Samsung S20 ultra hands-on vs iphone 11 pro, everything you need to know

Samsung S20 ultra vs iphone 11 pro

Samsung has just launched Galaxy s20 ultra and it's an absolute mammoth of a smartphone we're talking 16 gigs of RAM and a camera with a hundred times zoom it's not just better than any flagship phone you've ever released before it is a tier of both you could always call it a super phone of today.

We're answering the big question does the Galaxy s20 ultra destroy the iPhone 11 pro Max. I think the results might surprise you. 

Putting both these two devices side by side is the ultra is an absolute unit of a phone. It's massive for most people's hands the iPhone 11 pro Max is a large device but Samsung takes that, then adds about 5% more height and almost 10% more thickness. To be honest though I don't think that in itself is a problem it's large enough that you can forget about it being a one-handed experience. As long as you go in with that as an expectation you'll spend more time at the magnificent display, you forget about how you're going to hold it but more than in a minute. What is weird though is that even though Samsung's phone towers above apples in size it's actually lighter, and I'm going to be honest feels a little bit cheaper.

While Samsung has actually upgraded the metal they use in their phone rim from 7,000 series aluminum to something that's now 1.2 times stronger. Apple uses stainless steel which has many times in mechanical strength of aluminum. It'll be far more resistant to dust and scratches plus I just like the density of the material. The iPhone's weight just makes it feel a touch more premium. It is a little early for m, if we dropped both phones on their sides my money would be on the iPhone surviving with far less damage that said that whilst it only feels okay I think the s20 ultra looks fantastic compared to the standard s20. Which visually looks not too distinct from the company's own mid-range phones this beefy camera module makes the ultra look badass. When you're holding it you feel like you're holding cutting edge technology. I love that idea, but I will say that the design is a little odd compared to the iPhone. It has got an enormous camera module with text just highlight its new space zoom feature, but the iPhone is a little more understated because of its ability to resist fingerprints and avoid that kind of stickiness you can sometimes get with glass Samsung's camera module is protected by gorilla Glass 6, but it's share size means that it's going to cause major wobble if you put the phone off that surface.

Both phones have IP68 water industries ratings and neither has a headphone jack wireless is the future i think ! Having a headphone jack on a mainstream flagship 2020 smartphone is going to be a rarity anyways. Design and build wise I would slightly side with Apple. Now is where the tables start to turn. I'm going to say it now the display on the Galaxy s20 ultra is the best display on a smartphone. I could just leave it at that but it is better than the iPhones in so many ways. I think we should talk about it. Both use OLED technology for deep contrast and they both have an almost identical brightness of the 800 nits across the whole display. Samsung s20 Ultras panel is just colossal in size. We say that every single year because somehow each generation these screens just keep getting bigger, This time around you're looking at a whopping at 6.9 inches that might not sound like a big jump versus the 6.5 inch iPhone screen. But in terms of screen area that's a difference you'll feel Samsung's tiny hole punch camera which is 40% smaller than past generations. Combined it with tiny bezels all the way around means that the s20 ultra feels almost border-less and futuristic compared to Apple's large notch. s20 ultra screen to body ratio sits around 90% versus Apple's approximately 84.

What is interesting though speaking of borders is that the s20 lineup is the first time Samsung has backtracked on curved displays. Compared to the S10 and other previous flagships these new displays look almost flat. Still a slight curve which is more than you can say for the iPhone but it's nowhere near as dramatic. It is fair enough the curves didn't really have any functional benefits and I don't think they'll be that many people that miss them. There is more to this ultras display though it's a quad HD+ panel giving it around 30% more pixels than the iPhone's display. Best part is that it's refresh rate is double what's the 11 pro's panel refreshes a pretty normal 60 times per second, Samsung does 120 and it changes things, Apple has always had this reputation for buttery smoothness then it's Android rivals just haven't been able to replicate. The s20 completely reversed that trend for me .

Using both side-by-side for the first time Samsung felt like the more fluid experience and it's not just that Samsung's display refreshes twice as fast but it also has twice the touch response rates. Which means that it's faster registering your touches. Which makes everything just feel more instant and responsive. I should clarify here the display on my iPhone 11 pro Max is top shelf but the display on the ultra there's unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Now I mentioned Apple's sizable notch and so while we're here it's worth noting that it's not there for show it has all the senses needed for face ID. Which if you never used it works incredibly and if you have you'll know what I mean just by scanning your face face ID is secure enough to make bank transactions autofill your passwords. Samsung uses a 2D camera so it's more of a tool for convenience then it is a safety measure the phone does though have an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. Pretty much the same as the one scene on the note 10 last year. 

Just before we get to cameras which is arguably the main event of this new s20 ultra, there is something else I always like to keep track of with new phones processing power a lot of different variables that play here. The main takeaway is that both are kind of on top depending on your region. Samsung uses either the external 990 or the Snapdragon 865 chipset. Versus last year's S10 that's around a 15% faster CPU 825% faster GPU and an AI engine that's at least twice as good. That actually puts it slightly behind the a13 bionic chip in the iPhone that will be some tasks the Samsung does better but for most games and apps I'd expect them to run a tiny bit faster on iPhone.

Samsung does kind of make up for this though with an absolutely absurd amount of round 12 gigabytes on the base model and up to 16 gigs on ultra. When you factor in that this is the fastest round we've ever seen on phone the performance ceiling here is the sky high. iPhone by comparison only has 4 gigs so somethings will definitely have an edge when you're juggling heavy apps. But bear in mind that because iOS is optimized to not need as much ram the difference won't be as noticeable.

I've tried opening apps flicking between them and there was a tangible difference between the performance of this 20 ultra and even Samsung phones from just a few months ago. Something I actually noticed even more was just how fantastic the haptics are here. Ultra uses the same vibration motors as the Galaxy note 10 plus. But it's been further tuned to offer what I'm going to say is the most satisfying physical response to touches you've seen on a phone. I really would recommend you go into store you try the phone. I would rank it above Apple in this aspect.

It's no secret that the camera is a very important part to the s20 ultras proposition. I mean this is quite possibly the largest camera module I've ever seen. Lets start with the side by sides looking at specs. Samsung's camera makes the iPhones look a bit like a toy. We have to be careful here because the specs can be a little bit misleading. It's main camera has a 108 megapixel resolution versus 12 on the iPhone. It has a 48 megapixel telephoto camera with support for 100 times space zoom, versus the iPhone.  Both having a wide 120 degree field of view but on top of that Samsung has an additional depth vision sensor. Which the iPhone doesn't so on paper this kind of gives you the impression that these two phones are completely different leagues, like they're not even comparable and that is kind of the case but also not really. Main camera or 108 megapixels you can take 108 megapixel photos but most of the time you probably won't the benefit. Mainly because of something called pixel binning. There's quite a few phones out there that can do this they merge four smaller pixels into one bigger one to make those resulting pixels cleaner and more noise free well the s20 ultra uses something called mono binning converting not for but nine pixels into one and so once you do still end up with a 12 megapixel photo from this 108 megapixel camera the size of those pixels and the resulting quality is three times greater than the iPhone.

Samsung 12 megapixel photos have an incredibly crisp finish and this translates to its night mode too. When you take a night mode shot now you can hold your phone still for 8 seconds and capture way more light than you used. Apple's night mode is really good but Samsung is now better in my opinion for the first time. You can actually record 8K video at a proper frame rate it's only 24 frames per second. Which means you'll definitely benefit from sticking it on a tripod when capturing but just the fact that you can shoot AK video is staggering 8k is 4 times the resolution of 4k.  A still image taken from an 8k video shot on this phone and just screen grab alone is a 33 megapixel image.

From what I can see the actual optical zoom range is only about 4 to 5 times but still impressive. Samsung phones have the benefit of almost none of that weird distorting effects that we're used to seeing on ultralight cameras and switching between the lenses on Samsung's phone no longer feels like switching between lenses which is something the iPhone has done really well. As far as the user is concerned using these cameras on both phones just feels like using one camera. but Samsung with a hold of options and that's how it should be Samsung's fourth additional sensor is just a depth camera meaning that when you take a portrait mode for example you just getting a bit more information about how far away your background is the phone also has a 40 megapixel selfie camera versus Apple's 12mp. I should say at this point when it comes to cameras the battle is not one with hardware it's one with software and Samsung's camera software is catching up rapidly with apples but at the same time their hardware has just leapfrogged apples.

My Verdict 

If you want to Samsung phone by the latest Samsung if you're on an iPhone by the latest iPhone because neither companies phones have been so far ahead of the others. It makes sense to go through all the hassle of switching ecosystems, but the s20 ultra now offers so much more than its iPhone counterpart. For some users this might make sense it's camera it's displayed it's storage we're talking about a phone that can have 1.5 terabytes of data stored on it with a micro SD card slot. For the first time this is a device I can recommend not just Samsung and Android enthusiasts but even iPhone.