Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra in its most recent Unpacked event that it hosted online. The Ultra was one of the two devices of the Galaxy Note 20 lineup, which also includes the standard Galaxy Note 20. Both the smartphones were revealed on August 5, 2020, alongside other new Samsung devices.

At the price of Rs 104,999, the Note 20 Ultra is more expensive than the standard version, which costs Rs 77,999.

The Galaxy Note, along with the Galaxy S, is one of the highest-end smartphone segments of the Korean firm. The lineup is signature with a stylus that sets it aside from the other Samsung phones and makes it special compared with other handsets on the phone market too.

Display

The screen of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is a Dynamic OLED 2x panel that’s protected with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus. The display measures 6.9 inches with a screen-to-body ratio of 91.7%, a resolution of 1440x3088 pixels and a pixel density of 496 ppi. It supports HDR10+, offers the always-on feature, and a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz.

The Dynamic AMOLED 2X on this phone sets records for the accuracy of its DCI-P3 and sRGB display modes. In addition, it set records for absolute contrast, color accuracy, as well as intensity scale accuracy. All of this makes it the most color-accurate display ever measured.

The screen features a punch hole at the top-center to house that front-facing camera. The same design is used on the Galaxy Note 20, which gives more space for viewing, especially when you play games or watch videos. Unlike thick notches the eats into the viewing area, the punch hole is neat and much smaller, meaning it shouldn’t interfere with your viewing experience.

Overall, the Note 20 Ultra display is bright and brilliant as always. It offers a perfect experience for watching films, reading the news, as well as browsing through images. However, the Wind Down mode doesn’t seem to bring the right brightness for late-night scrolling. Even with the lowest brightness setting, the display is still too bright to help the user fall asleep more easily.

Besides, due to the thin bezel, users may accidentally hit the volume button when holding the phone. This could be especially annoying when you’re playing games as your fingers and move a lot. Other than that, the screen seems perfect like other Samsung phone screens.

In initial gaming tests with PUBG, at HDR setting with a 60fps frame rate, the phone can maintain at around 40 frames per second only. But the good news is, the gaming act seems smooth from the beginning when the game is being loaded to during the gameplay. You won’t likely experience any frame drop on this screen. It’s worth noting that this test was done with the Exynos 990 variant.

Chip

The global version of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is powered by the Exynos 990, the newest processor from Samsung and one of the most powerful chipsets currently available on the market. It’s an octa-core processor that consists of dual 2.73Hz cores, dual 2.5Hz cores, and quad 2.0Hz cores.

On Antutu, this chip gets a total of 486104 points, out of which 181007 points are for the GPU processing power. This is lower than the Snapdragon 865 Plus’ score, which is over 210,000 points. This suggests that the Exynos 990 offers a lower graphics performance, but that doesn’t mean a bad thing because it’s still a very powerful chip.

This chip is more than enough to play games. As shown in the gaming test, though the frame rate was limited to 60fps, the chip handled PUBG very well with zero lags or frame drop. Normally, when you are loading the game and settings, the frame rate drops a bit and only gets stable when you actually start playing. However, with the Exynos 990, the experience is smooth from the very first minute and remains the same for the next 30 minutes of battle.

All in all, despite being less powerful than the Snapdragon 865+, this chip is reliable for any task you throw at it.

Storage

When it comes to storage, you have three options. All the three variants feature 12GB of RAM but different internal storage capacities, including 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The 12GB RAM is the largest RAM capacity we have seen in a smartphone so far, which not only allows for efficient multitasking but also handles any mobile title you want, even intensive ones like Free Fire and PUBG.

 As we said in previous sections, playing games on the Galaxy Ultra note 20 is very smooth and you have nothing to worry about. Over a gaming session of 30 minutes in a 30-degree-C environment, the phone heats up to 42 degrees C. This is not bad at all considering that every device gets hotter when you play for longer and this temperature is in a 30-degree room. If the room where the phone was tested had been cooler (25 degrees for example), it wouldn’t have heated up that much.

Battery

The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra packs a 4500mAh battery with support for 25W fast charging, fast PMA/Qi wireless charging, and 9W reverse wireless charging.

This battery capacity can last you an entire day with moderate to intense use because while the capacity itself isn’t impressive, premium smartphones often have better energy management to use its power more efficiently.

Camera

In terms of cameras, there are three lenses on the back, including a 108MP wide-angle lens, a 12MP periscope telephoto lens, and a 12MP ultra-wide-angle lens. The telephoto lens also offers a 5x optical zoom along with 50x hybrid zoom.

The rear camera module allows for video recording at 8K/4K/1080p/720p resolutions with 24/30/60/240/960 fps frame rates.

On the front, there is a single 10MP camera that can take wide-angle shots and allows you to record videos at 4K/1080p resolution and 30/60 fps frame rates.