest phone.

In a world where just about everything is online, the S24 Ultra plays into that space really well, removing the need to take a picture and upload something just to find a search result.

Instead, one just has to hover over the home button, circle an item they’d like to search and almost instantly there’s the result.

That search capability, which is called “circle-to-search” works across just about every app – from Instagram and TikTok to notes or the camera app.

While it is quirky and new, it isn’t entirely unique. Google has had its “Lens” search capability on its devices for some time, and the same day Samsung announced “circle-to-search”, Google stole a little of the show announcing the feature was on the way to Pixel phones this year.

For now, the only real difference between the two is that Google’s starts broader and can be narrowed down while Samsung invites the user to use either their pen or stylus to be more selective from the start.

Samsung Galaxy S24 series of smartphones displayed during a preview event in Seoul. Picture: AFP

The Australian got its hand on the new S24 Ultra ahead of its public release next week – first playing with the device in Las Vegas during CES and later again at the launch in San Jose about a week later.

“Circle-to-search” is one of several new AI-powered features packed into the new phone. The Australian tested the search feature across multiple apps and items, and can confidently say you can search just about anything except Netflix, which has also blocked the capability to take screenshots.

While fun to play with, the S24 Ultra it doesn’t come cheap, entering the market in 2024 at $2199 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of memory – which is $250 more than its 2023 counterpart.

The company has hedged its bet that the shiny new AI features will persuade most. Those features include the ability to translate live phone calls, to convert recorded audio to text and translate that text, to edit images and to summarise notes.

The use of Generative AI and images and video is probably where the device stands out most for us. One feature we enjoyed a lot was the ability to turn any video into slow motion by simply long pressing on the video.

Samsung’s new S24 Ultra easily turns any video into slow motion.

How that function works is again with computer vision to analyse the image, and generative AI which creates frames to allow the video to be slower.

For those who prefer to take pictures, the days of unwanted items being a feature in your photos is over. Kind of.

The S24 range arrives with a generative AI function that can fill in blank spaces once you have removed an item.

For the most part, this feature is fun to use but it’s not 100 per cent accurate. On one level it can be used to remove an olive from a pizza. On another, you can remove your friend’s hair or shoes.

Speaking of the camera, this one arrives with a 12MP ultra-wide camera, a 200MP wide camera, 50M telephoto camera and 10MP telephoto camera as well 12MP on the front.

Just like last year, the quality is impressive and, what’s more, the device can now zoom up to 100 times. That might not sound necessary for most, and to be fair it’s not, but can be fun to pry or look down the street to an open or closed sign on a store before you arrive.

The phone itself is 6.8 inches and weighs just 232g. That’s a pretty impressive weight for a phone that comes with a stylus built in and the Ultra packs a 5000mAh.

The S24 Ultra can use AI to remove unwanted items in a photo.

One thing we did enjoy was that the Ultra does well to conserve power when not in use. Unlike some devices that would be flat within a day or two, we let it sit for four days and found it had about 40 per cent battery.

The verdict? The AI features which set the device apart from others are fun to play with but perhaps not life changing for most.

The price is high but there’s enough packed in this one that we think it’d be hard to end up disappointed with the purchase and, over time if you slowly learned to use all the AI features, you’d probably become quite efficient at a lot of things.

Joseph was a guest of Samsung in San Jose.

Originally published as Review: On Samsung’s S24 Ultra you can search just about anything but Netflix