Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra long-term review

Display

It's a huge Samsung-made AMOLED, so it is stunning. This is nothing unexpected, of course, for the company has consistently used the best screens out there with every flagship smartphone generation. Things are no different this time around, aside from one thing.

You probably already know this, but you can't use 120Hz refresh rate with the maximum resolution, it only works when the screen is set to 1080p+. This feels inexcusable on a device that costs this much. Sorry for not mincing words, but if Oppo and OnePlus can go QHD+ at 120Hz, then so should Samsung (who is most likely supplying the panels for the Find X2, X2 Pro, and OnePlus 8 Pro anyway). There's no escaping how weird it is for Samsung itself not to be able to pull this off on its signature device for early 2020.

Otherwise, the screen is outstanding. The brightness goes high enough that you have no issue making out what's on the display even in bright sunlight, and it goes low enough that the panel won't sear your retinas at night.

There are two screen modes, Natural and Vivid, and a color slider to adjust from cool to warm. If you, like us, enjoy the 'Vivid' mode but want to 'tame' its color reproduction somewhat, a good tip is to just take that slider to the maximum Warm setting. This, for us, created a nice experience with colors that 'pop' (although unrealistically) but with whites that aren't comically blueish. Of course, if you want to see accurate (if blander) colors then go with the Natural setting.

Display settings

There's a blue light filter too which works very well and can be scheduled to automagically do its thing, and an Always On Display (also schedulable) with a bunch of clock styles to pick from. It also shows icons of the apps that you've received notifications from, and you can customize the color of the clock. It has widgets for music player controls, alarms, weather, and so on. There's not much more to say about it really, it just works and it works well, and we feel like it is adequately customizable for most people, while not going to extreme lengths to offer a bazillion different designs.

Always On Display settings

Auto-brightness works extremely well, at least for our taste, and the S20 Ultra was actually the second-best smartphone we've ever tested for a long-term review when it comes to how little we had to manually adjust the auto-brightness. The Huawei P40 Pro was better at this, but just by a tad. It's great to see manufacturers paying more attention to such user experience elements even if small.

In-display fingerprint sensor

Samsung still uses ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanners, going against the grain in the mobile world, where literally every other company chose optical ones. The main downside with the optical sensors is that they need to light up your finger to unlock, and that can be slightly annoying in pitch dark environments.

The main downside with ultrasonic sensors, at least in Samsung's implementation of these, is that they just seem to be way less reliable and accurate than optical ones. They also used to feel slower, but thankfully that's something that you can 'fix' in the S20 Ultra by just turning off the unlocking animation (which Samsung calls "Screen transition effect") - it looks like that was the culprit and in the latest version of One UI you can finally get rid of it.

Biometrics and security settings

While in past long-term reviews we've praised some optical in-display fingerprint sensors for getting to a point where we can't subjectively tell any difference in reliability and accuracy between them and capacitive ones, the same can't be said for Samsung's ultrasonic part inside the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It definitely works... most of the time as expected, but then from time to time you will need to touch it again... or for longer.

It's a good thing there's face unlocking on board too as you'd expect, but the usual caveat about that applies - it's less secure than using your fingerprint.

Smoothness

When we look at the smoothness of a device, we mean our innately subjective evaluation of smoothness in operation, because the 120Hz refresh rate is still as smooth as you can get with a 'mainstream' flagship smartphone. Obviously, 120Hz is incredibly smooth, there's no contest there. We will mention however that in our experience, the jump from 60Hz to 90Hz feels more substantial than the one from 90Hz to 120Hz in use, but your mileage may obviously vary.

Now, the screen itself is smooth, but the overall user experience on the S20 Ultra is less so. That's because in our evaluation of smoothness, while display refresh rate does play a part, it's definitely not everything - the rest is up to the software, and how well-optimized everything is on that front. And that's where the S20 Ultra falls flat on its face, compared to similarly priced 2020 flagships. The P40 Pro's software is actually smoother than the S20 Ultra's, and the likes of the Oppo Find X2 and X2 Pro pair that with 120Hz at QHD+ resolution, so, unfortunately, Samsung's latest and greatest misses the mark.

Obviously it's much smoother than any Samsung before it, and it's smoother than any 60Hz phone out there, but compared to other high refresh rate flagships, it suffers from the fact that Samsung still allows micro stutters to be found everywhere when using its One UI, even in the 2.1 iteration. Things have improved a lot over the past few years in this regard, but we're still consistently baffled at how companies like OnePlus, Huawei, even Oppo, and Xiaomi seem to all have a leg up here.

Bottom line then: the S20 Ultra is very smooth, especially compared to any other Samsung device that isn't part of the S20 line, but not an overall smoothness champ in our subjective book.

Performance

Smoothness aside, the S20 Ultra's performance was excellent. The phone is incredibly fast no matter what you throw at it, and yes, that's becoming a canned phrase in these reviews when we're discussing flagships, but that's what is expected. That's how it should be. Sure it may lag once in a while and stutter sometimes, but it is incredibly fast, almost to a point where its speed will spoil you, and you'll be annoyed whenever you have to touch a friend's phone for even a few minutes - if it's a different model, of course.

It's a true flagship smartphone, and we expect the Snapdragon 865 model to be even faster than our Exynos-powered unit. So you should have absolutely no worries about performance, and also about it getting too warm in the hand when in use. Yes, if you throw the best games at it, you will feel it heating up, but nothing that gets to an uncomfortable point. This section isn't longer because there really isn't anything more to say, if you're interested in how the S20 Ultra does in synthetic benchmarks, make sure you read our normal review too, it's full of numbers.