It’s Galaxy Note time, and the best one this year is the Ultra. Samsung has changed things up a bit at the top of its lineup, and the Galaxy Note20 Ultra is the one you want in 2020. We already have it.

Last year, Samsung made a one-time effort to make the Note 10 and Note10+. These were two phones with similar specs, and the main difference between them was their size. This time, it’s not like that.

Both the Note20 Ultra and the Note20 are big, and they don’t have the same features. This is like how the S20 Ultra is better than the S20+, but even more so.

We’re not here to pick on the Note20 when we don’t have one, and we’ll deal with its flaws and limits when one shows up on our doorstep. Let’s think about the Ultra for now.

The big camera bump first showed up on the other S20 Ultra. It’s back on the Note20 Ultra. Most of the parts inside are the same, like the 108MP main camera and the 12MP ultra-wide camera. But the periscope telephoto, which is part of the reason why the whole thing is so big, has been changed from 48MP to 12MP. We’ll have to see how that works out.

The review of the Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G

The screen is a nice mix of the shape of the Note and the high refresh rate of the S20s. With the new adaptive refresh rate adjustment, it should be even better. Oh, and here’s a spoiler: it has the brightest AMOLED screen we’ve ever seen.

The S Pen is still here, but it is now on the left side. It’s also better now, with a latency of 9ms (down more than 4 times from the Note 10), system-wide Air actions, and a Notes app that will make you forget about Google Keep.

All of this comes in a new design with a stainless steel midframe where there used to be aluminium and the new Gorilla Glass 7 (also called Victus) for better durability.

The matte finish on the back will keep fingerprints away and make the phone look better, but it’s only in the Mystic Bronze colour. All the Mystic Black shines.

Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G specs

Body: 164.8×77.2×8.1mm, 208g; Glass front (Gorilla Glass Victus), glass back (Gorilla Glass Victus), stainless steel frame; IP68 dust/water resistant (up to 1.5m for 30 mins); Colors: Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, Mystic White.
Display: 6.90″ Dynamic AMOLED 2X, 1440x3088px resolution, 19.3:9 aspect ratio, 496ppi; HDR10+, Always-on display, 120Hz@FHD/60Hz@QHD refresh rate.
Chipset: Exynos 990 (7 nm+) – Global, Qualcomm SM8250 Snapdragon 865+ (7 nm+) – USA: Octa-core (2×2.73 GHz Mongoose M5 & 2×2.50 GHz Cortex-A76 & 4×2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) – Global, Octa-core (1×3.00 GHz Kryo 585 & 3×2.42 GHz Kryo 585 & 4×1.8 GHz Kryo 585) – USA; Mali-G77 MP11 – Global, Adreno 650 – USA.
Memory: 128GB 12GB RAM, 256GB 12GB RAM, 512GB 12GB RAM; UFS 3.0; microSDXC (uses shared SIM slot).
OS/Software: Android 10, One UI 2.5.
Rear camera: Wide (main): 108 MP, f/1.8, 26mm, 1/1.33″, 0.8µm, PDAF, Laser AF, OIS; Telephoto: 12 MP, f/3.0, 120mm periscope, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS, 5x optical zoom, 50x hybrid zoom; Ultra wide angle: 12 MP, f/2.2, 13mm, 1/2.55″, 1.4µm; LED flash, auto-HDR, panorama.
Front camera: 10 MP, f/2.2, 26mm (wide), 1/3.2″, 1.22µm, Dual Pixel PDAF; Dual video call, Auto-HDR.
Video capture: Rear camera: 8K@24fps, 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/240fps, 720p@960fps, HDR10+, stereo sound rec., gyro-EIS & OIS; Front camera: 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30fps.
Battery: 4500mAh; Fast charging 25W, USB Power Delivery 3.0, Fast Qi/PMA wireless charging, Reverse wireless charging 9W.
Misc: Fingerprint (under display, ultrasonic), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer; NFC; FM radio (Snapdragon model only; market/operator dependent); Samsung Wireless DeX (desktop experience support), ANT+, Bixby natural language commands and dictation; Samsung Pay (Visa, MasterCard certified); S Pen Stylus, 9ms latency (Bluetooth integration, accelerometer, gyro).

But some of the other things on that list make me wonder. Like how the battery is smaller than on the S20 Ultra and the 45-watt charging support has been removed.

Users in half the world have to deal with the fact that the difference between the Snapdragon and Exynos platforms is getting bigger.

In that case, we’ll be reviewing the 5G version of the Exynos Galaxy Note20 Ultra. That’s the only time you’ll hear about 5G in the review, though, because we’ll be leaving it out to keep things short.

Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G unboxing

The Galaxy Note20 Ultra comes in a two-piece black cardboard box with a picture of the S Pen on the top, which is pretty typical for Samsung. The glossy “N20″ stands out against the matte material, and the striped patterns on the side edges of the top surface hint at the curved screen inside.

As part of the package, you would get a 25-watt charger that meets the USB PowerDelivery standard and also works with the PPS part of the standard.

There is, of course, a USB-C-to-C cable included. If you don’t get the Galaxy Buds Live as part of a pre-order bundle, there’s also a pair of in-ear headphones made by AKG.

Because this was a review unit and not a retail-ready one, it didn’t come with the usual extra S Pen tips or the tool to change them. There were no different sized tips for the earbuds either.

We don’t think Samsung will leave either of these out, and the units that will be sold will probably have them.

The display on the Galaxy Note20 Ultra could be the best you can get right now. It has the same resolution, refresh rate, brightness, color accuracy, and, since it’s a Note, the S Pen can sense different levels of pressure.

Let’s unpack a bit. With a diagonal of 6.9 inches, the 20 Ultra is the largest Note to date. It’s just 0.1” bigger than last year’s Note10+, but that’s enough to give it the edge. It has a resolution of 1440x3088px and an odd aspect ratio of 19.3:9, which is between the Note10’s 19:9 and the S20’s 20:9. The number of pixels per inch is 496ppi.

It’s called “Dynamic AMOLED 2X,” which isn’t a very catchy name, but it’s how Samsung refers to its 120Hz refresh rate displays (get it? This one also has touch sampling at 240Hz, which makes it faster to find touch input.

Since the S20 family, when Samsung put out 120Hz panels, the only thing that hasn’t changed is that the refresh rate is still locked at 60Hz if you choose a 1440p resolution. To get the HRR, the Note20 Ultra needs to be set to 1080p resolution.

This time, the 120Hz setting isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Instead, if you choose the Adaptive mode, where the Note can go up to 120Hz, it will change based on what you’re doing on the device.

We’ve seen this kind of behavior from other HRR phone displays, and it should help with battery life. After all, you don’t need your phone to refresh 120 times a second when you’re watching a 30fps video, and if it does, you’ll have to pay for it with shorter battery life.

Keep in mind that the Note20 Ultra won’t do it in steps of 1Hz. Samsung Display says that the refresh rates used are 10Hz for still images, 30Hz for apps with a lot of text, like email, 60Hz for video, and 120Hz for games. So this adaptive system seems to be more precise than those on other phones, but most of the time it still defaults to either 60Hz or 120Hz.

We have a custom app that reads the current resolution and refresh rate from Android and puts that information on the screen so we can keep an eye on it. The Note20 Ultra will choose its refresh rate based on a number of factors, and we can’t say that the list that follows is complete.

First of all, the screen will stay at 120Hz if you are actively tapping and swiping on it. Leave it on a table or just stare at it for a few seconds while holding it, and the RR will drop to 60Hz. When you touch the screen, the RR will go back up. Based on what the accelerometer says, there is strangely no spike.

However, when you pick up the phone from a table, you are likely to touch some part of the screen, which will cause the touch-based spike to 120Hz. That’s how the interface and most apps, like Instagram, Facebook, and browsers (we checked Chrome, Firefox, and Samsung’s own) usually work.

Then there are things that are unique to each app. Games are neither here nor there, or, as our own Victor said in a recent review of the ROG Phone 3, “High refresh rate gaming on Android is still the Wild West.”

Pac-Man, Sky Force Reloaded, 1945 Air Force, and Dead Trigger 2, for example, kept the Note’s display in 120Hz. The HRR-capable v1.01 of Alto’s Odyssey (as confirmed in both our Razer Phone 2 review and more recently on the ROG Phone 3) – that’s 60Hz on the Ultra. Mortal Kombat ran at 144fps on the ROG Phone 3, but it could only run at 60fps on the Note20 Ultra. Real Racing 3 ran at 144 frames per second on the nubia Red Magic 5G.

Normally, PUBG and Call of Duty don’t go above 60fps, and Fortnite is limited to 30fps, so the Note20 Ultra’s screen ran at 60Hz for these two games.

Even in the 120fps 1080p mode, the camera viewfinder is stuck at 60Hz, but the camera settings menu, like all other menus, gives us 120Hz. Still, 1080p 120Hz videos recorded on the Note do, in fact, cause the screen to refresh at 120Hz. This is also true of 120fps videos you can find online, which are usually gameplay clips because who record 120fps videos at normal speed? (slow-mo is a different thing).

Aside from that, apps that play videos add their own variable: HDR. When you play SDR videos in the phone’s built-in player, on YouTube, Netflix, or Amazon Prime Video, the phone will always follow the above touch-based switching instructions.

So even when you’re watching a full-screen video, you can tap on the screen and it will jump to 120Hz for some reason. Play an HDR video, however, and the screen will be locked in 60Hz for as long as the clip is showing on the screen – even on YouTube for the tiny thumbnail-sized view on the bottom of the screen.

The proximity sensor is the last one. If you turn it on, the phone will go up to 120Hz and, most of the time, stay there until you turn it off. To turn on the auto drop to 60Hz again, you have to touch the screen, and it will then go back to the “wait for 5 seconds of inactivity” behavior.

This whole thing seems more like a bug than a feature, and it’s likely that it will change in a future update.

We were only able to catch the Note20 Ultra’s Adaptive refresh rate going below 60Hz a couple of times. The first one is for the two or three seconds after the screen timed out when the screen went dark but the phone wasn’t yet locked. The refresh rate for this time is 15Hz.

When you open YouTube in a browser is the other case. If that’s the case, tapping on things works normally at 120Hz, but when you play a video, it drops to 48Hz. Who knows why.

Battery Life

The Galaxy Note20 Ultra has a 4,500mAh battery, which is 500mAh less than the S20 Ultra, which has mostly the same hardware. The S20+, on the other hand, has the same capacity as the S Pen flagship, even though it has a slightly smaller screen than the Note.

The Adaptive refresh rate mode on the Note20 Ultra is supposed to help the battery last longer by only sending as many Hz as is needed for the current task. Again, we’re looking at the Note20 Ultra Exynos version.

We tried out the phone in both modes, but some things need to be made clearer. In Adaptive mode, our browser script kept the screen at 120Hz all the time.

We think this is more realistic since you are more likely to be scrolling than just staring at a page. The video test was kept at 120Hz, even though the Adaptive mode tends to drop the refresh rate to 60Hz when playing videos in some situations.

We think that’s the best way to test for the worst-case scenario since there are times when the Note will keep playing videos at 120Hz.

The call time is about the same as what we were able to get out of the S20U/+. This was a nice surprise for a phone whose battery was 10% smaller.

On to surfing the web. Still in Adaptive mode and running at 120Hz the whole time, we were able to browse the web for 11:31 hours. This is an hour more than the S20 Ultra (also 120Hz) and about 40 minutes more than the S20+ (also 120Hz).

The Note20 Ultra made their scores better while still running at 120Hz at full speed. Our best guess is that this is because the new display panel uses less power when showing content that is mostly white, like our scripted web page test or most social networks.

The Note20 Ultra’s video playback time, on the other hand, was a less exciting 13:05h, which was the same as the S20 Ultra’s 12:55h and the S2013:30h +’s in 120Hz mode.

Again, that’s the worst thing that could happen if you’re watching a video when the Note20 Ultra thinks that the 120Hz refresh rate is the best one.

Then, we switched the Note20 Ultra to its Standard refresh rate (but kept the resolution at 1080p to isolate the effect of the refresh rate), and we got more mileage: 3 more hours of web browsing and 4+ more hours of video playback.

For completeness, we also ran the two screen-on tests at the highest possible resolution, 1440p. Here, web browsing took 13:40h, which is closer to the 1080p/60Hz Standard result than the 1080p/120Hz Adaptive result.

That’s 1:32h more than what the S20 Ultra got in the same conditions and about 40 min better than the S20+. On the other hand, the 15:01h number for video playback is about 2 hours less than what the S20s can do in 1440p/60Hz.

Thanks to SmartViser and its viSer App, our battery tests were done automatically. The above rating shows how long a single charge will last if you use the Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G for an hour of phone calls, an hour of web browsing, and an hour of watching videos every day.

We set up this pattern of use so that our battery results for the most common day-to-day tasks can be compared across devices. If you’re interested in the details, the procedure for testing batteries is explained in full. You can look at our full battery test table to see how all of the smartphones we’ve tested will compare with how you usually use your phone.

All of this means that the Adaptive refresh rate mode on the Galaxy Note20 Ultra can make a difference, but we can’t test how much it will affect how long the phone will last for you based on how you use it. You can easily figure out where you stand with the numbers above.

Moving on, we found that the Galaxy Note20 Ultra didn’t charge as fast as Samsung said it would. With the 25W adapter that came with it (instead of the promised 50% or more), we got 43% in 30 minutes.

For example, after 30 minutes of charging from 0%, the OnePlus 8 Pro will be at 63%, the Mi 10 Pro 5G will be at 77%, and the Huawei P40 Pro will be at 80%. In the same amount of time, the Find X2 Pro will be 95% full. On the other hand, the Xperia 1 II only gets you to 43%, but the iPhone 11 Pro will get you halfway to 100% in half an hour.

The Note20 Ultra took 1:23 hours to fully charge from dead, which is faster than both the Xperia (1:51h) and the iPhone (2:00h).

The Note10+ and S20 Ultra can charge at 45W, but the Note20 Ultra can’t. Since it wasn’t much faster than the standard 25W brick, we think it won’t be missed and won’t be coming back, but it’s still strange that it’s not there.