Review: Samsung Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra

"Did you eat cancer?"

Artificial intelligence apparently thinks that's a normal sentence to say. My friend and I were speaking over the phone, testing Samsung's new real-time call translation feature on the Galaxy S24. He asked me in Korean whether I had eaten dinner. Alas, the AI thought cancer was on the menu instead.

These AI tricks, powered by Google's Gemini artificial intelligence model, are the key new features on Samsung's latest trio of Android phones: the Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra. They're fantastic handsets all around, but while some of the new smarts they've gained are helpful, they need more polish. There's still plenty of room to catch up to Google's Pixel phones.

Let's get the hardware out of the way because, frankly, it's a little boring. In a good way! Samsung's expertise in smartphones shows—there's just not a ton to complain about. I break down many of the differences between the trio here, but to summarize, they go up in sizes with the S24 being the smallest at 6.2 inches and the massive S24 Ultra at 6.8 inches.

The S24 and S24+ are nearly identical, outside of battery size, RAM, and base storage capacity. (The 6.7-inch S24+ starts at 256 GB and 12 GB of RAM instead of 128 GB and 8 GB). The S24 Ultra is the only one with the S Pen stylus, which is housed inside and accessible from the bottom edge. The cameras are also different, but I'll get to that further below. The Ultra's frame is made out of titanium, which is lighter and more durable than aluminum, and the glass protecting the display is tougher than what you'll find on the other two.

I like the feel of these devices—the flat edges offer a nice grip. I just wish they were more interesting to look at. Samsung had a great design with the Galaxy S21 series, but things have become less distinctive of late; they look like the textbook definition of a "phone." At least there are a bevy of unique colors, especially if you purchase directly from Samsung, including yellow, orange, green, and purple. As for the titanium, it's a shame you're not seeing many weight savings here, unlike what we saw on the iPhone 15 Pro. It shaves off a single gram compared to last year's S23 Ultra. I hope it's more durable, but I'll leave the drop tests to the folks with multiple units to spare.

Every part of the hardware on the S24 series has been refined to a point of perfection. The AMOLED screens enjoy rich colors and crisp details, and they get impossibly bright on sunny days, making them super easy to read. I want to especially call out the flat display on the S24 Ultra, which is so much more enjoyable to use than the curved screens on its predecessors. All three displays look and feel buttery smooth—they all have variable refresh rates that juggle from 1 Hz up to 120 Hz, so they're quite battery-efficient.

This fluid performance is aided by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset inside. Every task feels snappy—even playing Genshin Impact at the max graphical settings for an extended amount of time. However, I will note that these phones tend to get quite hot in one specific area the longer you perform an intensive task, which doesn't feel great when you're holding them. The gameplay also had a few stutters here and there. It wasn't as smooth as my experience on the new OnePlus 12, but it was pretty close.

Battery life across the board is easily more than a day on all three of these devices with average use, but even with heavier usage, you'll likely be able to finish the day with some juice left over. (Overall, you'll see better battery life on the S24+ and Ultra.) The 5,000-mAh cell in the S24 Ultra left me with 32 percent after six hours of screen-on time (SOT), the 4,900-mAh cell in the S24+ had 24 percent left with seven hours of SOT, and the S24 had 16 percent remaining after six hours of SOT. They're all quite respectable numbers.

It's a shame Samsung wasn't able to add Qi2 support on these devices. Yes, Qi wireless charging is available like before, but the new Qi2 charging standard would have enabled a MagSafe-like system on the back of these phones, allowing you to take advantage of a great ecosystem of magnetic accessories. Ah well, next year. For now, maybe use a MagSafe case instead.

Speaking of support, Samsung will keep the software on these phones updated for seven years, which is a big leap from before. This now matches what Google is offering on its Pixel 8 series, and is some of the longest software support you'll find on a smartphone. Time will tell how this plays out and whether Samsung stays true to its promises, but it's fantastic news for anyone who prefers to hold on to their devices for a long time.

There's a laundry list of smart software features bundled in the S24 series. Call Assist is the one I talked about earlier, where you can enable real-time translations during a phone call.

I highly recommend muting the other person's (and your) voice in the phone app's settings when you have this translation feature enabled, because things can quickly get confusing. The AI often starts reading out the translated text, but the other person on the line might not realize it, and they'll start speaking again. My friend, who spoke to me in Korean, says it's about 65 percent accurate (see the whole eating cancer thing). The translations are akin to results you'd get from Google Translate and don't quite capture the intent of the message. Still, he says the transcriptions that appear on the screen are better, and it was cool to have a somewhat functional conversation in Korean. I think most people will be able to use it to get by if they need to make such a call when traveling abroad.

Surprisingly, I kind of like the Chat Assist function. This works on Samsung's keyboard and you can use it to change the tone, or spelling and grammar, of your messages. I've used it to make some texts sound a bit more casual or to quickly fix some grammar and punctuation. It's not always going to be useful—the “professional” tone is a little too formal. And I have no idea who would want to use the “social” tone, which adds hashtags at the end of your sentence #yolo.

I typically use Google's Recorder app for all of my interviews, thanks to its excellent real-time transcriptions, so it's nice to see this functionality on Samsung's default recorder app. It works similarly well when I used it during a briefing and also includes speaker labels, though these aren't always perfect. I also took notes in the same meeting with Samsung's Notes app, and I appreciate being able to use AI to format my garbled words into a nice-looking page with proper formatting and bullet points.

Google's Circle to Search is debuting on these phones (and Pixels). It's a new way to run a Google Search by circling anything on the screen, even when you're watching a video. It doesn't work well if you're trying to figure out who a celebrity is, but it's otherwise adept—plus you can add to your search with text to make it more specific. I mostly like not having to leave an app to run a search.

While these features are smart, using the phone over the past two weeks has made me miss some of the smart features on Google's Pixel phones. For example, I've received an endless amount of spam calls, even with Samsung's spam protection turned on. PSE&G keeps calling me to say that they'll shut down my utilities in 45 minutes if I don't make a payment, but after four days of calling, you'd think I'd be typing in darkness right now. I rarely get spam or robocalls when I use a Pixel thanks to Call Screen.

In the same vein, I have to say it: Samsung's keyboard sucks. The swipe typing is super inaccurate, and the voice typing is way worse. It doesn't add punctuation when you dictate it, something I'm used to with Google's Assistant Voice Typing on Pixels; Samsung regularly thinks I want to say the word “comma” in my sentences. None of this makes the phones feel smart.

It wouldn't be a smartphone review if I didn't spend a bit of time on the cameras. The S24 and S24+ share the same camera system, with a 50-MP primary sensor joined by a 12-MP ultrawide and a 10-MP telephoto offering 3X optical zoom. The S24 Ultra adds an extra 5X optical zoom camera and switches out the main camera for a 200-MP sensor. Long story short, whether you have the S24 or S24 Ultra, you're getting a versatile and reliable set of cameras.

Samsung swapped the 10X optical zoom for a 5X optical zoom on the S24 Ultra, and I don't like the change. Sure, the sharpness is relatively close when you use the 10X digital zoom on the S24 Ultra, but things are still a bit fuzzier. Colors, contrast, and white balance were all a bit off, compared to the same results from the S23 Ultra. It was super unique to have such a high zoom level, especially when you still have 3X optical zoom. Too bad. Thankfully, the 5X is still a nice option to have, and its results are usually sharper than that of 5X zoom on the Google Pixel 8 Pro. As usual, Samsung tends to pump up the colors a bit.

I prefer the quality of the Pixel 8 Pro's ultrawide over the ultrawide on the S24 series; it has sharper details and colors are more natural with better white balance. The 3X zoom seems to be sharper on the S24 series over its predecessors by a hair, and these are still some of the best selfie cameras on a smartphone.

Video performance, as usual, is excellent, but my favorite new feature is Instant Slow-Mo. In the Gallery app, just press and hold any video to instantly turn part of it into slow motion. As someone who routinely forgets that slow-mo is a feature on the camera, this lets you apply it with any clip as it generates new frames in between real frames to make the footage appear smooth. The quality is not going to be nearly as good if you had actually shot in slow-mo, but it's good enough for social videos for when you inevitably forget to film in that mode.

Generative Edit is another smart software feature available for your photos. Like Google's Magic Editor, you can resize subjects, move them around the frame, and the AI will fill in the rest. I don't have a massive Psyduck plushie, just a small one, but I resized it to look almost like a realistic large one. Did I fool you?

In a nutshell, the Galaxy S24 series marries the best hardware in Android with Google's smarts. However, I find Google's Pixel phones to have more helpful day-to-day software features, so there's still some work to do for Samsung to catch up. If you still prefer the exceptional Samsung hardware though, you'll still have to deal with the price. The S24 ($800) and S24+ ($1,000) are priced well, but I'm just not seeing the justification for the $100 price jump of the Ultra at $1,300. Try to catch them on sale.