It’s that time of the year when we look at the best devices the last few months have produced. We begin our series with the best Android phone of the year. Though there have been great efforts from Pixel, OnePlus, Vivo and Xiaomi, it’s Samsung that once again tops the list of Android phones of the year simply because it offers the best overall performance. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, even at the end of the year, remains all-powerful as we prepare for the launch of the Galaxy S25 Ultra sometime early next year. The question: Why should you buy the S24 Ultra even at the end of 2024?
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and its telephoto lens captures colours perfectly and it's among the best on any smartphone
Best features in one place
The S24 Ultra has taken the best things from every other high-end phone Samsung has made and stuffed them into one place, so anything that you could possibly value, it has pushed it to the max. And this is the phone that managed to set the tone for 2024.
The formula for Samsung’s Ultra phones has evolved over the years. At first, it was just the most numbers, the biggest megapixel count, the most zoom and all that. Then it added the S Pen and got more refined and it replaced the Note. Now it’s the best hardware, all the best software you can think of in one phone.
Top-tier display
Do you like to pixel peep? This is one of the best screens on any phone. The phone has a class-leading 6.8-inch Quad HD AMOLED display and it is top of the line. This year the company made the phone completely flat and brighter. It’s the best-looking Android phone with up to a max 2,600 nits, which is awesome outdoors or anywhere. But it also gets extremely dim at night.
Colours are accurate on Samsung's heavy-hitter phone
Samsung didn’t stop there: It has put an anti-reflective coating that makes a noticeable difference when you work in bright sunshine. If you are a screen snob, this is the phone to get.
battery life
What about battery life? As reasonably sized flagship slabs go, it doesn’t get much better than this. Samsung kept a 5,000mAh battery in one of the best-performing phones, despite making it thinner and keeping the S Pen. It still has 45W wired charging, you still have 25W wireless charging and in terms of battery, I am able to have long days with no problems, with six hours-plus screen-on time.
Big on performance
What about performance? Samsung made the best use of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. There are efficiency gains across the board, plus this phone pairs it with 12 gigs of RAM and it is a multitasking champ. If it’s a stylus you’re into, you aren’t really going to consider any other phone. The S Pen is the only high-end stylus still available on slab smartphones. It’s good for note-taking, drawing, highlighting and whatnot.
Getting a clip out of a video shot on the Galaxy S24 Ultra is easy and the final output has enough resolution
There’s also gaming performance and there’s ray tracing plus a 90 per cent larger vapour chamber to cool the phone. Getting a gaming phone over this will hardly get you a few per cent extra frames and that too after making a few compromises.
Zoom magic
When it comes to cameras, there are so many other Android phones you can buy, like from Google, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and OnePlus. Yet, when it comes to smartphone cameras, this is the phone that offers all the big chops you need.
There is a primary camera (200 MP), an ultra-wide (12MP) and a pair of two different telephoto cameras (5x@50MP and 3x@10MP). The main camera is consistent and offers great dynamic range, besides offering quick shooting and autofocus. The ultra-wide is wider than ever before with very little distortion around the edges. The ultra-wide options match the colour tones of the main camera. Once you start using the 5x telephoto, it would be difficult to have a phone without the feature. All the photos between 5x and 10x look sharper than ever before. Utility wise you can’t doubt the camera on this phone.
What we want from Galaxy S25 Ultra
A rural Bengal moment captured using the head-spinning 200MP wide-resolution camera on the S24 Ultra and then we cropped in to get the frame
Samsung can win customers if it comes up with a slightly lighter Galaxy S25 Ultra while keeping titanium as the choice of material. The screen size can remain the same. More choice of colours will offer customers options besides black, grey and silver. We expect the phone to use Qualcomm chips, maybe the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset with tweaks made for Samsung. More RAM will help work with AI-related tasks and we wonder if there will be any 8GB RAM variant. On the camera front, updates to the telephoto sensors may help generate crisper photos, besides more features in the video department.