The new Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a camera that’s ready to take your extreme close-up – and a lot of your money.

Mystic Green, Mystic Bronze, and Mystic Grey are colour options for the Note 20; Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black and Mystic White are colour options for the Note 20 Ultra. Unlike their predecessors, the Note 20 Ultra is the first Samsung phone that uses stainless steel as the frame material, while the regular Note 20 sticks to the more classic anodized aluminum. There’s a large camera bump on the back of the phone, but the payoff is that the 5x optical zoom works so well.Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Is the First Smartphone in the World to Ship With Gorilla Glass Victus on the front AND the back panel". Earbuds are included in some countries such as the UK, but are not bundled in others such as the US. In this section, we take a closer look at how these sub-scores were achieved and compare zoom image quality against some key competitors. 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.

You can see the focus breathing at the start of this video and that the Samsung’s autofocus remains locked on the background when a person comes into view, whereas the iPhone quickly changes focus to the subject’s face. The triple camera setup provides lots of shooting options for smartphone photographers, but the implementation of a 120 mm-equivalent tele-lens has some implications for the quality of its zoom shots. As you can see in this photo of Halloween decorations, I could crop in on just a few of the straw the people, a ghost and witch, and you can still make out plenty of detail. By comparison, the Galaxy S20 Plus with its 4,500 mAh battery lasted 10 hours and 31 minutes and 8:55 in 120Hz mode.Samsung’s latest top-of-the-line Note continues to buck the trend that outfits phones with rounded corners.

The 50x zoom reach is more than enough, and the biggest deal is the souped-up 5x optical zoom – not digital, not hybrid optical, but optical optical. I tried a few rounds of Forza, and the gampplay was surprisingly fluid using a PS4 controller, despite the fact I was streaming over the cloud. Also dialed back: the marginally better S20 Ultra 40MP selfies (offering finer detail when cropping in on photos).In the US, that gets you a 128GB of internal storage, rather meager for power users, while in the UK and Australia, the base model has a more proper 256GB. There was a pronounced difference in the performance of the two processors available, which caused concern that Exynos models were an inferior product, as the differentials were not as large in previous models. We found Samsung’s photos to be clear up to 10x zoom, depending on the lighting conditions and how we were viewing the photos (on the phone screen vs a larger computer monitor). Oddly, what’s not on offer here is 45W wired charging, which is supported by last year’s Note 10 Plus, and this year’s S20, S20 Plus and S20 Ultra, via an adapter that Samsung sells separately. The fun gets underway September 15 when the service officially kicks off, so we'll report back with final impressions.