A compact flagship that packs everything with Exynos chipset!!
The Galaxy S24 series has had a great start this year as it spruced up the market with a huge set of AI features which come in handy in daily activities. Like every year, we get three different versions of the iconic S-series. This year it follows the same nomenclature where we have the most compact Galaxy S24 followed by a slightly larger Galaxy S24+ and the largest of all being the Galaxy S24 Ultra (Review).
The Galaxy S24 Ultra is a power-packed flagship with a huge set of specifications and offers the best in class features in the market now. The Galaxy S24 and the S24+ are the more affordable versions thus getting most of the features from the Galaxy S24 Ultra but with few differences. The Galaxy S23 (Review) was a great smartphone with all the best specifications being one of the best compact flagships out there.
The Galaxy S24 brings in a few upgrades over its predecessor but still, the changes are not so big. So would you consider the Galaxy S24 over the Galaxy S23 or if you are someone who has an older Samsung smartphone and wants to upgrade to the Galaxy S24? Should you consider the Galaxy S24 Ultra over the Galaxy S24? Can the Galaxy S24 make a statement for itself just like the Galaxy S23?
Let's find out in the full review.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Design:
The Galaxy S24 sports a similar design as that of its predecessor i.e. Galaxy S23. The back of the Galaxy S24 looks plain and there is no dedicated camera module to house the triple cameras along with an LED flashlight but compared to the Galaxy S23, the LED flashlight has been moved slightly lower. All three cameras are covered by metal rings that look premium.
Since the back is flat, the smartphone does not wobble when kept on a flat surface. The back has a smooth matte finish that looks premium and does not catch fingerprints. The smartphone is also more rounded around the edges compared to its predecessor making it easy to hold in hands. Just like all Galaxy S series, this one also gets an IP68 rating which makes it dust and water-resistant.
The Galaxy S24 weighs around 168 grams which is almost similar to that of its predecessor i.e. Galaxy S23 and also thinner at 7.6mm. Around the sides, there is an aluminium Armor frame which is now flatter instead of rounded and looks premium. The side frame houses the power button along with the volume buttons on the right side with the left side being completely clean.
At the bottom, there is a USB Type-C port, a loudspeaker grille that doubles as a speaker grille, a primary microphone, and a dual SIM card slot that accepts two SIM cards. There is neither a 3.5mm headphone jack nor a microSD card for storage expansion. On the top, there are two outlets for the secondary noise-cancelling microphone.
The display of the Galaxy S24 is slightly larger at 6.2 inches compared to the 6.1-inch display of the Galaxy S23 and also around the sides, the bezels are slightly thinner also. The punch-hole is present at the top in the centre which houses the selfie camera. The Galaxy S24 is available in different colours - Amber Yellow, Cobalt Violet, Onyx Black, and Marble White.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Display:
The Galaxy S24 houses a 6.2-inch Full HD+ (1080x2340 pixels) 2X Dynamic AMOLED display with a screen-to-body ratio of 19.5:9. Since it is an AMOLED panel from Samsung, the colour reproduction is really good and viewing angles are the best in class. Like its predecessor, the display of the Galaxy S24 is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2.
This is slightly disappointing as its elder sibling i.e. Galaxy S24 Ultra comes with a Gorilla Glass Armor which is more scratch-resistant and durable. The display has a 120Hz refresh rate but now it is an LTPO panel where the refresh rate scales between as low as 1Hz and 120Hz. In settings, there is the Motion Smoothness option which consists of two settings - Adaptive and Standard.
Setting the display to Adaptive mode, most of the applications do refresh at 120Hz especially when it comes to playing games or scrolling webpages. When it comes to other activities like watching content on the smartphone, the display refreshes at 60Hz or 70Hz, while viewing an image in the gallery, the display switches to 24Hz and can even go as low as 1Hz.
If you switch to the Standard mode, the display maintains 60Hz throughout the interface but does refresh at 24Hz, 30Hz, or 60Hz depending on the content in the display. However, setting the display to Standard mode provides great battery life. Along with the 120Hz refresh rate, there is 240Hz touch sampling for faster touch responses.
In terms of brightness, the Galaxy S24 can reach a peak brightness of 2600nits which is around 850nits more than the peak brightness of its predecessor i.e. Galaxy S23 which is really good and these were observed while watching the content in HDR. With the Auto Brightness mode turned on, the display was measuring a brightness of around 1400-1500nits which is good.
Under sunlight, we could get around 1800nits of brightness and the display had good visibility. In the display settings, there are two different colour modes to choose from - Natural and Vivid. Setting the display to Natural provides more realistic colours with slightly off-white tones. It covers the sRGB colour space whereas the Vivid mode provides punchier colours that cover the DCI-P3 colour gamut.
The Vivid option also lets you choose the colour temperature to a warmer or cooler tone through the colour temperature slider. When it comes to content consumption, there is no support for Dolby Vision which is slightly disappointing considering it is a flagship. However, you do get support for HDR10+, so you can stream HDR content on YouTube as well as on OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, etc.
Just like its elder sibling i.e. the Galaxy S24 Ultra, this display also gets an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner that works very well and is accurate also. Overall, you get a good display for media consumption.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Performance:
When it comes to performance, Samsung has made a few changes this year with the Galaxy S24 and the 24+. After a two-year gap, Samsung has brought the Exynos chipset back to its flagship S series where both the Galaxy S24 and S24+ are powered by this year's latest and powerful Exynos 2400 chipset whereas the Galaxy S24 Ultra is still powered by this year's flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset.
So talking about the Exynos chipset is Samsung's own chipset that is based on a 4nm process and has a 10-core architecture where it has: 1x3.2 GHz Cortex-X4 cores with 2x2.9 GHz Cortex-A720 cores and another set of 3x2.6 GHz Cortex-A720 cores with 4x1.95 GHz Cortex-A520 cores. This chipset is combined with a Xclipse 940 GPU which is based on the AMD's RDNA3 architecture.
Like earlier, Samsung has provided the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for both the Galaxy S24 and S24+ for the people residing in either the US, Canada, or China whereas the rest of the countries get the Exynos chipset. Talking about the history of some of Exynos chipsets, there were signs of overheating and battery drain considerably but this time it seems Samsung has addressed this issue on the Galaxy S24.
In terms of daily activities, this chipset can handle all the tasks easily without breaking a sweat. When it comes to gaming, all heavy games like BGMI, Genshin Impact, etc. ran smoothly but in Genshin Impact at the highest graphics settings, we could notice few frame drops and similarly with BGMI when the graphics were set to Ultra and frame rates to Extreme.
However, the BGMI gameplay was smoother after setting the graphics to Smooth and frame rates to 90fps. There were minor stutters noticed but it was negligible still the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset on the Galaxy S24 Ultra provides slightly better gameplay. After playing for 3-4 hours, the back of the smartphone felt warmer which came as a slight concern considering the history of Exynos chipsets.
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S24 with a vapour cooling chamber that dissipates heat faster in the long run. The benchmark scores came out really good and were almost equivalent to the scores of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset or sometimes higher than that. In the CPU throttling test, the smartphone could achieve a sustained performance of around 70-75 per cent which was good.
However, there was thermal throttling present on a slightly higher side which came as a disappointment as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on the Galaxy S24 Ultra had no thermal throttling issues. In terms of network connectivity, you get support for good carrier aggregation and all bands of 5G are supported. The Galaxy S24 is available in two different variants - 256/512GB UFS 4.0 storage with 8GB LPDDR5 RAM.
It is good to see that Samsung is now shipping with the base 256GB storage which most smartphone manufacturers should follow.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Software:
The Galaxy S24 runs on the latest OneUI 6.1.1 based on Android 14 out of the box. Just like the Galaxy S24 Ultra, here also you get the AI features on the smartphone. The look and feel of the OneUI 6.1 are slightly newer as now there are newer-looking quick toggles, the AOD shows the lock screen wallpaper with widgets, etc but the main talking point here is the AI features.
Almost all the AI features include Circle To Search, Writing Assistant, Photomoji, Live Translate, Generative Edit in Gallery, Genrative Wallpapers, Instant Slow-Mo, etc. However, the only thing missing is the presence of the S-Pen that the Galaxy S24 Ultra has. Circle To Search lets you select anything in the content on the display by scribbling, tapping or circling an object anywhere in the interface.
It works in almost all applications thus combining both image and text search results and providing the information. Whenever you are writing something. the Writing Assistant lets you correct the grammars and spellings in the text and suggest formal and informal ways of writing. It also enables you to translate the text and this is available in multiple different languages.
Suppose there is an object present in an image, Photomoji helps create an emoji of that object by detecting through AI and it can be used anywhere. There is Live Translate which transcribes the language that the other person is speaking to the desired language that another person wants to understand with subtitles and it is read louder also. Similarly, it works in a vice-versa way.
The AI features are well integrated with some Samsung-specific applications like Samsung Browser and the Voice Recorder. In Samsung Browser, the AI lets you translate the content in different languages for better understanding and even the voice that is being recorded in the Voice Recorder gets transcribed with proper subtitles for clear understanding.
Then there is the Generative Edit which works well in the Gallery application where it does object detection with the help of AI thus letting you select an object and do multiple activities like titling, scaling, or removing it from the background. This smart feature also lets the missing pixels get covered whenever there is a loss in detail after an edit to make sure it looks real thus removing shadows and reflections.
All images do get a watermark after getting edited using the Generative Edit feature. Then there is the Generative Wallpapers which lets you customize a wallpaper by selecting the contents, colour, image, and different moods provided by Samsung. Instant Slow-Mo is a great feature which lets you increase the frame rate of a video by simply tapping the video and lets you see the normal video as a slow-motion one.
This works mostly for videos shot at 720p resolution or more and can be saved inside the Gallery application. Other Samsung features like Samsung DeX are present which allows wireless connectivity between your personal PC/laptop to a Samsung smartphone, Modes and Routines are present where you get different profiles to choose and accordingly, the wallpaper is changed.
There is the Knox Security, Secure Folder, Privacy Dashboard, etc. But still, there are some bloatware present which can be uninstalled easily. In terms of software updates, just like the Galaxy S24 Ultra, the Galaxy S24 and S24+ will also receive another seven years of software updates which is a good improvement over last year's Galaxy S23 series software update cycle.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Cameras:
The Galaxy S24 sports a similar camera setup as that of its predecessor i.e. Galaxy S23 which means you get a 50MP f/1.8 Samsung ISOCELL GN3 sensor for the primary camera with support for OIS, a 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera, a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with support for 3x optical zoom and has OIS. There is a 12MP f/2.2 camera on the front for selfies.
The images from the main camera come out with sharper details and have good dynamic range. The colours look punchier without any kind of oversharpening in the background. The noise is on the lesser side which is great. However, there is more contrast in images compared to the ones shot on the Galaxy S23. By default, all images are shot using the 12MP mode and there is also the dedicated 50MP mode.
The images from the 50MP mode come out with sharper details and the dynamic range is wide enough. However, there is a lot of oversharpening present and noise is slightly higher but you would not notice any difference when compared to the dedicated 12MP images. At night, the images from the primary camera have sharper details and have wider dynamic range.
The details in shadows look good and the exposure is well handled even in the darkest scenarios. There is no sign of underexposure as such which is really good. Like the Galaxy S23, the Auto Night Mode gets triggered automatically and the results are very good. The noise is very low in the background. The contrast is again on the higher side, and you also get punchier colours.
With the Auto Night Mode turned off, the results look good with sharper details and wider dynamic range. The colours look punchier and have good contrast but there is slightly more noise compared to the ones shot using the Auto Night Mode. At times, the highlights look slightly blown out but there is not much of a difference. The only improvement over the Galaxy S23 night images is that the noise is on the lower side.
The 12MP ultrawide camera takes images with sharper details and comes out with a wider dynamic range. There is almost no distortion around the edges and noise is also not present. The colours look saturated and the white balance is handled very well. At night, the auto Night Mode gets triggered for the ultrawide camera automatically resulting in sharper details and a wider dynamic range.
The exposure is well handled and highlights in shadows do not look blown out. Even the noise is almost not present even when the auto Night Mode is turned off. There is the auto white balance which works very well. The colours in the background look saturated without any oversharpening and definitely, the low-light performance of the ultrawide camera of Galaxy S24 is a huge improvement to that of the Galaxy S23.
Now coming to the third camera i.e. telephoto camera, the performance remains almost unchanged compared to the Galaxy S23 which means you get sharper details with a wider dynamic range. The white balance is handled very well and the contrast looks good. The colours look punchier in the background and noise is almost not present in the background due to the presence of OIS which works well.
At 5x zoom levels, the image results look good with sharper details and have decent dynamic range but beyond that, you may notice softer details and a large amount of noise. Even the primary camera is capable of 2x digital zoom which provides sharper details and good dynamic range with less noise in the background. However, there is slightly more noise but still the results look good.
The colours look saturated in the images taken from the telephoto camera without any kind of oversharpening. At night, the telephoto camera does a very good job in terms of details that look sharper and have a wider dynamic range. But the white balance is not well tuned and exposure takes a hit at times. With the auto Night Mode turned on, the results look decent.
However, the colours do look saturated without any oversharpening. The noise is present on the higher side which will not be noticed until and unless you look at the image minutely but the telephoto camera does need quite some improvement when it comes to low-light scenarios. Without the Night Mode, things remain similar but you get slightly better exposure in the images.
The Galaxy S23 did slightly better in terms of low-light scenarios from its telephoto camera compared to the Galaxy S24. In terms of portraits, both the main as well as the telephoto cameras are capable of taking portraits. The primary camera can take portraits only at 1x and 2x which results in sharper details with good dynamic range and almost less noise in the background.
The edge detection is perfect and background blur is implemented well. Similar goes for the portraits taken from the telephoto camera which works at a 3x zoom level and provides slightly better dynamic range and also a better level of background blur compared to that of the primary camera. The portraits from both cameras have almost no noise in the background and do have good contrast.
In terms of selfies, the 12MP front camera does a great job in terms of details and has a wider dynamic range. The skin tones look natural without any kind of oversharpening. The noise is very low in the background and the white balance is handled very well. Similar goes for the selfie portraits that have good edge detection and provide a good level of background blur.
When it comes to videos, all four cameras can record 4K videos at 60fps and the primary camera can record 8K videos at 30fps. The videos from the primary camera at 8K resolution come out with sharper details and have a great dynamic range with some amount of noise in the background. Switching to 4K videos at 60fps, the videos have an excellent level of detail and colours look punchier in the background.
The noise is almost not present. The videos from both the ultrawide and the telephoto cameras come out with sharper details and have excellent dynamic range but the noise is slightly higher in the videos from the ultrawide camera compared to the telephoto camera but it is negligible. The colours look punchier and so is the contrast in the videos from both the cameras.
The front camera can record some videos which have good details and dynamic range which could have been wider. The skin tones look natural and the noise is very low in the background due to the presence of EIS. The white balance is handled very well in the background. Another big advantage is that while recording any video, you can easily switch between different cameras and there is also no drop in resolution.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Battery Life:
The Galaxy S24 houses a slightly larger 4000mAh battery which is just 100mAh more in capacity compared to the Galaxy S23. The Galaxy S23 was a great smartphone in terms of battery life, and so is the Galaxy S24. With the presence of the Exynos 2400 chipset and slightly larger battery, battery life does show a slight improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset on the Galaxy S23.
With normal usage that includes scrolling through webpages, playing games casually for 1-2 hours, streaming social media, etc. the smartphone easily lasted for two days with some battery left. With heavy usage that includes playing games like BGMI for longer hours, running benchmarks, rendering videos, etc. the smartphone lasted for one single day with some battery left.
The standard screen-on time comes around 6-7 hours with heavy usage and with normal usage, the screen-on time comes around 5-5.5 hours, both of which are very good and are a slight improvement over the Galaxy S23. However, there is one area where things have things still remain the same i.e. charging. The Galaxy S24 supports only 25W fast charging and Samsung does not supply a charger inside the box.
Both the Galaxy S24+ and the Galaxy S24 Ultra have support for higher 45W fast charging which could have been a letdown for the Galaxy S24. Using a third-party 25W charger or even Samsung's own 25W fast charger will take the smartphone from 0 to 100 per cent in around 1 hour 35 minutes which is very slow and time-consuming which is a slight disappointment considering this is a flagship.
There is support for 15W wireless charging which is good but still, it is way behind the competitors like the OnePlus 12 which offers faster 50W wireless charging and is priced similarly to that of the Galaxy S24. The Galaxy S24 does get support for 4.5W reverse wireless charging where you can simply keep another Samsung device that supports wireless charging on the back of the Galaxy S24.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Audio Quality:
The Galaxy S24 sports a dual stereo speaker that provides solid sound output which is loud and clear. The bass level was very good and the sound came equally good from the bottom speaker as well as the speaker grille on the top. There is support for Dolby Atmos which provides enhanced sound output while watching movies, playing games, and listening to music.
Verdict:
Overall, the Galaxy S24 is a well-put-together smartphone which feels like a proper flagship in a compact form factor. It brings a solid build and design, an excellent 120Hz AMOLED display along with stereo speakers for multimedia consumption, a powerful chipset for daily performance, a great set of cameras, solid battery life with faster charging, and the software experience is just amazing with the presence of AI and the longevity of updates.
There are some areas where things could have been better. When it comes to charging speeds, things have not changed as there is still the 25W fast charging support instead of the 45W fast charging like the Galaxy S24 and the S24 Ultra, the telephoto camera low-light photography needs some improvement, and most important of all is that there is thermal throttling present which needs to be controlled.
This time Samsung has bundled the smartphone with an Exynos chipset that does heat up quite a bit after longer hours of gaming or while taking videos. However, other than these issues, the Galaxy S24 still feels like a proper compact flagship and compared to its predecessor it does get a slightly brighter display, a better chipset, slightly better battery life, and a plethora of AI features which will also soon trickle down to the Galaxy S23.
The Galaxy S24 is a good upgrade over its processor i.e. Galaxy S23 if you consider the slightly better performance, higher display brightness, and battery life or else the Galaxy S23 is still a great option to consider as the prices have been reduced thus making a valuable option to consider in the market. But if you are someone who is using an older Samsung smartphone, then upgrading to the Galaxy S24 is a smarter move.
Well if you compare the Galaxy S24 with the Galaxy S24 Ultra, the performance is equally good, you get a similar premium software experience with the presence of AI features and even in other areas also it comes closer to the Galaxy S24 Ultra thus delivering the same premium experience in a compact form factor except that the latter has more things to offer but is priced higher compared to the Galaxy S24.
The Galaxy S24 is a perfect compact flagship that strikes all the boxes for Samsung and is worth buying in the era of compact flagships out there in the market.
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