Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: release date, price, specs, cameras, and more

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is the latest and greatest flagship phone from one of the biggest players in the smartphone world. And it’s one heck of a phone. 

In our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review, Senior US Phones Editor Philip Berne concluded: “The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra embraces what it means to be Ultra, a phone that transcends the smartphone category. It offers more than any other phone, and somehow manages to improve upon last year’s Ultra in every way.” 

There’s a lot to break down there, but this Galaxy Ultra is due a high spot on our best phones list, likely filling in the spot held by the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. 

While Samsung has gone for iteration over a significant refresh, there’s more to this flagship phone than meets the eye, with changes that go beyond a specs boost and materials tweaks. Artificial intelligence is the big headline-grabber for the Galaxy S24 Ultra, as well as the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus. But on the S24 Ultra, it plays the biggest role, directly tapping into S Pen functionality. 

So with that in mind, read on for everything you need to know about the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and how it may just be one of the best Android phones of the year so far. 

For our first impressions of the other Galaxy phones, do check out our hands-on Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus review and hands-on Samsung Galaxy S24 review.

Cut to the chase

• What is it? Samsung’s latest high-end flagship phone
• When is it available? Pre-orders start from January 17, it goes on sale January 31 
• How much does it cost? It starts at $1,299 / £1,249 / AU$2,199

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: release date and price

• Starts at $1,299 / £1,249 / AU$2,199
• Available for pre-order from January 17, on sale from January 31

Announced at the first Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event of 2024, the Galaxy S24 Ultra was revealed on January 17, with pre-orders for the flagship phone going live on the same day. It’ll go on sale January 31. 

As Samsung’s top S-series phone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra doesn’t come cheap. In the US it starts at $1,299 for the base model – we’ve yet to get full pricing at the time of writing. Over in the UK, the phone starts at £1,249 for the entry-level 256GB model. That price jumps to £1,349 for the 512GB option, and then tops out at a hefty £1,549 for a 1TB version. In Australia, the Galaxy S24 Ultra starts at AU$2,199 for the 256GB model, AU$2,399 for 512Gb of storage and a hefty AU$2,799 for a 1TB model. 

While the US entry-level price has gone up over the Galaxy S23 Ultra, there’s now 12GB of RAM by default rather than 8GB. In the UK, pricing is the same at the entry-level and some £50 cheaper for the 256GB and 1TB options. 

But is the Galaxy S24 Ultra a good value? Well, the iPhone 15 Pro Max starts at $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$2,199 for its base 256GB model. Yet moving up the storage tiers, the largest iPhone is more expensive than the equivalent S24 Ultra – in the UK at least – with prices coming in at $1,599 / £1,599 / AU$2,899 for Apple’s phone. 

On the whole, the Galaxy S24 Ultra seems competitively priced for a serious flagship phone. It’s undercut by the Google Pixel 8 Pro, however, which has a 256GB model that comes in at $1,179 / £1,179 / AU$1,999, meaning the S24 Ultra’s (arguably) nearest Android rival might be the phone for people whose purse strings are ruled by their head, not their heart. 

If you’re interested, you can see our best Galaxy S24 deals page for a roundup of the initial preorder promotions.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: specs

With the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chip tuned for the Galaxy phones, 12GB of RAM as standard, and a trio of storage options, the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s specs make for impresive reading. 

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Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: design and display

• A new titanium chassis 
•  Flat edges on the display 
• Up to 2,600 nits of brightness 
• Gorilla Glass Armor offers 56% better durability

You may need to peer rather hard at the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to spot any initial design changes over the Galaxy S23 Ultra. The dimensions are nearly identical, albeit the S24 Ultra is about a millimeter shorter and wider, but also 0.3mm thinner. It’s lighter too, at 232 grams rather than 234g. 

In the hand, as you can read in our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra hands-on review, a titanium frame helps the phone feel lighter than its size would suggest. That’s not to say 2g is a huge difference, but it’s likely compromising for the use of a larger 50MP telephoto camera that’s taken the place of a 10MP telephoto lens – more on that later. 

Speaking of being in the hand, one notable difference is the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s display is now flat rather than curved, which Samsung says will give people more usable screen space when poking and doodling on it with the integrated S Pen. Thankfully, trim bezels mean the lack of curves on the screen’s sides keeps the display large but not unwieldy – this is still a phone that requires two hands a lot of the time to avoid dramatic finger stretching. 

On the subject of the display, it’s a 6.8-inch AMOLED 2X panel with a QHD+ resolution and a 1Hz to 120Hz dynamic refresh rate; this will scale up to a high refresh rate when apps and games require it and dial right down when the phone is mostly displaying static content to save on battery life. There’s also a 12% faster touch response rate.

All this reads like the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s spec sheet, but the S24 Ultra has two display upgrades. The first is it can now high 2,600 nits of peak brightness, which beats that of the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro but can’t quite match the 2,800 nits of the OnePlus Open.

The second upgrade is the Galaxy S24 Ultra comes with Corning’s new Gorilla Glass Armor, which offers 56% better durability than its predecessor. In short, the display looks set to impress us once again, while also weathering harder knocks than before.

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Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: cameras

• 200MP main, 12MP ultra-wide, and 50MP 5x and 10MP 3x telephoto rear cameras
• ProVisual AI Engine for better low-light photos and video
• AI-based editing and photo manipulation 

Samsung has stuck with the camera layout of four rear sensors and a front-facing camera embedded into the top section of the display. Specs-wise the selfie snapper comes in a 12MP, the main camera has a 200MP sensor, the ultra-wide clocks in at 12MP, and the 3x telephoto camera sticks with a 10MP sensor; these are all the same specs as the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s camera suite. 

The major exception is the Galaxy S24 Ultra has dropped its predecessor’s 10MP 10x optical zoom telephoto camera for a 50MP sensor with a 5x optical zoom lens. What’s a downgrade in optical range sees a jump in detail, and those extra pixels mean the Galaxy S24 Ultra can use a combination of cropping and processing to punch into 10x, seemingly without an obvious loss in image quality. 

As such, Samsung is touting this camera system as providing a Quad Optical Zoom setup in that it can cover 2x, 3x, 5x, and 10x zooms. While only the 3x and 5x offer true optical zooming, the use of the new ProVisual AI Engine means the Galaxy S24 Ultra can use smart processing to deliver sharp shots across this zoom range. 

The upgrade to a 50MP sensor also means 1.6x larger pixels and 2x wider optical image stabilization, which promises to deliver clear zoomed-in shots and video in low-light situations, say a music gig. 

But the star of the camera systems is set to be the integrated AI tools. Using smart algorithms, there are now edit suggestions served up, such as removing reflections or remastering the whole image. 

However, the most powerful tool might just be the Generative Edit. Not unlike Google’s Magic Editor found on the Pixel 8 phones, this option uses AI to generate all manner of edits, from filling in the gaps left when straightening up an image to letting people effectively recompose a photo by highlighting and moving subjects around.

For people concerned that this’ll open up a whole new arena for photo fakery, Samsung will embed AI watermarks into the metadata of images so AI-enhanced or edited images can be sniffed out. For people who messed up a photo but don’t have the chance to snap a better version, such AI smarts could save things like hastily shot holiday photos.

AI also plays a role when it comes to video, with it being able to generate frames to make a slow-motion video from a normal video in an instant.

Not quite AI, the Galaxy S24 Ultra and its siblings now use an algorithm to ensure HDR photos are used in third-party apps like Instagram. This means users will be able to get the dynamic range and punch of HDR photos even when snapping shots directly in apps like Instagram.

In short, while the hardware changes are minimal, the Galaxy S24 Ultra has a lot more going on in its software that could make it one of the best camera phones and a solid upgrade over its predecessor.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: performance and features

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for all Galaxy S24 Ultra models regardless of region
• 12GB RAM (LPDDR5X) on all models
• All storage now UFS 4.0
• Improved ray tracing for gaming
• Powerful AI features that tap into the S Pen

Regardless of the region, you get a Galaxy S24 Ultra in, it’ll come with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset that’s been tuned for the phone. In short, this means a solid upgrade over the older generations, but also new features. 

The Kryo CPU comes with one prime core capable of hitting 3.3GHz, five performance cores that max out at 3.2GHz, and two efficiency cores that ramp up to 2.3GHz; compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the prime core is a tad slower in terms of clock speed, but the Gen 3 has one extra performance core and hits a faster clock speed on these, while it drops one efficiency core but can ramp up to 2.3GHz. In short, expect a processor that’s overall faster and likely more efficient than before. 

However, you’re probably not likely to notice a big difference in performance in everyday use. But the Adreno GPU on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 means the Galaxy S24 Ultra can now deliver 40% improved hardware-accelerated ray tracing in compatible games, thanks to support for the Unreal Engine 5 Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections system. The Galaxy S23 Ultra had support for ray tracing at a hardware level, but with the Unreal Engine 5 tech, the Galaxy S24 Ultra promises more impressive graphics. And thanks to a larger vapor chamber cooling system, it should be able to maintain smooth gaming for longer. 

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s AI Engine also gets a boost thanks to its Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) offering 98% faster performance over the Gen 2 chip. So not only does this mean the aforementioned AI features are rather responsive, but it also powers the new Circle to Search tool. 

Created in partnership with Google, pressing and holding on the home button activates a view where the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s S Pen can be used to circle an image on the screen, after which the AI tech will then look up the information the person was looking for: say, identify a building in a landscape photo. 

Then there’s live translation on calls, where not only is a transcription provided of the translated language, but an AI voice can also interpret what someone is saying in another language and say it to the user in their native tongue or language of choice, with the same being provided to the caller on the other side in their language. At launch, 13 languages will be supported with more to come.

Building on this, audio transcriptions via the voice recorder app can use AI to give a summary of what was said. Those recordings can sent to the Samsung Notes app, where Note Assist will also provide a bigger overview and auto-organize notes into more digestible information.

There are more AI smarts on offer too, with the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s AI able to detect the tone of messages and offer suggested changes to the text if they want to rework their messages into a more formal or casual tone. This could be great for people who never know how to thread the line between sounding casual or professional.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: battery life and charging

• 5,000mAh battery w/ 45W wired fast charging
• No upgrade on 15W wireless charging

With a 5,000mAh battery and boosted chip that can offer more power but is more efficient, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is likely to have a similar battery life to that of the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which gave around eight hours of screen-on time in our testing. 

At the time of writing, Samsung has yet to detail the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s battery life. Ideally, we’d have liked to have seen a bigger battery, but that could have compromised the phone’s dimensions and weight. 

Charging is the same as that on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, with 45W wired charging and 15W wireless charging supported. An upgrade here would have been appreciated, but in general, the Galaxy S23 Ultra charged at a reasonable pace so it’s not a big deal. 

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: outlook

What may seem like a small upgrade on paper could end up being a lot more significant in real-world use, with the potential for the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s AI features to bring smart and generative tools to the fore for consumers. Google may have been first with its generative AI Magic Editor and other smart features, but Samsung seems to be putting them front and center in the whole Galaxy S24 experience. 

With the AI tools on offer and the precision of the S Pen, the Galaxy S24 Ultra could make AI use very practical and part of everyday phone life. Of course, we’d need to test these features properly in a full review to see if they can deliver what they promise, or if they end up serving a mess of poorly curated information and sloppy recomposed photos. 

Beyond the AI potential, the scope for delivering console-quality smartphone gaming, an even more versatile camera system, and a refined design that could make for a phone that doesn’t feel its size, is all very promising. And while we’ll reserve judgment for now, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is shaping up to be one of the best phones of 2024.