Incredibly bright screen, memory to make your phone jealous, zoom and cameras that make it the best camera on Android, all with a beautiful design. The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G is the ultimate fantasy user who wants to do everything with their phone, including emptying their bank account.

WE love

The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G's 6.9-inch AMOLED display makes any phone you place next to it look dull. Image accuracy, brightness and color richness are impressive, thanks to its 496 dpi resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate.

A comparison: this phone has more pixels than the 27-inch Dell screen we're writing about. Its 12 GB RAM exceeds what the average consumer uses on a computer, all powered by a Snapdragon 865 Plus processor, the latest innovation from Qualcomm designed for video games and artificial intelligence.

It's fast, no doubt. We couldn't find any mobile games that weren't smoothly supported. We edited a 1min 20s video by changing its colors, cutting segments and changing the resolution. It took 22 seconds for the Note 20 Ultra 5G to process the video and save the result.

As is the norm with the Note range, the youngest comes with a stylus, the S Pen, which is inserted into the bottom of the phone. It can be used to take notes directly on the off screen or in the Samsung Notes app. The handwritten text can then be transformed into a digital document, and it works quite well, even in French. You can even control the phone remotely, by pressing a small button on the S Pen which then becomes a small remote control. Useful especially when connecting the Note 20 Ultra 5G to a larger screen for a presentation with the DeX function.

On the camera side, we have obviously equipped this device with the ultimate, with three rear lenses: a wide-angle lens up to 108 MP, an optical telephoto lens x5, x50 in hybrid mode of 12 MP and a very 12 MP wide-angle. We pitted it against two other stars, the Huawei P40 and the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

See for yourself. However, the photos have been considerably compressed for La Presse+, which makes the differences less obvious.

The Note 20 Ultra 5G against the P40 and the iPhone 11 Pro Max

The quality of contrast management, the richness of the colors and the precision of the details are remarkable. Tight victory for the Note 20 Ultra 5G, in our opinion. Only criticism, the use of digital processing sometimes seems too obvious and can give artificial colors. Some will prefer the fidelity of the photos produced by the iPhone, others the warmer colors of the P40.

As for the hardware, the battery is 4500 mAh, more than enough for a day. It accepts fast charging at 25 W, magnetic charging and can charge any phone you stick to its back. Unlocking the phone is done either with the fingerprint reader hidden under the bottom of the screen, or by facial recognition. Both work flawlessly. It is compatible with 5G, now offered by several providers in major Canadian cities.

We love less

The combination of three lenses, sensors and flash forms a large bump on the back of the phone, making it ugly and unstable when laid flat on a table.

Samsung wants to encourage its users to use its own voice assistant, Bixby. While it performs basic functions like weather forecasts and alarms well, it falls far, far short of Google Assistant's capabilities for more complex matters. Find the distance between Montreal and Quebec or the name of the singer of Half Moon Run, find an Italian restaurant? "I didn't understand your request," the pretty French voice of France from Bixby keeps repeating to us. Needless to say that to the same questions, Siri and especially Google had all the answers.

Finally, and this is its main flaw that makes it miss the perfect score, it's a very expensive phone: $1819.99 contract-free.

One buys ?

One hesitates, in the current economic context, to recommend such an expensive phone, especially since more affordable high-performance models have landed on the shelves in recent months. One thing is certain, the user who wants the best and who is ready to pay accordingly is satisfied with the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G.

Sheet: Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G

Manufacturer: Samsung

Price: $1819.99 (Mystic Bronze and Mystic Black)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5