First Impressions: Samsung Galaxy S20 Series Hands-On

[Redaktion]

As expected Samsung revealed the new Galaxy S20 series comprised of three different models during yesterday's Unpacked event. We were able to take a first peek at Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra and want to give you our first impressions made during this hands-on experience where we encountered well-done evolution but also the first minor imperfections.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-Impressions-Samsung-Galaxy-S20-Series-Hands-On.453764.0.html

[kristof van rooy]

as a big samsung fan having owned lots of smasung s phones in the past i have my doubts this year.

1) because of the screen aspect ratio i did a few calculations with pythagoras and the 6.7" screen offers less width then my 6.42" screen at 6.98 cm for the s20+ vs 7.13 cm for my s10+ all that horizontal space is only good for movies and not even youtube movies. For gaming we are growing away from switch that has a 7.72 cm screen. Yet we do get the extra weight and the extra price

2) 5g is not really usefull yet.Stadia would be very ecounfriendly as you are using one more console to produce power. Xbox one streaming or ps5 streaming would be very nice though. The most ecofriendly would be done by gpu on the chip as it uses least power for performance.
And then there is the fact that 5g is not even available yet.

3) the performance of the gpu whilst unknown is a factor of worries for me the s10+ got a healthy 40% boost but was still inferior to the s855 regular and the a12 by a lot. This year the 865 got a lot of improvements on gpu and promises even less throttling. With samsung phones its always been that your final performance of long gaming is only 50 - 60% of max performance.

so my s10+ at 600 gigaflops was only performing at 360 gigaflops when throttling was on or about on par to the s8+ you can see that is right to if you look at the scores of throttling in benchmarks where the s10+ gets 24 fps at gfxbench vs 42 max what would be about on par with what my s8+ did in the time at max speed. Basically full throttled my s10+ can just about compare to the switch docked console (that is still cool though!)

anyway if they only going to promise a 20% boost in performance OR 20% boost in efficiency and are keeping the throttling the same. Then the gamer in me sees little reason to go for samsung as the difference with snapdragon this generation would grow. But without performance numbers i guess we'll have to wait.

-) it has software going for it ofcourse i like samsung software a lot, also their camera will be nice. But to be honnestly i don't feel like i need the extra quality now over the s10+. Even if the upgrade likely is bigger then in many generations. Next year likely more phones will support that quality and maybe this year to. Waterproofing stays a solid reason. And another big one is samsungs perfect repair services.home delivery of phone within a few days having it fixed is so nice

4) back to the negatives the biggest thing bothering me is price and one more reason that is is because the next generation iphone they are speculating up to 15 billion transistors in a chip. And that is only 7 more months away.

Not saying i 100% won't buy it. But there need to be some good surprises still coming. Also mi phones look so nice each year. Last years mi9 cost only 499 at launch and i am sure i would have been happy with that to.

(all the point from a gaming enthousiast and not a photographer)

[xpclient]

Any camera feature with such extreme zoom or Ultra Bright Night mode (Samsung's equivalent of Pixel 4's astrophotography mode) that requires a tripod to take pics is not for me as I am a consumer, not a pro photographer.

I am more interested in the alleged low light HDR video on this phone. I hope you cover that :)