Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, S24+ and S24 hands-on review

Design and build

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra's design remains largely unchanged at first glance. The chassis retains the rectangular shape with sharp pointy corners, curved side frame and flat bottom and top sides of the frame.

Speaking of, the S24 Ultra is now built with a titanium frame, similar to the iPhone 15 Pro series. The back and front glass sheets are a new generation of Gorilla Glass Armor, which is allegedly offering 4x better crack resistance than competing aluminosilicate solutions and having 75% better anti-glare properties than regular glass.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

As you may have noticed already, the S24 Ultra's front is now completely flat - gone are the curved side edges. This is a surprising departure from the curved screens, especially after Samsung pioneered them. On the other hand, the company promises the slimmest bezels yet. We can confirm that they look, indeed, quite slim in person.

These design changes and new materials have a near-zero impact on weight and dimensions. The S24 Ultra is still around 230 grams, albeit a bit slimmer now - 8.6mm, down from 8.9mm. It isn't something you could notice right away.

There's little to no change in the back design - vertically-stacked cameras, separated from one another with individual rings. The glass back is matte and completely flat. The available colors are Titanium Black, Titanium Gray, Titanium Violet and Titanium Yellow. Fewer colors than last year, but more paint jobs are likely coming in the following months.

Hardware and software features

While this year's Samsung focus is more on the software side of things, particularly the AI-powered features, there are a couple of noteworthy hardware upgrades, or changes, depending on who you ask.

Starting with the most obvious upgrade, and that's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The chipset will be universal for all global Galaxy S24 Ultra models, and it's perhaps needless to go over the specs as it's not the first device running the said chipset.

In any case, you can expect better overall performance, efficiency and faster number-crunching when it comes to AI-related tasks. The Adreno 750 GPU is also capable of better ray-tracing performance for nicer visuals during games.

To support this beast of a chipset, Samsung has implemented a 1.9x bigger vapor chamber on the Galaxy S24 Ultra compared to its predecessor so it can maintain higher clock speeds for longer periods without overheating.

The display, although still 6.8" and with the same 1440 x 3088px resolution, is now brighter. Samsung advertises 2,600 nits of peak brightness, likely achieved when playing HDR content.

With the most notable hardware changes out of the way, let's talk software. The staple of this year's One UI 6.1 based on Android 14 is AI. Samsung calls it Galaxy AI, and it's an umbrella term for all AI-related features.

Although some AI-powered functionalities are a lot like the ones we've already seen in the Google Pixel phones, Samsung has developed some unique ones. For instance, the Galaxy S24 phones are the first to support two-way live translation during calls, with support for 13 languages at launch.

Similarly to the Google Pixel, the S24 Ultra and its siblings can do a live conversation translation and assign speaker labels too. The transcribed text can then be summarized by the AI assistant.

Text translation on the go is also possible, and Samsung calls it Chat Assist. It comes baked into the native Samsung Keyboard and can translate text from a messaging app or a social media app. It will also help you compose text with the appropriate tone, depending on the context.

Galaxy AI is active even when connected to Android Auto. Once you receive a message, you can let the voice assistant summarize the message and offer adequate answers depending on the context.

The Galaxy S24 series is the first to introduce the so-called Circle to Search. It's a feature that lets you circle, scribble, tap or underline certain objects on the screen, be it text or an image, and initiate a Google search. The feature works in all apps. This is particularly convenient when using the S Pen on the S24 Ultra.