I was at a family reunion last week where a lot of relatives asked me about the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the launch of which I had attended just days before. All of them were interested in learning about the AI features in the smartphone. Frankly, I have not seen this kind of interest in a phone in recent times as this genre of devices has not really been able to enthuse users with features that blow their minds. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra seems to have done just this, and that too without significant changes in the actual hardware of the phone compared to its previous version.
Well, let me put it this way. Samsung has curated the best AI features for productivity, creativity, and communication that are available at the moment and packed them into the phone. And even better, most of these features work even without the phone being online.
Let me give you a use case. I was recently on a team call where we were looking at planning for the next financial year. I just switched on the voice recorder of the phone and it started transcribing the call. While the phone struggled with some parts where the conversation switched between Hindi and English even within sentences, wherever it could make sense of the conversation it did the job well and even offered a separate tab for summaries. Now, if I wanted, I could just hit the translate button on top, select Hindi out of the 13 listed languages, and share it back with the team.
Now, none of this is really pathbreaking stuff. What is pathbreaking is that it happening on a phone that is now even connected to the network or Wi-Fi.
The ability to translate is inherent in this phone and applies to all places where there is text. Like when you receive an SMS in a language you are not familiar with. While it translates those messages, it can even translate your reply into the language the sender understands.
The phone goes a step further. If you are travelling to Seoul, you could potentially have a conversation say with a hotel receptionist who is speaking in Korean and you in Hindi. And this can happen even if the other side is speaking via a land phone — no, WhatsApp calls are not covered. I tried this in a Hindi-to-English conversation and it worked perfectly, though there is a small lag initially as the phone gets its moorings right.
The S24 Ultra’s AI capabilities are not limited to language. And it is no surprise that it has packed the camera with artificial intelligence. Online what other phones have done over the years, what I loved about the S24 Ultra’s camera is how it has a different suggestion for each photo. For instance, used the 10x zoom on the camera to shoot the faraway mountains while waiting at the airport in San Francisco. Then when I tapped the AI tab on the image, it suggested a 24-hour timelapse which was mind-blowing in how real it looked. But that does not mean it will suggest the same for every landscape.
For some images, the AI just suggested a remaster or colourise option, while for portraits and images where the subject is prominent, it can work on the backgrounds too.
Then there is the Generative AI button that shows when you are editing photos. With this, you have the ability to move around the subject or just erase elements, with varying degrees of success and perfection. For this, you need a data connection as well as some patience, though it does work most of the time. You can also straighten the photo with the AI filling up the rest of the frame. This is the real cutting-edge feature of the phone, one that I expect other phone companies to add to their cameras soon. But for now, the success depends a lot on how isolated the subject you want to move or erase is from the rest of the photograph. But that is understandable.
There are some hidden implementations of AI across the phone and maybe there are many that I have not even discovered in the 10-odd days I have used the phone. But there is one I really liked — the ability of the phone to create wallpapers using generative AI on themes. You can give a prompt and get a wallpaper that represents your mood.
How is the design of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
The look and feel of the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a bit different from its predecessor. To start with, there is a luxurious silky finish now on the first titanium chassis to appear on a Samsung phone. And that itself makes the phone look different. On top of this, this titanium frame blends into the new flat display protected by Corning Gorilla Armor made especially for this phone. The Corning Gorilla Armor technology makes this new 6.8-inch Quad HD+ screen reduce reflections and be more resistant to scratches. Under the sharp Kerala sun, I had no issues reading the latest reports on the Indian Express app. But the rest of the phone has no changes at all, except the camera which now has a 5x optical lens instead of the 10x on the last version.
How powerful is the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
Even as we dabble with the question of whether a phone will need to pack a lot of power in a world where it can be powered fully by AI, Samsung has upgraded the S24 to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is powerful enough to handle a lot of the AI queries on the device itself. But that is not all.
In fact, I recorded about 110 minutes of stage performances from my family meet on 4K using the Galaxy S24, edited it using the inShot app, and exported the entire file in Full HD. The entire export of the one-hour-fourty-minute edited file took just about 10 minutes. And even at the end of it, the S24 was as cool as a cucumber. This was a good display of the muscles this phone packs in, from the processor to the memory and vapor chamber that dissipates heat efficiently.
The 5000mAh battery is impressive despite all these power-guzzling antics of the phone and is good for a 48-hour life on a full charge if you use it judiciously and with a stable network.
How is the camera quality of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
After the 10x zoom camera in the S23, Samsung realised that most people were actually happy using the 5x zoom and really did not use 10x all that much. So the telephoto lens on the S24 does 5x optical zoom, but with a 50MP sensor so that there is a 10x crop available of the photo. The zoom goes all the way up to 100x digital zoom like last time, though at the fag end the images do get pixelated. In between somewhere you still manage to take clear pictures of the moon’s surface and decent pics of birds on telephone cables.
For me, the most impressive of the cameras is clearly the 200MP ultra-wide which captures some stunning details, which you realise as you zoom into different corners of the frame. And when you apply remaster AI on these images they start looking crisp and clearer.
I also loved the low-light images that S24 Ultra could capture, whether it is a setting sun in Kozhikode beach or a coconut grove under the moonlight nearby. All these images underline who this is maybe the best Android camera around now.
What are the negatives of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
The only negative of the phone is the fact that in more ways than one, it looks like the S23 Ultra of last year. And I think we should stop expecting phones to change drastically now every year, given that the technology is almost at a pinnacle. And when you look at it critically it is not really necessary for a phone to change all its specs every year, if the experience remains the same. What Samsung has done with the Ultra is offer a differentiated experience even as the phone looks and feels a bit familiar. Plus, do remember that regular people don’t change phones every year and for them, the design will be refreshing even if it is not updated annually.
Who should buy the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra?
In my book, this is the best business phone around at the moment and the AI features give users a productivity boost very few others have been able to deliver on. Given that this phone has the best processing power, display, and camera along with the added advantage of the S-Pen, the S24 Ultra opens new possibilities for those who use them when it comes to creativity and just daily work. There are not many phones that compete with the S24 Ultra now.
