Is Samsung’s latest and greatest worth an ever-increasing stack of dough? Find out in our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review.
Samsung Galaxy S24 UltraSamsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
Think of the biggest, most complicated Swiss Army Knife you’ve ever seen, one with more tools than you could ever use. Now, give it a USB-C port, a stylus, and four cameras on the back. Congratulations, you’ve got the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. That might be oversimplifying one of the most capable Android phones on the market, but the analogy isn’t too far off. Let’s get into our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review, and you’ll see what I mean.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review: At a glance
What is it? The Galaxy S24 Ultra is Samsung’s top-end flagship for 2024, complete with all the bells and whistles. It replaces the Galaxy S23 Ultra with a slightly modified four-camera setup, an S Pen, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, and a new titanium frame.
What is the price? Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra starts at a cool $1,299 — a $100 price increase from the previous generation. If you need more storage, the 1TB model costs as much as $1,659 before trade-in.
Where can you buy it? The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra launched for pre-orders on January 17, 2024, before reaching open sales on January 31. It’s available from Samsung, retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, or carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
How did we test it? I tested the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for two weeks. The review unit was supplied by Samsung with an active T-Mobile SIM.
Is it worth it? The Galaxy S24 Ultra is Samsung’s best ultra flagship to date, but it comes with an ultra price tag to match. It scores big with a class-leading update commitment, improved materials across the board, and Galaxy AI features in every corner, but pairs it with a price increase that’s tough to make sense of with the minimal hardware upgrades gen-on-gen, and exclusive features that aren’t quite as exclusive as they seem. What I like about the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
There’s only one place to start with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and that’s with AI — Galaxy AI, specifically. It’s the main event, the big idea, whatever else you want to call it. Samsung mentioned the phrase a whopping 50 times during its first Unpacked event of 2024, promising a laundry list of features to make your smartphone smarter and even more helpful. Now, take that with a grain of salt because we’re still very much in the experimentation phase of on-device AI, but I’ve found a few Galaxy AI features that should probably stick around.
We’ll come back to the photography features like Photo Assist (essentially Samsung’s version of Magic Editor) later, but there are plenty of other ways to make texting, calling, and even note-taking easier. One that I’ve been using is Chat Assist, which lives within the Samsung Keyboard. It reads through messages as you type them, offering tips for spelling and grammar, but it can also give you alternative tones to try. Chat Assist has tones like Professional and Casual for use with bosses and coworkers and a #Social tone, which loads your message with emojis and hashtags, like a tweet from back when X was Twitter.
As a writer, I can usually do without Chat Assist, but the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s Note Assist is a lifesaver. It covers a few different AI features, including the ability to summarize a webpage into a more concise set of notes, something I’ve sorely needed while researching how on-device AI works. Note Assist also covers transforming my horrendous S Pen handwriting into legible notes when I have to scribble out a quick reminder during a Zoom content meeting.
Some of the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s more refined AI features, however, are those co-developed with Google. Options like Circle to Search and the ability to generate wallpapers based on a few prompts are already available on the Pixel 8 series, and now they’re on Samsung’s latest flagships as well. Circle to Search works like Google Lens, though it’s a bit easier to control now that you can pick out specific elements from a more cluttered image. Samsung’s generative wallpapers are the same as those on the Pixel 8 Pro, right down to the list of prompts you can pick from, but they’re fun either way.
Our Galaxy S24 Ultra also came with Android 14 and One UI 6.1 out of the box. Samsung’s Android 14 experience doesn’t feel much different from its previous setup, though it has a few nice tweaks. The quick settings menu has been slimmed down, shifting to smaller buttons that seem to float above your home screen rather than block it out. Samsung’s color-coordinated theming is better, too, with more app icons matching your background color instead of exclusively the first-party options. The best software news is that the Galaxy S24 series is in line for seven years of upgrades — a solid bump from its previous four years of Android versions and five years of security patches, and one that puts it back in line with Google regarding update policies.
Once you move past the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s AI-fueled heart, you’re left with the phone itself. It feels like a Galaxy S23 Ultra with a bit more polish across all aspects. The two phones look almost identical, with boxy corners, camera rings that dot the satin-textured rear glass, and an S Pen that hides away along the bottom edge. So, if you like Samsung’s existing flagship design, you’ll probably find plenty to like about the updated version. And yet, those changes offer just enough quality-of-life improvement to make them worth mentioning.
For starters, Armor Aluminum is out, and titanium is in. Apple already switched from stainless steel to titanium on its iPhone 15 Pro series, and now it’s Samsung’s turn. However, Samsung is upgrading its frame for a very different reason. Whereas Apple made the change to save a few grams from its hefty Pro models, the Galaxy S24 Ultra adopted titanium purely for its improved durability. It only shaved about a gram off the weight of the previous Galaxy S23 Ultra, but the titanium frame has a slight texture, making it much more comfortable in hand than the previous model. Oh, and the textured finish is pleasingly fingerprint-averse, too.
Samsung also upgraded its top-tier flagship to the latest and greatest glass that Corning has to offer — as usual. The sweeping 6.8-inch Dynamic 2x AMOLED is now made of a special low-glare sheet of Gorilla Armor, while the rest of the Galaxy S24 series hangs onto Gorilla Glass Victus 2. We’ll have to wait and see if Gorilla Armor is the toughest glass that Corning has to offer, but the glare-resistant treatment is already an easy win for Samsung. It offers a night and day difference in how it handles bright sunlight compared to the previous display, making it much easier to use in broad daylight. The Galaxy S24 Ultra also tops out at 2,600 nits of peak brightness, which doesn’t hurt its performance on sunny days.
Samsung’s final display modification is probably the one you’ll notice first — it’s flat. The Galaxy S24 Ultra now matches its more affordable siblings by dropping the curved edges, so you no longer have to worry about accidental presses or squeezes. As someone with smaller hands, I welcome the change, as I can keep the frame in a tighter grip while using this beast of a phone with two hands. Granted, the swap results in slightly more noticeable side bezels, but I’d call it a fair trade.
Although its Galaxy AI features briefly touch on the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s reputation as a power user’s best friend, there’s a lot more to cover when it comes to performance. For starters, Samsung has finally done away with split levels of RAM, putting all Galaxy S24 Ultra configurations on equal footing with 12GB instead of limiting the base model to just 8GB. The increased RAM pairs nicely with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, an overclocked version of Qualcomm’s latest silicon to give Samsung the most power possible.
That extra power translates to some of the best benchmarking scores in an Android phone right now. The Galaxy S24 Ultra topped everything but the iPhone 15 Pro Max in our Geekbench 6 run, came up just a hair short of the ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro (in its high-performance X-Mode) in the graphically intensive 3DMark tests, and topped the charts in our PCMark race. Samsung’s strong numbers were less inspiring during our stress tests, tailing off to more modest results after a few runs, but they were still good enough to stay ahead of most competitors. Although the Galaxy s24 Ultra was left behind by the ROG Phone 8 Pro, it achieved its results without trying to burn a hole through our desks, meaning that you could enjoy its performance, unlike the ASUS model. Check out our dedicated Galaxy S24 benchmarks article for a deeper dive.
Of course, none of this benchmarking performance means a thing if the day-to-day experience suffers. Thankfully, we know Samsung well enough to expect a user experience matching its lofty lab numbers. I thoroughly enjoyed how the entire Galaxy S24 Ultra package came together during my weeks with the phone, offering more than enough power for gaming, social media, and its generative AI features without ever really coming close to the thermal troubles of Google’s early generation Tensor offerings.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra landed right between a few of my busier periods of work travel, meaning that it got to be my adventure companion rather than a business partner, powering my GPS and Spotify playlist for a drive from Baltimore to Philadelphia and back.
