You must really want that stylus not to go with the S20 Plus or Galaxy S21 Plus instead of the Note 20. As you would expect for a premium flagship, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra supports both flavors of 5G, so you should be able to hop on both sub 6-GHz networks and mmWave networks with ease where they are available. I watched over an hour of Umbrella Academy on Netflix, streamed Spotify with the screen on for an hour and a half and played about 40 minutes of Fortnite.

In addition to overseeing the direction of Tom's Guide, Mark specializes in covering all things mobile, having reviewed dozens of smartphones and other gadgets. New S Pen tricks are addictive: The new Air Actions can come in handy (like drawing a a quick arc in the air to go Home). The Galaxy Note 20 line comprises two models with various hardware specifications; international models of the Note 20 utilize the Exynos 990 system-on-chip, while the United States, Korean and Chinese models utilize the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+.

In certain markets [ vague], the Galaxy Note 20 has been offered with three months of free Xbox game pass along with an Xbox game pad; Xbox games will be playable from the phone to the TV. In many examples, the device was either slow to shift focus from the background when a face was visible in the scene, or in some cases often refused to focus on the person at all. Under benchmark testing in the lab, video target exposures on the Note20 Ultra 5G were very accurate, capturing bright and well-contrasted videos in simulated lighting conditions between low light (20 lux) and bright light (1000 lux). Seeing a timer ring form around the 10MP selfie camera punch hole, rather than having to badly guess where the camera lens is inside the display – invaluable for group selfies. The Note 20 Ultra did a fairly good job with portraits, but Samsung's tendency to slightly wash out faces is prevalent here, and you can see that it had a bit of trouble with the sunlight on my arm.

Galaxy Note20 Ultra is equipped with a 4500mAh (typical) intelligent battery that uses its power efficiently, so it lasts through the workday and your late-night fun. Target exposure measurements were a little high in bright light over 300 lux and low in very dark conditions below 20 lux.

Although the background was blown out in the live preview, I found that Samsung's post-processing handled things well enough in the end. Videos are particularly successful in bright sunny conditions, thanks to rich and pleasant colors, accurate white balance, and good texture preservation.

The telephoto camera has a focal length of 120 mm ( 35mm equivalent), which equals 5× optical zoom, and allows for 50× hybrid zoom (assisted by digital zoom). It’s not Samsung’s longest-lasting phone, and that comes down to the curbed battery capacity compared to the S20 Ultra – 4,500mAh for the Note 20 Ultra vs 5,000mAh for the S20 Ultra. I handed the Note 20 Ultra to our resident Fortnite expert, my 12-year-old son, and he found the gameplay to be so smooth that I had to lobby hard to get the phone back. The Note 20 Ultra's shot is closer to reality as the petals look more red than violet and the white balance is better. Capturing night portraits in flash-auto mode, the performance of the flash is good, recording accurate exposure of the subject, nice color with pleasant skin tones, and a high level of detail.

Globally, ultra-wide image quality is very good, with the same excellent exposure and color from the main camera filtering down to the wide. It’s slightly less successful in flash-auto mode, however, where low-light cityscapes aren’t quite as well exposed.