Samsung makes the $1,300 Galaxy Note 20 Ultra official
The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (bronze) and Note 20 (green).
Today is Samsung's big hardware event, Unpacked 2020, and the company's late-2020 flagships have been announced: meet the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the Galaxy Note 20. Typically, Samsung has built two nearly identical phones with different size screens and bodies, but this year there are major differences between the two devices. The big news today is the prices: the Note 20 Ultra starts (starts!) at $1,299, and the Note 20 starts at $999.
The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch, 3088*1440 120Hz display; 8GB or 12 GB of RAM; 128GB, 256, or 512GB of storage; and a 4500mAh battery. You get three cameras on the back, a 108MP main camera, a 12MP wide-angle, and a 12MP, 5x optical zoom. Earlier this year with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, Samsung promoted the 5x optical zoom as a "100x Space Zoom" through the use of cropping and AI upscaling. As you can imagine from that huge gulf between optics and output, the resulting images were a blurry, smeared mess. For the second half of the year, on the Note 20, the feature has been cut down to a "50x Super Resolution Zoom."
As always, Samsung is offering two different SoCs. For both Note 20s, you get either the new Snapdragon 865+ or the Samsung Exynos 990 SoC, depending on the country. We expect the US will get the Snapdragon chip; Europe will get the Exynos. The Exynos models have an option for an LTE-only device, while 5G is mandatory on the Snapdragon chip, and at least some models have mmWave.
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