Living With the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: The Phone That Does Everything Except Fold (2024)

For the past several weeks, I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra as my primary phone, and I've been very impressed. As in previous years, the Ultra is Samsung's flagship phone, with unique features such as the inclusion of an S Pen stylus. As you would expect, the camera and the processor are improved from the previous model, the Galaxy S23 Ultra. The biggest difference this year is the inclusion of new AI features that work well.

At first glance, the S24 Ultra remains a rather large-looking phone, measuring 6.40-by-3.11-by-0.34 inches and weighing 8.22 ounces. Compared with last year's model, it's about the same size, but the front is flatter and the angles more squared off, making the phone look even more rectangular. The S24 has a Titanium case and looks and feels very solid. It uses Corning Gorilla Glass Armor, and while I didn't intentionally test its scratch or breakage resistance, it does seem to reduce screen glare. As noted, it's a big phone, one that fits in my pants pocket, but just barely.

(Credit: Eric Zeman)

It has a 6.8-inch AMOLED display, with a 3120-by-1440 resolution, though set to default to display 2340-by-1080 (which seemed quite good.) It has a variable 120Hzrefresh rate. I found the display to be quite good, with smooth scrolling. There's a small round cut-out on the top of the display for the selfie camera; the back of the phone has the main cameras and sensor.

In North America, the S24 family is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which increases performance over the Gen 2, used in the S23 family, though I can't say I noticed much of a difference in actual use. It sports a beefed-up NPU, which supposedly helps with the AI features. Battery life seems quite good. It runs Android 14 with Samsung's One UI 6.1 skin on top. One nice change over the previous version is that Samsung now promises seven years of software and security updates.

As for the past few generations, the S24 Ultra differs from the other members of the family by including a built-in S Pen stylus, which slides into an opening on the bottom. This continues to be quite useful for more accurate photo editing, as well as for note-taking or drawing (I'm no artist). The flatter display makes drawing with the S Pen easier than it was on the S23 Ultra.

(Credit: Eric Zeman)

The "Galaxy AI" features are the ones that most differentiate the S4 line from last year's S23, and the most obvious of these is Circle to Search. With this, you can press down at the bottom of the screen, then circle part of an image in a photo, video, or webpage and Google will return a search based on the image. Although Samsung announced the feature first, it was developed with Google and is also available on the Pixel 8 phones. It works similarly to Google Lens, which lets you search by taking a photo of an object. As with any search, it's not always perfect, but it does make searching easier.

One of the most interesting new features is Live Translate, which, as the name suggests, can translate conversations on the fly in the Samsung Phone application. Currently, this works with 11 languages, plus a couple of variations of English and Spanish. Live Translate on phone calls worked quite well for shorter, transactional requests—things like making a restaurant reservation.

There's also an Interpreter app, accessible from the control panel, that works as a real-time translator. What's most striking—for those who care about privacy or working without an internet connection—is that this can work entirely on the device.

The S24 continues to offer the Google Translate app, which can translate words, text, or text in photos among a much wider array of languages, although that requires the internet. I used this extensively on a recent trip and was impressed at how well it worked while visiting a country where I didn't speak the language.

Other features include the ability to create transcripts and summarizations of your voice recordings, something that is becoming more common in AI applications.

Not surprisingly, the camera system has been notably upgraded. That too has more AI features.

As with the S23 Ultra, the S24 Ultra's main wide camera is a 200-megapixel (MP) camera sensor with an aperture of f/1.7 and an 85-degree field of view, with what Samsung calls "adaptive pixel," where it supports multiple layers of binning. In most situations, when you use the main camera, the camera system will combine 16 pixels into one, creating a 12MP image. By just clicking a button on the photo menu, you can switch to capturing 50MP photos (where four pixels are combined into one), or even 200MP photos. The downside is that 50MP and 200MP images take up a lot more storage. When I've tried this, I haven’t been able to tell the difference—all general photos look great—so the default setting makes sense to me. The larger settings are only necessary if you intend to create very large prints or zoom very tightly into a picture. The main camera did a great job of capturing images, generally looking pretty good even in low light.

A Westport Sunrise on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (Credit: Michael J. Miller)

This year's big camera change is to the zoom lens. This keeps the 10MP 3x zoom lens, with f/2.4 and a 36-degree field of view, but replaces the 10MP 10x optical lens on the S23 Ultra with a new 50MP 5x optical lens with f/3.4 and a 22-degree field of view. It might seem that going from 10x optical to 5x optical would result in less zoom, but because the 50MP sensor is much larger, Samsung says you're effectively getting the same size sensor for a 10X optical shot as you did before. The main camera and the two zoom ones have optical image stabilization. In practice, I thought 10x photos look as good as with the previous model, and 5x shots looked a bit better, particularly at night.

Samsung continues to use "adaptive pixel sensor" technology to decide on the level of binning it takes to produce the best photo, and in general, I was impressed.

Overall, you can take photos at a variety of lengths, from using the 12MP Ultra-wide camera (with an aperture of f/2.2) to the main camera, to the two zoom cameras and then bump it up to a "space zoom" of up to 100X by combining digital zoom to optical zoom. I still find that 100X photos don't look that good—at least without a tripod. In general, I'm quite happy with the zoom, and find this an area where Samsung continues to lead the pack in phone digital photography. It's not going to replace a large professional camera with a big telephoto lens but it's a lot more convenient.

As far as the basic cameras go, all the recent top-end phones I've tried do quite a good job in most situations. That's certainly true for the S24 Ultra. As usual, Samsung photos tend to be more saturated than those from the other top-end phones, which is a matter of personal preference. In some situations, I liked the photos better from the iPhone 15 Pro Max or the Pixel 8 Pro, in others I preferred ones from the S24 Ultra. I really can't complain about any of them. Where the S24 Ultra shines is in taking zoom photos. I worried that the change in the telephoto lens would hurt this, but it hasn't. It's still the big winner.

The Galaxy series continues to have a 12MP front camera (f/2.2 with an 80-degree field of view) that works well. And of course, it offers a variety of video capture options, up to 8K30, with lots of options. Generally, the video looked quite good, though the quality of the image stabilization can vary, particularly if you are zooming the camera.

Grand Central Terminal on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (Credit: Michael J. Miler)

"Galaxy AI" features are also part of the photo suite. This includes erasing unwanted objects in photos, removing blemishes, adjusting skin tone, and adding background blur to create a portrait effect.

Like the latest Pixel phones, the S24 line now adds Google's Magic Eraser; this worked surprisingly well too. I removed people or objects in the background of several photos, and while it took a little bit of work, I often got surprisingly good results.

Another feature lets you turn video recordings into slow motion, with AI filling in the missing frames. Within the Gallery app, you can press down during the part of the video you want to slow. Alternatively, you can edit, choose adjust speed, and choose ¼, ½, or 2x speed. This can take a few seconds to happen, but it worked quite well.

If you're looking for more aggressive AI features, the S24 lags a bit behind Google Pixel which offers things like the "Best Take" feature that lets you choose different facial expressions from a set of photographs. Some people find that a bit gimmicky, but I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung adds it later. Overall, the AI features on the S24 family generally seem useful and work well.

The S24 family continues to have several features that separate it from most Android phones, including the Dex feature that lets you connect the device to a large screen (wirelessly or by USB-C cable) and then get a more desktop-like experience. With a small dock, I was able to use it with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse—something that is useful in some business situations.

All in all, the Samsung S24 Ultra is the most powerful, most complete Android phone I've used. But its large size and $1,299.99 list price for a model with 12MB of memory and 256GB of storage will dissuade some buyers. Samsung offers the regular S24 with a 6.2-inch screen starting at $799.99 with 8GB of memory and 128GB of storage, and the S24+ with a 6.7-inch screen starting at $999.99 with 12MB of memory and 256GB of storage. The S24 and S24+ are notably lighter but have the same basic features except for the extra 50MP Zoom camera and the S Pen. Still, I've appreciated the better zoom and the S Pen does make photo editing easier. If you want everything an Android phone can do (except fold), the S24 Ultra fits the bill. It's a terrific phone.