



If you're going to drop over a grand on a new smartphone, you might as well spend a couple of hundred more dollars or pounds and get the very best. The regular Note 20 has some of these features, but falls short in terms of both specs and design of what you’d expect from a Note phone in 2020 – there’s no microSD card slot, the camera maxes out at 3x zoom, and the back glass isn’t actually glass. The S Pen also comes with brilliant new features, like syncing voice recordings with your scribbled-down notes (students and journalists in lectures will love that). Still, the Note 20 Ultra is the complete package from Samsung: it has a 6.9-inch 120Hz display that moves fluidly under the finger, a fast new chipset, 12GB of RAM (more than some of the best laptops), 5G speeds, and all-day battery life. Of course, there's now the newer Samsung Galaxy S21 range - including the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, which zooms further than the Note 20 Ultra, and even supports the S Pen stylus. The Mystic Bronze color of our review unit certainly helped. The new Note design also looks and feels more premium than the S20 Ultra. The camera adds a laser autofocus – without it on the S20 Ultra, out-of-focus photos became so much of an issue, we began recommending to people the S20 Plus due to its lower resolution camera but more stable Dual Pixel Autofocus. Our core issues with the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra have been addressed with the Note 20 Ultra.
