Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra First Impressions

How do you make an already impressive phone even better?

This is the challenge that I believe the team at Samsung have struggled to answer after launching the Galaxy S23 Ultra last year, and fast forward today, we have the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which once again looks identical to two generations of Galaxy S Ultras, but this is one flagship phone that you shouldn’t take for granted.

Yup, no more curved screen and it now has slimmer bezels!

To anyone that takes a first look at the Galaxy S24 Ultra, it is a conventional looking big phone with a 6.8-inch display that does away with the curve edges that was a signature on the company’s flagship phones, you get five protruding camera rings on the back which four of them are usable, and there’s still the beloved S-Pen stored conveniently in a silo, it still has a 5000mAh battery that easily power a full heavy work day, but with the Titanium frame, this phone feels so much better to hold than before.

Samsung perfectly understands that smartphones have hit a bottleneck in almost every aspect, while the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a respectable phone with a powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with Galaxy chip and has a great quad-camera system, the one thing that Samsung wants to set it apart from the rest is Galaxy AI, which is a suite of generative AI features that aims to improve the way you work on a smartphone, and in my opinion, it is a big gamble from Samsung and one that its competition will have a hard time catching up if it ultimately pays off.

Of so many Galaxy AI features that Samsung showed off, I am most impressed with the chat translation feature that can instantly translate foreign text into your native language, the feature is integrated on the Samsung Keyboard that you can have it translate text messages in WhatsApp conversations, and simply type on a small text box to have your message translated into the language you desire, all of these are done on device in just a few seconds, and I find the translation accuracy to be decent as well.

Want to digest a long article on a webpage? Simply tap on the three magical stars button on the toolbar of Samsung Internet, and it will summarize an article for you with the option to translate the content into your native language, effortless and impressive.

Ultimately, this is what Samsung believes that makes a smartphone exciting again, which I totally don’t doubt as we are constantly looking for better ways to work on our phones, there are more generative AI features to try out as I review the phone, which I will reserve my thoughts for the final review, so definitely stay tuned for that.