Samsung Galaxy Note 20 First Impressions
The Galaxy note 20 is here and I love the device. Regardless of what other reviewers think and say, I think this is a beautiful and absolutely impressive device. Hats off to the design team at Samsung, I think the design on the Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra. But at the price of a thousand dollars, I really would have loved to see a 120 hertz display on this device nevertheless, let me tell you why the Galaxy Note 20 is important.
Build
So the first thing you notice about the Galaxy note 20 is the design, it’s got a flat display panel and has flattened top and bottom any it comes with a satin textured back panel and this gives the device a nice feel to the touch. I mean its just so satisfying and also reassuring. Even without a case, you kinda assured that your grip on the Note 20 is solid and it wont be slipping off your hands anytime soon.
We have gorilla glass 5 in front and the back plate is made from a combination of glass and plastic. Again I think this is cool, your device is safer even when you accidentally drop it, you’re not scared of the back panel shattering since it isn’t glass. And then you have Gorilla glass 5 on the front panel which is quite strong and scratch resistant. So its safe to say that this is one safe device in term of build quality.
Cameras
So on my first day of getting the Note 20, I immediately wanted to try out the Cameras, so I took the phone to the beach and oh boy was I pleased. Thanks to the triple camera setup consisting of a 12MP main wide angle optically stabilized camera, a 64MP telephoto also optically stabilized and a third 12MP Ultra-wide angle camera.
Results from these cameras were utterly impressive. I mean I was blown away. You get almost perfect shots from the main camera. Dynamic range was on point, color reproduction was stellar and the overall crispness and clarity of the photos just points to the fact that Samsung learned from their mistakes on the S20 Ultra and fixed most if not all those issues here. One such issue we had, was the focus hunting challenge on the S20 ultra. The Note 20 absolutely crushes focusing, Its got a much better dual pixel autofocus system and boy I’m very pleased with the results. I had no problems capturing every moment at the beach and the results can testify for themselves.
Portrait shots were a joy to behold and is testament to Samsung consistently improving the camera results. Selfie shots were also beautiful. This a phone I can absolutely recommend if we were looking at just the cameras.
On the video side this phone supports 4k60 on the front facing and the rear does 8k at 24fps. Video looked very sharp and had great dynamic range. I’ll let the camera speak for itself.
I’ll rate the camera system on this phone an 8.9 out of 10.
Display
So now I want to talk about the elephant in the room. The display. This is where a lot of reviewers felt like Samsung didn’t do great on this phone. It’s 6.7 inch, flat, infinity-o, Super AMOLED Plus display, it has an aspect ratio of 20:9, its got a resolution of 1080X2400 and refreshes at rate of 60 times per second or 60hertz.
This display is fantastic in itself, great colors, deep blacks, fantastic viewing in-doors and under direct sunlight. Watching movies and video here just pops. I mean it’s just beautiful.
The gripe here with reviewers is that it’s a 60hertz display and that it still costs quite high. Although I would have loved to see a 120hertz display here, I do not think that this make this phone any less. This whole 120herts display need is a tech head requirement. What do I mean? Well if you were to give a regular phone users two phones with 120 and 60 hertz displays, truth is they’d hardly notice it until you point it out to them. Regular smart-phone users aren’t concerned with screen refresh rate, at least for the time being. In fact they probably don’t know what that is. They just want a phone with a great looking display, great cameras, good performance and great battery life. And talking about battery life and performance. The Note 20 comes with a 4300mah battery, has my unit here has 8Gigs of RAM and 256Gigs of UFS 3.1 storage. There’s also an option with 128Gigs storage and 8gig RAM. There’s no SD Card expansion slot which is another annoyance with the reviewers. And I also agree with them on this. I mean this is a thousand dollar smart-phone. People who buy this might want to hold on to it for an extended period, and in that time, say 2 to 3 years, they may have filled up their storage so the need for an SD card expansion becomes necessary. The Note 20 Ultra has the option for an SD card so I really don’t understand the rationale behind removing that feature on the Note 20.
Performance
Anyhoo performance was very decent on the Note 20, i have the Exynos 990 and Mali G-77 GPU variant here, although in the US and Korea, they get the Snapdragon 865+ which is actually more powerful than the Exynos 990, but there’s no need hammering on this, it is what it is.
Performance was smooth, gesture were smooth, app opening speeds was good, what you’d expect in a flagship. Gaming was also a breeze. The phone handled all 3d games I threw at it with ease. I had no problems here at all.
S-Pen
Now for the signature feature of every Samsung Note release, The S-Pen. This year the S-pen on the Note 20 is much improved with a 26ms delay, making writing on the Note 20 feel faster and smoother. This is a significant drop from 42ms in the previous Note 10 series. This however doesn’t compare to the insane 9ms you get on the note 20 Ultra. Thanks in part to the 120hertz panel on the Note 20 Ultra.
You still have all the usual note feature here with some new features including the ability to straighten texts. Samsung also says you’ll be able to sync your Samsung notes to outlooks one note. The Note 20 also supports Samsungs DeX although this year you can now do it without wires. If you’d like to see a review on using DeX wirelessly, do hit the like button and also subscribe to my channel.
Conclusion
Overall for $999 dollars the Note 20 is quite good and i absolutely love the cameras on this phone. I think Samsung could have done better with the pricing seeing how you can already get phones with 120 hertz displays and micro SD expansion slots and bigger batteries for even less.
Compared to the Note 20 Ultra, this phone isn’t as glamorous and I believe Samsung did that on purpose wanting more people to go for the ultra instead and you wouldn’t be dissapointed if you did.
I reviewed the Note 10 Lite not too long ago and that phone is quite to the Note 20 in terms of its looks and size and I’ll be bringing you’re a comparison video of both devices soon to help see how they differ.
What do you think of the Samsung Galaxy Note 20, do you think it fair Samsung released a phone like this at the price of $1000? And is the camera improvement on the Note 20 enough for you to upgrade. I’d love to hear from you.
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