Samsung Galaxy S24 / S24+ / S24 Ultra

GotNoRice said:
Yeah, I really have not heard a single good reason to have eliminated the SD card. It's pretty obvious based on their pricing that they simply seized upon the opportunity to use storage as another price tier. They can advertise the phone at a lower price, but that model only comes with such a small amount of storage that a large percentage of people will end up paying hundreds more for extra storage. Except that extra storage isn't worth hundreds of dollars. You can buy SD cards with 4 times as much storage for 1/4th the price, but they simply eliminated that option and forced users to pay extra directly to Samsung if they want it. It's a deliberate money grab and nothing else. Any nonsense about maintaining their water-proof rating or not wanting users to have to deal with slow SD cards is pure BS. Phones still have slots for SIM cards, and all phones have at least some internal storage that is used for system functions.

Since phones have become most people's main cameras, it makes sense that people need storage for all of those pictures and videos. It's not rocket science. I usually take 10-15 pictures every time I take a picture and then pick out the best one later. I like to take long videos at max resolution and scale it down later if necessary. I don't want to have to compromise just because of a limitation of the phone.

The one thing that does not bug me as much as I thought it would was the removal of the headphone jack. The USB-C dongles work pretty good. The one I got is pretty small, and even allows pass-through USB-C charging while I listen to my headphones. So essentially 100% equivalent functionality compared to if my phone had a real headphone jack, using nothing but the USB-C port. I was actually impressed.

I also limit my battery to 85% charge unless I'm going on a trip, at which time I'll disable battery protection. It does seem to have helped maintain battery health over time. If my battery actually starts to go bad, and I'm not ready to give up the phone yet, I might try one of those battery-cases. I used one with my old Note 2 and it was pretty nice having 10,000+ mah of battery.
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The most insulting thing about removing the microSD card slot is that Samsung sells UFS cards now, so if they wanted to justify it by saying that eMMC (which is fundamentally what SD cards are) doesn't have the performance of the built-in UFS for things like high-res video or burst photos, then having literal UFS memory cards negates that excuse. Too bad you can't really find anything that USES them, other than maybe a few Samsung laptops and tablets that aren't as likely to need them in the first place when you've got plenty of USB ports to jam Mass Storage devices into.

I'm still upset about the loss of the headphone jack, but I'd be less upset if they added a second USB-C port to make up for it; after all, like you said, the dongles work pretty well. Instead, they take away another feature and give you nothing in return.

I wouldn't mind knowing which USB-C headphone jack dongle you're using that has a passthrough, seeing as my current one doesn't and one of my main gripes is that I can't use wired audio and charge at the same time. In fact, I need a wireless charging phone mount in my car because of this. (Why not Bluetooth? Cassette adapters have finite battery life, and switching to a standard double-DIN head unit in my vehicle is an abnormally expensive pain in the ass due to sourcing the non-nav HVAC control panel.)
 
NamelessPFG said:
I wouldn't mind knowing which USB-C headphone jack dongle you're using that has a passthrough
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Basically identical to this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185346138720 Super basic and cheap. I got it at first as an experiment to see how well it would even work, but it's worked well enough that I kept using it and never looked for anything more.
 
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My S24 Ultra shipped today.

Delivery on Sunday. (y)

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Just got my S24U yesterday, then a Mous Limitless case and glass screen protectors to slap on today. I'm still very much in the first impressions phase, but I may as well list 'em off.
  • This phone is much, MUCH easier to hold without a case due to the thick frame edges and matte-finished rear glass. You actually have some surface area to grip and aren't triggering the edges of the screen by accident, and the back isn't all slippery for once. It almost makes me want to run it caseless, if not for the incidents where my Note 20 Ultra slipped out of my pocket and onto concrete while doing oil changes in the driveway. Not risking that this time.
  • Smart Switch is not exactly the most seamless thing to use, but it helps. The main things that tripped me up were that I wasn't expecting it to also copy the microSD contents to the new phone's main storage (too bad I can't just, you know, move the card itself like the old days!), and that immediately after it says it's "done", it's actually still installing all your apps in the background when it says it's "optimizing", so hold off on the itch to go straight to the Play Store, F-droid, etc. to reinstall all your apps until that's done.
  • Swipe nav gestures are gone? God dammit, I liked using those! It was like not wasting screen space and risking burn-in with nav buttons, while still being more intuitive than that weird gesture pill Google's been trying to push for the past few years. Auto-hiding the nav bar is not the same, as it's still fidgety compared to just going back/to the launcher/calling up the switcher with a single swipe.
  • If using pill gestures, you can theoretically make it fully transparent with a Good Lock extension, but you can't do it straight from the UI - gotta resort to ADB commands again.
  • Speaking of Good Lock, any smartphone reviewer worth their salt would keep that in mind when reviewing any Samsung device. It really does wonders for customization and usability, like moving the clock back to the top-right corner where it used to be, hiding notification icons you know you're always going to have on (NFC, for instance), enabling the aforementioned auto-hide on the nav button bar, bringing back app windows of the sort old-school Note 3/4 users had by default, and now I can apparently add "negates shutter lag by triggering on button press rather than release" to the list.
  • The speakers in this thing get surprisingly loud - uncomfortable at max volume, even. You could almost do without a dedicated Bluetooth or USB speaker if bass response isn't critical.
  • Fingerprint reader's noticeably faster than on the N20U - damn near instant if you're running without a screen protector. Adding some thickness with tempered glass does seem to slow it down a bit.
  • My old Gear S2 that a friend gave me for free refuses to pair because of some crap about not being supported on 2024 models and later. Since I went for the AT&T trade-in deal over the usual Samsung promo that would've bundled a Galaxy Watch6 at substantial discount (but not enough to offset $1,000 off!), I don't have anything to replace it at the moment, and to be brutally honest, this doesn't make me want to go with another smartwatch that might be equally at risk of planned obsolescence. Might just put that money into an old-school auto-winding mechanical timepiece instead, one where I'm not having to worry about charging it every two days.
  • I don't think the MagSafe magnet array in the Limitless case is noticeably interfering with the Wacom EMR digitizer response for the S Pen, which is a good thing. I do like magnetic wireless charging mounts, but the pen functionality is exactly why I've only bought Galaxy Notes/recent S Ultras - there's just no real alternative in the market. At least Samsung makes damn sure that a phone that boasts it doesn't blatantly suck at everything else we want in a smartphone... unless you want the headphone jack back, or the microSD card slot, or the iris scanner in the Note 8/9 as a fingerprint reader alternative.
  • The glass screen protectors I went with were fairly easy to install, but cut exactly to the width of the screen, which means there's some refraction artifacts at the edge of the glass that can be a bit distracting. I'd say there's about half a millimeter on each side that they could've expanded to before the screen's glass surface subtly rolls off (something that owners of older Samsung flagships from roughly the Galaxy S3 to the Note 4 era may be familiar with).
  • Treble Info says that the S24 Ultra STILL doesn't support Seamless Updates with the A/B partitions, never mind that it's shipped with Android 14 and I'd think Google would have outright required that by now like the past several versions were supposed to.
Overall, it's a very nice phone, but those are some surprising software annoyances coming from the Note 8 and Note 20 Ultra where I could very easily use the entire screen length while still having reliable edge swipe navigation, all speculated to be because of that Circle to Search feature they're hyping up. Could've just done a swipe-and-hold for that.
 
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Verizon says they can’t activate the S24 Ultra until the 31st of January. That’s their official launch of the phone. Got my S24 Ultra yesterday.
 
Travolta said:
Verizon says they can’t activate the S24 Ultra until the 31st of January. That’s their official launch of the phone. Got my S24 Ultra yesterday.
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Do you have a working SIM that you could swap into the S24U?
 
Travolta said:
I do not, I was using an eSIM on my S23 Ultra.
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And you can't just set up an eSIM on a pre-release phone like a physical SIM by scanning a QR code or whatever? So much for eSIMs being easier and more convenient like they all said!

I'm on AT&T at the moment (and have had Sprint and T-Mobile in the past, well before the merger), just took the physical SIM outta my N20U (which originally didn't even have the eSIM enabled for the US market until a later update) and plopped it into my S24U, no problem.

Just one more reason why I'm not going to ever give Verizon money, I suppose. They've already had a history of locking down phones even more than their competitors.
 
NamelessPFG said:
And you can't just set up an eSIM on a pre-release phone like a physical SIM by scanning a QR code or whatever? So much for eSIMs being easier and more convenient like they all said!

I'm on AT&T at the moment (and have had Sprint and T-Mobile in the past, well before the merger), just took the physical SIM outta my N20U (which originally didn't even have the eSIM enabled for the US market until a later update) and plopped it into my S24U, no problem.

Just one more reason why I'm not going to ever give Verizon money, I suppose. They've already had a history of locking down phones even more than their competitors.
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Tried setting up my wife’s S24U with the eSIM and it will not activate. We bought the phones direct from Samsung unlocked with the trade in of the S23U’s.
 
I do prefer physical SIMs for maximum flexibility. No need to worry when moving from Samsung to Google to OnePlus to etc. Also was no problem moving to Apple - until the 14 series. It's probably good that I'm not an iOS fan (too locked down; garden walls too high).
 
"This phone has taken all the best from every other high end phone and stuffed them into one place...." Marquee Keith Brownlee video review

Until Samsung has no hole punch or notch on the screen, has both of their stereo speakers facing the front, has given us an SD card slot, and has a head phone jack - as other high end phones have done, reserve making that claim.
 
Supersnake said:
"This phone has taken all the best from every other high end phone and stuffed them into one place...." Marquee Keith Brownlee video review

Until Samsung has no hole punch or notch on the screen, has both of their stereo speakers facing the front, has given us an SD card slot, and has a head phone jack - as other high end phones have done, reserve making that claim.
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The headphone jack isn't coming back. SD card slots probably aren't either. You can always bring a portable USB-C flash drive with you for storing things on, but short of that, you're SOL. There aren't any iterations of a hidden front facing camera that aren't complete crap, so I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make there.
 
Anyone get your S24 delivered today? Mine was supposed to be here, but wasn’t. FedEx sux. They’re always late or losing packages in my area.
 
Shoganai said:
The headphone jack isn't coming back. SD card slots probably aren't either. You can always bring a portable USB-C flash drive with you for storing things on, but short of that, you're SOL. There aren't any iterations of a hidden front facing camera that aren't complete crap, so I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make there.
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The point I was making is I was not criticizing Samsung, nor was I lamenting that the Samsung phone did not include a headphone jack, or a screen free of a cutout, or include front spacing speakers or an SD card slot . 🙂

What I was doing was calling out MKBHD for telling his viewers "This S24 Ultra has taken the best things 👉 from every other ultra high end phone 👈 and stuffed them into one place." When it is clear that Samsung did not.
One example of a high end phone that includes front facing speakers, AND a headphone jack, AND a screen free of a cut out AND a good camera, AND an SD card slot, is the Xperia 1 V.

But he doesn't end there, in his next sentence he tells you. "So anything that you could possibly value, it has pushed to the max."
When you tell people anything that you could possibly value, Samsung has it in the phone and has pushed it to the max, that leaves nothing that any person values up for argument.
 
Supersnake said:
The point I was making is I was not criticizing Samsung, nor was I lamenting that the Samsung phone did not include a headphone jack, or a screen free of a cutout, or include front spacing speakers or an SD card slot . 🙂

What I was doing was calling out MKBHD for telling his viewers "This S24 Ultra has taken the best things 👉 from every other ultra high end phone 👈 and stuffed them into one place." When it is clear that Samsung did not.
One example of a high end phone that includes front facing speakers, AND a headphone jack, AND a screen free of a cut out AND a good camera, AND an SD card slot, is the Xperia 1 V.

But he doesn't end there, in his next sentence he tells you. "So anything that you could possibly value, it has pushed to the max."
When you tell people anything that you could possibly value, Samsung has it in the phone and has pushed it to the max, that leaves nothing that any person values up for argument.
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He normally has a pretty blatant bias toward Samsung phones, but he cranked it up to 11 in this review and it was almost impossible to watch. He glossed over very bad things that other reviewers bashed Samsung pretty hard for. He's not as "neutral" as others try to make him out to be.
 
Still no delivery for my S24 Ultra. If it doesn't show tomorrow, Google told me they'd send another... if I agree to authorize a temporary hold on my credit card for the $1299 + tax until the original one is located. WTF????? Ain't my fault FedEx can't get a delivery done right.
 
Mad Maxx said:
Still no delivery for my S24 Ultra. If it doesn't show tomorrow, Google told me they'd send another... if I agree to authorize a temporary hold on my credit card for the $1299 + tax until the original one is located. WTF????? Ain't my fault FedEx can't get a delivery done right.
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FedEx just blows with tech deliveries, seriously the worst. Do the drivers get checked if they stole the package?

F off with charging another $1300 on the CC even if temporarily, knowing them you'll have to fight to get that taken off. No way. Sorry buddy but that's total bullcrap.
 
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Supersnake said:
The point I was making is I was not criticizing Samsung, nor was I lamenting that the Samsung phone did not include a headphone jack, or a screen free of a cutout, or include front spacing speakers or an SD card slot . 🙂

What I was doing was calling out MKBHD for telling his viewers "This S24 Ultra has taken the best things 👉 from every other ultra high end phone 👈 and stuffed them into one place." When it is clear that Samsung did not.
One example of a high end phone that includes front facing speakers, AND a headphone jack, AND a screen free of a cut out AND a good camera, AND an SD card slot, is the Xperia 1 V.
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Honestly, it sounds like the Xperia 1 V checks all of my boxes except for that Wacom EMR pen, and that's a niche Samsung has all to themselves. It's rather frustrating that nobody wants to compete there, because I can work around most of that other stuff with the USB-C port but can't just retrofit an EMR digitizer layer behind the screen of some other phone, or implement MPP/AES pen support for a comparable alternative.

Does Sony also allow bootloader unlocks on US/NA market phones, preferably without wiping some partition full of DRM keys and turning your camera performance to crap in the process like the older models were known for?

Despite yearning for some competition in my particular niche, I do admit that I don't really regret getting the S24 Ultra, especially when the only previous Note/S Ultra competition was stuff like the LG V60 (whose pen functionality wasn't even all that advertised) and the Surface Duo 2, which was somehow more expensive with worse specs - and both of those are literal years old and probably out of OS updates by this point.
 
Does anyone know how to remove a pinned note from the lock screen? I've been trying for the past 2 days and I can't find anything. It says there should be an X when you click on it to remove it but can't for the life of me get it to show or something. Wondering if they overlooked this lol.
 
Zorachus said:
but year to year upgrades lately are just lighting your ca$h on fire.
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My wife just lit 233 dollars on fire to go from a s23 to s24. Only one thing changed...the screen gets brighter.


NamelessPFG said:
I wouldn't mind knowing which USB-C headphone jack dongle you're using that has a passthrough, seeing as my current one doesn't
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JZS3645?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Works great.
Shoganai said:
He normally has a pretty blatant bias toward Samsung phones, but he cranked it up to 11 in this review and it was almost impossible to watch. He glossed over very bad things that other reviewers bashed Samsung pretty hard for. He's not as "neutral" as others try to make him out to be.
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Almost like he gets paid to advertise. Oh wait. That's exactly what he does.
 
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Mad Maxx said:
Anyone get your S24 delivered today? Mine was supposed to be here, but wasn’t. FedEx sux. They’re always late or losing packages in my area.
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I had mine last Friday. I swapped my Visible+ pSIM in it and have been using it ever since. Almost forgot the actual release date was yesterday.
 
Zorachus said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixe...m_back_to_pixel_8_pro_after_trying_s24_ultra/

Interesting reading the million replies in that post. All over the board, some say stick with the Pixel 8 pro, others say no the S24U is better, others say they're both good, some say no get an iPhone 15 PM. That thread is a good read.
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The best way is to try them for yourself because everyone's needs are different. I've enjoyed most of the phones I've tried out, but I've ultimately settled with the iPhone for its boring, consistent simplicity. I always know what I'm getting it and it always works and I don't have to tinker with anything (although I used to love the tinkering aspect of Android phones).
 
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