If you’re eyeing the Galaxy S24 Ultra as your next Android flagship, you’re probably wondering whether it’s a real upgrade or just an S23 Ultra with new buzzwords and a price bump. The truth sits somewhere in the middle: this is a meaningful refinement with a couple of smart changes, a few questionable ones, and a lot riding on Samsung’s big Galaxy AI pitch.
Design, Build, and S Pen: Same Note DNA, Sharper Edges
Conceptually, the S24 Ultra is still very much a Galaxy Note descendant. The overall shape and proportions are basically unchanged, but the refinements are real.
The most obvious shift is the completely flat front. Samsung has been dialing back curves for years, and the S24 Ultra finally drops them entirely. That means easier screen protector use, less accidental edge touches, and a more practical feel in hand. You lose some of that “waterfall” look, but most people who actually use their phones hard won’t miss it.
Samsung also moves to a titanium frame, though the construction is different from Apple’s. The outer titanium is connected to the internal aluminum structure via molded nubs and plastic, not diffusion bonding. Either way, what you touch is titanium, and the phone still hits a hefty but manageable 232g. Protection remains IP68, and Gorilla Armor glass is used front and back.
The S Pen is familiar: same active stylus, Bluetooth, gyro, accelerometer, air gestures, and excellent utility as a camera remote and note-taking tool. The clicker end sticks out slightly more, and the silo is still on the left side, which right-handed users may never fully love. But if you live in apps like Notes, browsers, or the camera, the S Pen is still the one thing no other mainstream flagship really matches.
Display: Flat, Bright, and Surprisingly Controversial
On paper, the S24 Ultra’s display looks like a flagship slam-dunk: 6.8-inch OLED, 1440 x 3120 resolution (505 ppi), 19.5:9 aspect ratio, HDR10/HDR10+ support, and a 1–120Hz LTPO refresh range. The bezels are slimmer, and the panel is now flat with Gorilla Glass Armor on top.
Gorilla Armor brings two key benefits: improved drop and scratch resistance, and much lower reflectivity. In practice, the latter might be the bigger win. Sunlight readability is helped not just by brightness but by reduced glare, and this glass reflects far less than older solutions. Samsung claims up to 2,600 nits peak; in independent testing, you’re looking at about 1447 nits in a typical small white window and up to ~2408 nits in a 20% window—strong, but not chart-topping compared to aggressive Chinese OEMs.
The catch: this display isn’t flawless. Users and reviewers have spotted visible graininess at very low brightness, especially in a dark room near minimum (~0.9 nits). It’s not a practical dealbreaker for most people but looks bad on a phone positioned as Samsung’s absolute best. There’s also less punch in the default Vivid mode compared to older Galaxies. Colors are more controlled and less saturated, which some will call “more accurate” and others will just call “less exciting.” Samsung is reportedly working on a tweak setting via software.
So you get a flatter, more usable, less reflective panel with strong but not class-leading brightness—and a few quirks that feel off for a halo device.
Performance, Thermals, and Connectivity: Fast, but Not Ice-Cold
Every S24 Ultra, regardless of region, gets Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy. It uses a 4nm TSMC N4P node, with a higher-clocked prime Cortex-X4 core (3.4GHz), three Cortex-A720 at up to 3.15GHz, two more A720 at 2.96GHz, and two Cortex-A520 efficiency cores around 2.26GHz. GPU duties are handled by the Adreno 750 at up to 1,000MHz.
You get 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM across all tiers (256GB, 512GB, 1TB), with UFS 4.0 storage. In synthetic benchmarks, the S24 Ultra lands where you’d expect: near the top of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 pack, slightly ahead of the regular 8 Gen 3 phones in some CPU and GPU runs thanks to the higher prime core clock. MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 can edge ahead in some all-core scenarios, and Apple’s A16/A17 Pro still owns single-core, but none of this matters much in day-to-day use.
The more interesting story is thermals. Samsung enlarged the vapor chamber by 1.9x versus the S23 Ultra, but testing shows massive throttling under prolonged GPU loads—over 50% performance loss in sustained 3DMark runs, and about 35% on the CPU. The good news: the phone doesn’t get uncomfortably hot in the hand. The bad news: raw peak performance drops off hard if you hammer it.
On the connectivity side, the S24 Ultra is well specced: dual-SIM 5G (with regional variations in physical/eSIM layouts), Wi‑Fi 7 (tri-band, including 6GHz), Bluetooth 5.3 with LE, NFC, UWB, and USB 3.2 Gen 1 with DisplayPort 1.2 over USB-C and OTG. No microSD, no IR blaster, no FM radio, and—despite rumors—no satellite connectivity.
Galaxy AI and One UI 6.1: Big Promises, Long Support
Software is where Samsung is trying to justify the “Ultra” label this year. The S24 Ultra ships with Android 14 under One UI 6.1 and a long list of Galaxy AI features layered on top.
Headliners include Live Translate for calls (on-device translation), Writing Assist to restyle your text, Circle to Search integration, AI photo suggestions in the Gallery, object removal and generative repositioning, Note Assist for summarizing notes, Web Assist for page summaries, and Transcript Assist for auto-transcribing recorded audio. Some language support is still missing in places and is promised for later, so not all of this will be equally useful everywhere on day one.
The bigger long-term story is support: Samsung is committing to seven years of OS and security updates for the S24 lineup. That potentially takes the S24 Ultra all the way to “Android 21” territory. If Samsung actually delivers on that promise in a timely way, it becomes one of the most future-proof Android phones you can buy, full stop.
The S Pen-specific software is mostly familiar—Air actions, note-taking, handwriting recognition in roughly 100 languages, and deep integration into Samsung’s stock apps. Nothing radically new there, but the ecosystem was already strong.
Camera System: Smarter Zoom, Familiar Hardware Limits
On the hardware side, the S24 Ultra’s rear camera setup is incremental rather than radical.
You get:
– 200MP main camera (16-in-1 binning, f/1.7, OIS)
– 12MP ultrawide with autofocus
– 10MP 3x telephoto (optical zoom, OIS)
– New 50MP 5x periscope telephoto (f/3.4, OIS), replacing the old 10MP 10x
The ultrawide is still relatively small-sensor compared to some competitors, and outside the iPhone 15 Pro series plenty of high-end phones now ship larger ultrawides. The 3x telephoto is also on the small side, though it’s not used for heavy hybrid zoom stacking beyond its range.
The big change is that 5x periscope. Moving from 10MP 10x to 50MP 5x sounds like a downgrade if you just read marketing, but in practice it’s a much more flexible choice. Most people don’t shoot at 10x all that often; 5x is far more useful day-to-day. The higher resolution and larger sensor allow the S24 Ultra to deliver very good 5x shots and still produce 10x images that are similar—or sometimes better—to the S23 Ultra once Samsung’s processing and AI kick in.
Daylight images from the main camera show a shift in processing: detail remains excellent, but sharpening is more restrained and colors are slightly less saturated compared to the S23 Ultra. It’s still not as mild as the S24/S24+, but feels like a deliberate move toward more natural output. HDR is strong, and dynamic range is wide across the board.
The 3x telephoto performs well, with good detail and toned-down saturation. The 5x telephoto is where the Ultra really stretches its legs: plenty of detail, controlled noise, and pleasing color both in daylight and in reasonably lit indoor scenes. 10x shots are a bit of a mixed bag—straight 10x can be slightly noisier and less refined than 9.8x–9.9x zoom levels, suggesting some quirks in how Samsung crops and demosaics the 50MP sensor. It’s the kind of thing that screams “software update needed.”
The ultrawide is solid, with autofocus enabling closeups, but the hardware lags behind the best from Chinese vendors. Selfies, on the other hand, remain excellent; the shared front camera with S24/S24+ delivers sharp, wide, natural-looking shots with reliable exposure.
Low-light behavior is split between Photo mode and dedicated Night mode. Unlike some rivals, Samsung still gives you two distinct processing pipelines rather than merging them. Photo mode tends to be more relaxed with noise and sharpening, while Night mode brightens more aggressively at the cost of smoothing fine detail. On the main camera and 3x/5x telephotos, Photo mode often looks more natural; Night mode helps mainly in very dark or high-contrast scenes.
Video is a strong suit. The S24 Ultra can shoot:
– 8K30 on the main and 5x telephoto
– 4K60 (and 4K30) on all five cameras, including the selfie
– 4K120 on the main camera from slow motion, with additional options in Pro Video (including 4K120 and 24fps modes)
Stabilization is excellent across main, ultrawide, and front cameras. Daylight video has good detail and consistent color across modules, and there’s no quality penalty when jumping from 4K30 to 4K60. At night, the main camera still carries the team; ultrawide and telephotos are serviceable but clearly weaker.
Battery, Charging, and Speakers: Great Endurance, Slow by 2024 Standards
Samsung sticks with a 5,000mAh battery again. Despite the unchanged capacity, the S24 Ultra posts slightly better endurance than the S23 Ultra in mixed-use testing, with small gains across most screen-on activities and a somewhat shorter call result. Overall, it slots between the Pixel 8 Pro (worse) and iPhone 15 Pro Max (better) in overall longevity.
Charging is where Samsung keeps dragging its feet. The S24 Ultra supports up to 45W via USB PD PPS, but you’ll need Samsung’s own 45W charger and a 5A cable to maximize that. The in-box USB-C cable is only rated for 3A, and there is no charger included.
Using Samsung’s 45W adapter, the S24 Ultra reaches about 69% in 30 minutes and hits 100% in around 65 minutes. It keeps sipping power for another ~20 minutes before truly cutting off, which makes its “100%” indicator one of the more misleading in the flagship world. It’s technically faster than Pixel 8 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max charging in many western contexts, but it looks slow next to mid-range and flagship phones from Chinese brands pushing 67W, 100W, or more.
Wireless charging is supported at up to 15W, and reverse wireless charging lets you top up earbuds or watches. Speakers earn a “Very Good” loudness rating with decent low-end presence, outperforming the Pixel but still trailing the iPhone 15 Pro series.
Should You Buy It? The Pragmatic Ultra
The Galaxy S24 Ultra is still Samsung’s most complete smartphone—and one of the most complete Android phones—just not a flawless one.
On the plus side, you get:
– A flatter, less reflective display that’s excellent in most conditions
– A smarter telephoto system with a very strong 5x camera
– More natural photo processing and still top-tier HDR
– Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy performance with strong peak numbers
– Serious longevity promise: seven years of OS and security updates
– S Pen integration that no mainstream rival really matches
On the minus side:
– Visible low-brightness grain and muted Vivid profile undercut the “Samsung display is untouchable” narrative
– Heavy thermal throttling under sustained GPU load limits how far the chip can stretch
– 45W wired charging and 15W wireless feel sluggish against 2024 competition
– Some camera behaviors (like the 10x vs 9.9x discrepancy and automatic lens switching for close focus) feel like software work-in-progress
If you’re coming from an S23 Ultra, this is an upgrade built on refinement: better glass, flatter screen, smarter zoom, Galaxy AI, and longer support. For many, that may not justify an immediate jump. If you’re on something older—or weighing S24 Ultra against Android flagships with worse software support stories—the S24 Ultra becomes a lot more compelling.
The hardware is very good, the software story is ambitious, and most of the current issues look fixable via updates. If Samsung actually follows through on seven years of meaningful updates and steadily improves the display tuning and camera quirks, the S24 Ultra will age better than most phones in its class.
Right now, it’s not excellent, but it is a legitimately powerful, long-term Android option that leans on software and AI as much as raw specs. If that tradeoff fits how you use your phone, the S24 Ultra should be on your shortlist.
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