The Phone I’d Buy Instead of the S24 Ultra

Author

Ark
November 18, 2024

Exploring the Galaxy S24 Plus: A Top-Tier Alternative to the Ultra

Discover the features and performance of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus, and why it could be the ideal choice for most users over the Ultra.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra is wonderful. In fact, it’s my favorite phone of the year so far. But here’s the thing: for most people, I think it’s too much phone, and, more importantly, it’s too expensive. Funnily enough, I’m not alone in thinking this. Samsung’s president was recently pictured rocking the S24 Plus, the less glamorous, ignorable middle child of the range—nnot the most expensive slab. The more I use it, the more I’m thinking I, too, and you might want to follow in the footsteps of TM Roh with the Goldilocks phone in Samsung’s 2024 range.

I’m C. Bunson from Pocket-Lint, and in this video, I’ll tell you why. My growing reasoning surrounds the added extras that you get on the S24 Ultra. Some of them, to some people, are genuinely meaningful; others are less so. For instance, yes, you can have an S Pen. Even as someone who likes to handwrite notes and to-do lists on paper every single day, the S Pen still isn’t a natural writing or note-taking tool for me. I find use for it in quickly marking up screenshots or maps or just using it when I want to give my grip a break, but that’s about it. While I know there are people out there who clearly like the S Pen and use it regularly, it comes back to this theory of “most people.” For me and most people, a stylus isn’t a tool that’s needed on a smartphone. After all, capacitive multi-touch displays and mobile interfaces have been designed with fingers in mind first, so they’re an added extra, not an essential.

There are other areas, too, where I think the Plus performs as well as pretty much any other phone. But it’s not just about performance, either. The experience of using a phone can be hampered or elevated by the feeling you get when you pick it up. The shaping and the build are quite different, but even here, while the Ultra has its advantages, the Plus has them too. I think the biggest strength of the Plus is that, despite having a quite large display, the build and shape of the phone are surprisingly compact and light. Usually, phones with this size display are comfortably over the 200g mark, like the Ultra or the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but this one sits underneath, and that’s a real tactile thing you can feel when you pick it up, as are the rounded corners.

Inevitably, when holding a phone, the corners can end up pressing into your palm, so it goes without saying that these rounded, softer corners are going to be a lot more comfortable than the right-angled, sharp corners of the more expensive sibling. The lightness and narrow build mean it’s easier to hold for long periods, even if the right-angled, flat edges ensure it’s not an absolute dream. Yes, it’s made from aluminum rather than titanium, but do you really need titanium? I’d argue not. The aluminum in the Samsung phone is about as tough as we’ve had from this material — it’s impressively rigid, and the phone has the highest levels of water and dust resistance you can get on a phone, at least on a standard phone.

There’s only one real feature I look at with the Ultra and think, yeah, maybe that’s a standout feature worth getting, and even that is something I think most people can live without if they’ve never experienced it. Of course, it’s the glass on the front. The Plus uses Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which is what you’ll find on most flagship Android phones. The Ultra ups the ante with a more durable Gorilla Glass Armor, which has this amazing anti-reflective surface. The Plus doesn’t have that, and it does make a difference — it’s the real deal. But is it worth the extra money involved? And is the experience or the build of the S24 Plus compromised? I’d have to say no, not really.

Now let’s look at the display and quickly ramble through the specs. It’s got a 6.7-inch panel, so that’s a big plus, as is the fact it can reach 2,600 nits peak in HDR video. It’s got a refresh rate that can hit 120 Hz, but more importantly, it can ramp up and down quickly in small increments. It’s even got QHD resolution, pushing the pixels per inch above 500, which isn’t actually something you see in that many phones these days. In normal speak, that means it’s big, it’s bright, it’s smooth, and it’s incredibly sharp, delivering small, fine details and curves that are really crispy. For pure numbers alone, there’s not much out there that can beat this phone screen, and the fact it’s surrounded by super skinny bezels with a uniform thickness and an accurate radius inside the corners means there’s nothing to distract you from your content. So that’s a big win — it’s just you, your favorite game, and the movie, all set in this really precise, minimal shape.

It also has one of Samsung’s ultrasonic fingerprint scanners built-in, which aren’t as easily duped by dampness or buildups of oil and dirt in your fingerprint ridges, so it’s super speedy and responsive. Now you look at that speed, and you might not be all that impressed by it, but when you think of this as being something that every person uses many, many times a day, it’s that kind of performance that can make a difference day in and day out, probably even more so than whether or not it can cope easily with an extreme 60-minute session in Call of Duty. And I guess that’s the way I feel about the phone in general. In most regards, it gets out of the way, makes everyday tasks effortless, and is built into this portable, nimble handheld device that you can just get on with and use every day.

We even get some of the same extra software features you typically only see on the absolute top models in older versions, like DeX software that turns your phone into a mini-computer when you connect it to a wired or wireless monitor. And because it’s Samsung, there will be plenty of third-party accessories, cases, and the like that you can get for the S24 Plus.

Now let’s talk performance, because, as I mentioned when I made a video about the Galaxy S24, there’s a lot to love here. Now, I’ve got a UK unit that doesn’t have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which we all know is super powerful, efficient, and top-tier. But here’s the thing — so is the Exynos 2400. Loading up some of my favorite casual or even demanding games proved to be absolutely no problem for the S24 Plus. It’s fast, it can go for a good chunk of time and still deliver smooth frame rates, and it doesn’t absolutely hammer the battery either. In older phones powered by Exynos, I’ve had issues with lag, stutter, and delay, especially in basic elements of the interface. But with this latest model, it’s like Samsung learned from those issues of the older model and tightened up the experience, and to the untrained eye, away from all the benchmarking and scientific tests that you could do, it very much seems like a proper top-tier phone. It’s got a minimum of 12 gigabytes of RAM to keep tasks running efficiently, but also UFS 4.0 storage, which means downloads, installs, and pretty much every aspect of the experience is fast and smooth.

Now, you run it through demanding benchmarks like 3D Mark, and it’ll still be in the top 10% of phones tested, keeping frame rates and visuals clear and smooth. It might not be the absolute best — it definitely isn’t— but at the same time, it does more than well enough that it will keep everyone happy unless you’re a real stickler for the details. Now here’s the other thing: it’s got a 4,900 mAh battery inside, which is only slightly less than the Ultra. There’s about 100 milliamp hours in it, and that means, along with the efficient processor and advanced refresh rate display, I’ve been able to get through nearly two days on a full battery. Even better, it can charge at the same 45-watt speeds as the Ultra, taking just 30 minutes to fill 65% of the battery. Now, phone enthusiasts know there are faster chargers out there from Xiaomi and OnePlus, but being able to just plug your phone in and have a day’s worth of juice in 30 minutes is really great.

Now looking at cameras, there’s this real sense that the S24 Plus offers almost everything you could need. You’ve got the main, the ultra-wide, and a three-times optical zoom lens to ensure versatility and focal lengths. The one thing missing is the five-times periscope-style zoom that’s on the Ultra. What I found, however, with any Samsung zoom, including the Ultra, is that once you go past that five- or three-times range, image quality does drop off. Yes, you get the extra pixel count and extra sharpness from the Ultra zoom, but it’s still not a perfect zoom. I’ve seen better results from the Pixel 8 Pro and the OnePlus 12, so as zooms go, that’s not the best there is. So alone, just like with the S Pen, it’s not necessarily a feature I’d pay extra for.

That’s not to say I think the S24 Plus camera system is perfect — it’s most definitely not — but it is good, and I suspect it’ll offer just the right amount of performance through image quality, colors, and low light to be perfectly good for 99% of people who want to buy a smartphone. Now, being critical, I think the processing of the color isn’t there. Even with scene optimization switched off, blues and greens are typically unnatural and oversaturated, and they do tend to overexpose. And with the zoom lens, there’s a lot of artificial smoothing going on, but it does seem to do a good job of lifting detail from the darker, shadowed elements at night. It snaps photos in less than two seconds using the dedicated night mode

. Images, for the most part, are again bright, sharp, and color-rich, but there is a weird green tint to a lot of these photos. So I think there’s a little way to go before it can compete with the Ultra head-to-head, especially with the zoom lens. But even in general, I think the Ultra does a better job with colors — it doesn’t make them look oversaturated as much as the Plus does.

So I’ll never say don’t buy the S24 Ultra — that would be a bit hypocritical after declaring it my favorite phone of the year. And if you want to, and it’s not beyond what you want to pay for a phone, absolutely go for it — it’s brilliant. But what I will say is that I think for nearly every smartphone buyer out there looking for a top-notch phone, you can get pretty much all the same high-end features and capabilities in the Plus, or at least the ones that really matter. It might not seem as exciting, and it may not even destroy every other phone in benchmarks or technical performance tests, but it is a phone that gets nearly everything else right. It costs less than the Ultra and is smaller, slimmer, and more comfortable to use. It’s a winner in my book. Let me know what you think of this phone in the comments down below, or you can get me on Threads. I’m @CUnon. If you liked this video, please do leave a thumbs up, subscribe, and tap that notification bell, and I’ll see you again in the next one. Bye for now!