Samsung launched the Galaxy S24 smartphone earlier this year. This has a slightly bigger 6.2-inch and brighter 120Hz LTPO panel, new Exynos 2400 SoC for the Indian market, and a slightly bigger 4000mAh battery. Even it is minor, is this a good upgrade to the Galaxy S23? Let us dive into the review to find out.
| Box Contents |
| Camera |
| Battery Life |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- Samsung Galaxy S24 8GB RAM, 256GB storage version in Amber Yellow
colour - USB Type-C to C Cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick Start Guide and Warranty information
Display, Hardware and Design
The phone comes with a 6.2-inch Full HD+ Infinity-O Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels at about 415PPI, aspect ratio of 20:9. The display is bright, thanks to 2600 nits peak brightness, compared to 1750 nits in the S23.
It offers good color reproduction and the sunlight legibility is good as well. In addition to Vivid or Natural screen modes, there is a new vividness option added in the February update to boost the display color. The screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, same as the S23. You can notice minimal symmetrical bezels around the screen that makes it attractive.
It has a 120Hz refresh rate screen that offers a fluid user experience with smoother animations, scrolling and gaming. Unlike the S23 that had 48 to 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, the S23 finally gets an LTPO panel for 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate so it can save power, especially if are using AOD. In the gaming mode, it offers 240Hz touch sampling rate.
The phone doesn’t have DC dimming, PWM dimming or any other low brightness anti-flicker mode that is present in some AMOLED screen phones in the price range. I didn’t notice any screen flicker issues in low brightness on the phone. It doesn’t have notification LED, but there is Always on display.
On the top, there is a 12-megapixel camera in the tiny punch-hole that we had seen in the S23. The earpiece is present on the top edge that doubles up as a secondary speaker. The punch-hole is small and it is not intrusive.
There is a small chin below the screen. The phone has an in-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor from Qualcomm that is present towards the middle.
The phone retains the Armor Aluminum frame that has a matte finish instead of glossy finish in the S23. This offers a good grip, and the phone doesn’t slip out of your hands. You can see the antenna bands all around. Coming to the button placements, the power button and the volume rockers are present on the right side. There is nothing on the left side. The dual SIM slot USB Type-C port and the loudspeaker grill are on the bottom. The secondary microphone is on the top. It has the same vibration motor as the S23.
On the back there is a familiar triple camera module arranged in a single line. There is a single LED flash next to the module. Even though the phone has a 6.2-inch screen, it is compact to hold. It is 7.6mm thick and weighs just 167 grams, even though the size of the phone and the battery size have been increased a bit.
The phone has a frosted glass back with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection, so it doesn’t attract fingerprints or smudges and is also not prone to scratches with day-to-day use compared to budget Galaxy models with a plastic body. However, it is recommended to get a case.
In addition to the Amber Yellow colour variant that we have, the phone also comes in Cobalt Violet and Onyx Black colours. There is also online-exclusive Sapphire Blue and Jade Green colours. This comes with dust and water-resistant in freshwater to a depth of 1.5 meter for up to 30 minutes, with IP68 certification.
Camera
- 50MP main camera with LED Flash, 1/1.57″ Samsung S5KGN3 sensor, f/1.8 aperture, OIS
- 12MP 120° Ultra Wide sensor, f/2.2 aperture
- 10MP Telephoto lens with Samsung S5K3K1 sensor, f/2.4 aperture, 3x optical zoom, OIS
- 12MP front camera with f/2.2 aperture
You can choose 50MP option from the aspect ratio settings on the top, and the default output is 12MP instead of 12.5MP after pixel binning. It also has AR stickers, scene optimizer, portrait video, director’s view, hyperlapse and more modes. The Expert RAW mode is now present in the camera app instead of a separate app.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are brilliant, and it captures in 12MP resolution after pixel binning. The camera captures a good amount of detail, creates well exposed photos with good dynamic range and detailing, and dynamic range can further be improved enabling HDR mode from the settings, which automatically turns on HDR when needed. Apart from the 3x telephoto zoom camera, the standard digital zoom is also good. The 10x and 20x zoomed photos are good. Autofocus speeds are fast and accurate. Ultra-wide shots from the 12MP camera are good in daylight and has improved compared to the older model.
There is no macro mode or camera, but you can use 2x from the main camera or use 3x telephoto for close-ups, which is good. Live focus is good at detecting the edges. Low-light performance is good, which can be improved further with Night mode that offers more details. Images with flash is good and is not overpowering.
The 12-megapixel front camera is good, capturing brilliant shots. Wide-angle mode takes images in 12-megapixel resolution, while the normal mode takes images in 8.6-megapixel. Software blur in the live focus mode has good edge detection even in low light.
Check out the camera samples.
The S24 offers 8K video recording at 30 fps. There is 4K UHD video recording at 60 fps, Super Steady 1080p video at 60 fps, Super Slo-mo 720p video support at 960 fps, slow motion 1080p video support at 240 fps and Hyperlapse 4K video support at 30 fps.
The normal stabilization works with both ultra-wide and main camera, but only the main camera has OIS. You can switch between normal, ultra-wide telephoto and front cameras when video recording is in progress, but only in 4K 30fps or less. There is also HDR10+ recording that you can enable in the settings, and it supports up to 4K 60 fps.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 14, and it recently got March 2024. Compared to older flagships that got 4 OS updates and 5 years of security updates, the S24 series will get seven generations of OS upgrades and seven years of security updates for the first time.
On the top of Android 14, it has the latest Samsung One UI 6.1 with Galaxy AI that brings Live Translate, two-way, real-time voice and text translations of phone calls within the native app, Interpreter feature, Chat Assist, Note Assist, Transcript Assist, and gesture-driven Circle to Search.
The Device maintenance option lets you manage your device’s battery life, storage, RAM usage, and security all in one place. We now have only 256GB and 512GB options in India with UFS 4.0. The 256GB model which we have has 224GB free space. Out of 8GB LPDDR5X RAM, about 7.2GB is usable and 3.5GB is free when default apps are running in the background.
There is also a RAM Plus feature, which uses the internal memory of the phone to expand the RAM by an extra 8GB, in addition to the existing 8GB of RAM. This is enabled automatically.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, the smartphone comes with Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and Microsoft apps such as Microsoft 365, OneDrive, LinkedIn and Outlook. You get the option to install apps when you are setting up the phone, which you can choose not to. The phone doesn’t have ads, but shows notifications of new Samsung products occasionally.
Fingerprint sensor and Face unlock
The phone has Qualcomm’s in-display Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor Gen 2 (QFS4008). This uses acoustic-based technology that reflects the unique features of a user’s individual fingerprint and is engineered to allow the device to detect a larger fingerprint image than the normal optical sensor.
You can add up to 4 fingerprints, and adding fingerprint is easy. It has support for Face recognition, which doesn’t work well if the lighting is poor in the room, if you use hats or sunglasses. Both these are protected by Knox security.
Music Player and Multimedia
YouTube Music is the default music player. It has equalizer, Dolby Atmos, UHQ upscaler, and Adapt that can be enabled from the settings. All these improve the audio when listening through earphones, and Dolby Atmos also works with speakers. It doesn’t have FM Radio support. That said, audio through earphones is good. Loudspeaker output from the stereo speakers is good, but the S24+ and Ultra models have louder speakers.
The phone comes with Widevine L1 support out-of-the-box so that you can enjoy HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming apps. There is also HDR playback support for Netflix and YouTube.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The Galaxy S24 has support for 5G SA, with support for several 5G Network Bands in India. Airtel and Jio 5G works out of the box. There is also 4G Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and support for LTE-A or Carrier Aggregation. The Samsung dialer, similar to other Samsung phones, supports auto call recording.
Other connectivity options include, Wi-Fi 802.11 6E ax (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Wi-Fi-Calling or Vo-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3 and GPS with GLONASS. It has support for USB OTG and NFC that works with supported payment apps. This lacks UWB, which are present in S24+ and S24 Ultra models.
The Galaxy S24’s head SAR is at 1.330/Kg which well under the limit in India which is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g). This is more than the Galaxy S23.
Performance and Benchmarks
The new Exynos 2400 Deca-Core processor powers the S24 and S24+ in India. It uses 4nm 3rd generation 4LPP+ (EUV) process node and has tri-cluster CPU structure that consists of one Arm Cortex-X4 large core optimized for peak performance at 3.2 GHz, five mid-sized core that includes 2 x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.90 GHz and 3 x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.6 GHz for balanced processing, and four Cortex-A520 cores at 2.0 GHz for efficiency.
The company promises 1.7x increase in CPU performance compared to Exynos 2200. It has the new Samsung Xclipse 940 GPU with AMD RDNA 3 architecture and hardware ray tracing technology.
We did not face any issues or frame drops in the graphic-intensive games like COD, BGMI and Genshin Impact. However, there is thermal throttling, which is common in compact phones. The phone reached maximum 44º in our testing indoors in Wi-Fi, but this might vary outdoors in 5G. At the launch, Samsung said the S24 has 1.5x bigger VC cooling compared to the S23. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
As you can see, the scores are on par with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered Galaxy S24 Ultra, and the multi-core scores are better than the competitors.
Battery life
Coming to the battery life, the phone packs a 4000mAh (typical) built-in battery, compared to 3900mAh battery in the S23, while maintaining the same size. It lasts for a whole day with 5G, dual SIMs, and heavy multimedia use. I got about 5.5 hours of screen on time with two days of use with mostly on Wi-Fi, and occasional 5G use in 120Hz, which is a slight improvement compared to S23.
It still has 25W fast charging compared to 45W in the S24+ and the S24 Ultra. It takes just over an hour to charge the phone fully using a 25W charger, and 0 to 50% takes about 25 minutes. Most competitors have a bigger battery that can charge in less than half the time. It still has 15W wireless charging and reverse wireless charging.
Conclusion
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S24 is a minior, yet a worthy upgrade to the Galaxy S23 in terms of display, performance and battery life. This also gets 7 years of OS updates, which is a welcome move. Wish the company had added the UWB in the S24 as well, and improved the charging speed.
Even though it looks like that price of the phone has increased, the S24 now starts at 256GB, and it has the same launch price of Rs. 79,999 as the S23 256GB model, and this time there is also a 512GB model.
Alternatives
The Google Pixel 8 is a good alternative in the similar range, but it lacks a telephoto camera. The Xiaomi 14 should be a good alternative with a slightly bigger screen, and a slightly bigger battery if you need a compact phone.
Availability
The Samsung Galaxy S24 8GB + 256 GB model is priced at Rs. 79,999 and the 8GB + 512GB model is priced at Rs. 89,999. It is available from Samsung online store, Amazon.in, and other online and offline stores.
Pros
- Excellent 120Hz LTPO AMOLED display
- Compact, light-weight body
- Smooth performance
- 7 years OS and security updates
- Good cameras
- Impressive battery life
Cons
- Still no UltraWideBand (UWB) support
- Still limited to 25W charging