The Samsung Galaxy S24+ is a true Ultra alternative for $300 less
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It’s easy to brush off Samsung’s two base Galaxy phones as the same device in different sizes, but that’s less the case than ever this year. While the Galaxy S24 and S24+ both have the same beautiful design, dependable cameras and fast performance, the larger model’s upgraded screen and best-in-class battery life truly make it feel like its own phone — and a legitimate alternative to the pricier Galaxy S24 Ultra.
That said, this year’s Galaxy S24 lineup is otherwise one of the most iterative we’ve seen in a while. And while Galaxy AI — the phones’ true marquee feature this year — has some legitimately fun and handy uses, there are just as many that feel like throwaways.
So, is this an upgrade year for the Samsung faithful? Here’s what I think after spending a week snapping photos, playing games and using a whole lot of AI on the Galaxy S24 and S24+.
Samsung Galaxy S24
The Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24+ are some of the best Android phones yet, with the larger model’s sharper screen and best-in-class battery life making it an especially great value.
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What we liked about it
Same great design
Samsung decided not to mess with a good thing, which is why the Galaxy S24 and S24+ look almost exactly like last year’s models. These continue to be some of the most stylish and nice-feeling smartphones you can buy, with a smooth matte finish that’s mercifully smudge resistant, flat metal edges that offer decent grip and a seamless rear panel that makes the Pixel 8 and its giant camera bar look unsightly by comparison.
The new phones come in a smattering of colors, including the main four — Onyx Black, Marble Gray, Cobalt Violet and Amber Yellow — as well as Jade Green, Sapphire Blue and Sandstone Orange, three hues that are exclusive to Samsung’s website. I dig the subtle shades of my Yellow Galaxy S24 unit (and especially like the Violet model I got to try a few weeks back), though I’d love to see more bold color options in the vein of the Orange one.
Superb battery life — if you go Plus
“How is it still going?” That was my reaction when I saw that the Galaxy S24+ kept on ticking after playing nonstop 4K video on a loop for more than a full day. Samsung’s plus-sized phone is officially the longest-lasting we’ve ever tested, enduring a whopping 26 hours and 24 minutes of video playback on our battery test.
That run time more than doubles those of the Pixel 8 Pro and standard Galaxy S24 (around 11 hours each), beats the similarly resilient OnePlus 12 (25:38) and even edges out what we got from the more expensive Galaxy S24 Ultra (25:27). We’re currently working out some kinks with our battery test on iPhones, but all anecdotal experience points to Samsung’s phone having the edge over Apple here.
The standard Galaxy S24’s 11-hour run time isn’t bad by any means, but you’ll want to keep a charger handy if you plan on being out for more than a workday. Fortunately, both these phones charge back up fast, with the Galaxy S24 promising up to a 50% charge in roughly 30 minutes and the S24+ rated for up to a 65% charge in the same time frame — both numbers that largely line up with my testing.
But the Galaxy S24+ is the new phone to buy if battery life is your main priority, and the fact that it gets you Ultra-level endurance for a non-Ultra price is one of several features that sets the Plus model apart for 2024.
The Plus model truly feels “plus” this year
Aside from its colossal battery life, the Galaxy S24+ has a few key advantages over its smaller sibling that make it feel like more of its own beast than ever. That includes a 6.8-inch quad HD+ display, which puts it nearly on par with the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s screen and is a significant jump in resolution over the full HD+ Galaxy S24.
This is a bigger difference on paper than it is in practice: An 8K nature video on YouTube looked similarly rich and detailed on both phones, as did a 4K image of a cornfield I downloaded to both devices. The high-speed racing action of Asphalt 9 was a similar story, though I noticed just a bit more visual clarity on the larger phone.
However, I also observed something potentially more significant during these tests: The Galaxy S24+ seemed to load the game a smidge faster than the standard S24. That could potentially be attributed to the fact that the S24+ has more RAM — something that helps with multitasking and heavy workloads — than its little sibling at 12GB compared to 8GB. Again, this is a minor advantage, but one that you may benefit from if you’re someone who loads up and jumps between lots of different apps at once.
The Galaxy S24+ also has more overall storage than the S24, starting at 256GB and going up to 512GB, whereas the standard model is limited to 128GB or 256GB. Considering how much space photos, videos and games can take up — not to mention the fact that Galaxy phones long ago ditched the microSD card slot for expandable storage — the extra free space may be worth the investment for you.
Predictably fast performance
There’s not much to report about the Galaxy S24 and S24+ on the performance front; these are two powerful phones that just work the way you want them to. Apps open in an instant, navigating menus feels wonderfully snappy and graphically demanding games run smoothly and without a stutter. If you’re a big multitasker (or just play an excessive amount of Marvel Snap like I do), you won’t have to worry much about taxing this thing.
Our benchmark test results tell the usual story, with the Galaxy S24 topping most competitors save for the class-leading iPhone 15 Pro series. On Geekbench 6 (which gauges overall performance), the Galaxy S24 beat out the Google Pixel 8 by a wide margin while showing an impressive 29% improvement over last year’s phone. Its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chip is custom-tuned for Samsung’s entire S24 lineup, which shows in the slightly higher scores we got compared to the OnePlus 12 and its regular ol’ Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
These numbers aren’t make or break — all these phones are reliably speedy in most real-world use cases — but it’s worth keeping them in mind if you’re a power user concerned with getting the absolute most horsepower out of your handset.
Galaxy AI can be impressive
The Galaxy S24’s big selling point is Galaxy AI, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to help you make fun photo edits, organize your notes and even have entire conversations with someone who speaks a different language. And while not all these tools feel necessary right now (more on that later), there are plenty that I found useful — or at the very least enjoyed playing with.
Some of Galaxy AI’s most impressive features lie in the Gallery app, where you can make all sorts of practical (and hilariously impractical) edits to your shots in a few quick taps. Perhaps most noteworthy is the ability to resize and remove objects, a feature that works almost identically to the Pixel 8’s Magic Editor. Galaxy AI allowed me to remove most of the posters behind me in a selfie for a cleaner shot and allowed me to blow up my dog into a comically large creature that took up an entire couch. There’s also the ability to remove unsightly shadows from your face and reflections from windows, both of which have worked fairly well in our testing.
Most of these edited images had enough oddities and artifacts to make it clear that they were tampered with, but they were fun to make nonetheless — and typically took less than a minute to generate.
One of the most impressive and practical AI features I tried out was Call Assist, which can both translate phone calls to other languages in real time as well as provide a text transcription of everything the person on the other end is saying. Live Translate was especially neat. As soon as I spoke, an automated voice provided a Spanish translation of what I said just seconds later. Likewise, Text Call provided accurate transcriptions of what I was saying on the other end, which could prove useful for, say, when you’re in a meeting and can’t hop on the phone but want to know what the other person is calling about. It reminds me of iOS 17’s Live Voicemail feature, except you don’t have to wait until your phone goes to voicemail to know whether the call is urgent or not.
Samsung’s been quick to improve on its software this year, too. In February, Samsung rolled out an S24 series update that added a Vividness display option, improved camera functionality across night and portrait modes and added additional language options for its AI tools.
Circle to Search is legitimately cool
Galaxy AI may be the marquee feature for this year’s phones, but the Galaxy S24’s most impressive smarts don’t even come from Samsung itself. That honor goes to Google’s Circle to Search, a visual search tool that’s a ton of fun to play with and could prove to be legitimately useful.
Circle to Search is exactly what it sounds like: Simply hold down the home icon and circle anything on your screen with your finger or S Pen and your Galaxy S24 will instantly perform a Google Image Search of said object. This feature worked instantly and near flawlessly in my testing, correctly identifying everything from the Las Vegas Sphere and the Cecil Hotel to my French bulldog and the quesadilla I had for dinner — regardless of whether I was browsing the web, flipping through Instagram or going through my own photo library.
As someone who often sees an Instagram post and says, “I need that shirt,” or stumbles upon footage of a cool arcade and thinks, “I need to go to this place,” I could see myself getting a lot of use out of Circle to Search over time. This feature isn’t exclusive to the Galaxy S24 — you’ll also be able to use it on the Pixel 8 series — but it far outshines any of Samsung’s own Galaxy AI tools, and it’s one of the few perks that have made this iPhone user jealous of team Android.
What we didn’t like about it
The cameras are good, but you can do better
Other than some improved processing chops, the triple-camera setup on the Galaxy S24 and S24+ is unchanged from last year, which is to say that it takes crisp photos with satisfactory color and offers some of the best zoom in the business. But when you stack them up to their increasingly strong competition, Samsung’s cameras start to falter a little bit.
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While I’ve typically found Samsung cameras to skew more saturated compared to the fairly neutral shots I get from an iPhone, I noticed the opposite happen in some cases when pitting the Galaxy S24 against the iPhone 15. The photos I took of a croissant and quesadilla on the Galaxy S24 packed plenty of detail, but the iPhone shots made them look much more vibrant and true to life — and made me a lot hungrier after looking at them. The same proved to be true when shooting my Queens neighborhood from my balcony on an overcast day — everything looked brighter and more colorful on the iPhone, and I could much more easily spot the finer details of nearby buildings.
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The Galaxy S24 and iPhone 15 each had their own strengths in low light. When photographing a rowdy rock show at New York’s Irving Plaza, Samsung’s phone produced images that were brighter overall but also a little blown out. Meanwhile, the iPhone shots were, again, more detailed, with darker but also more lifelike color.
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Outdoor night shots were a much closer race, with the Galaxy S24 more clearly capturing the red signage of the W Union Square building and better illuminating the details on nearby police cars. Similar to what my colleague Henry T. Casey found in his Galaxy S24 Ultra review, the iPhone has a tendency to overcorrect the brightness of a night’s sky, with the iPhone 15’s skyline shots looking too bright to be natural.
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I’ve long considered Samsung to offer the best smartphone camera zoom in the game, and that remains the case with the Galaxy S24 and its 10-megapixel telephoto camera. The iPhone simply can’t get as far in as the Galaxy does, with the latter offering up to 3x optical zoom and up to 30x digital zoom for snapping faraway objects. Samsung’s phone did a very good job getting clear shots of signage that was either hard to see or illegible from my current point of view, whether it was a distant pizza shop on my block or the aforementioned Union Square building. Samsung’s telephoto lens isn’t flawless — my iPhone zoom shots were brighter, and they better illuminated the facade of said building — but the Galaxy S24 got notably closer to the action.
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The Galaxy S24’s 12-megapixel front camera is a perfectly good selfie taker, capturing sharp self-portraits that did an especially good job squeezing in every little detail of my scruffy face and scraggly mustache. When comparing portrait selfies I snapped, Samsung’s phone made me look a little pale, the iPhone 15 skewed warm and the Pixel 8 Pro was somewhere in the middle. I’d be happy posting any of these shots to my Instagram feed, though I found the Galaxy and iPhone photos the most pleasing.
Samsung’s latest phone can capture up to 8K video at 30 frames per second (fps) or 4K video at 60 fps — I mostly stuck to the latter, and enjoyed crisp, smooth clips of cars whizzing down my street and my rowdy French bulldog barking at me for treats. New to the S24 series is Instant Slow-Mo, a feature that lets you slow down any video by simply holding down on your screen. It’s fun to play with and works as advertised, but it’s basically a preview tool; you still have to open the editor and make manual changes if you like what you see. Fortunately, most of my slow-motion videos looked nice and fluid, save for one particular clip of my dog that became a little blurry and disorienting while slowed down.
Some Galaxy AI features aren’t quite there yet
As much as I enjoyed making silly photo edits and translating my voice to other languages in real time, I found the rest of the Galaxy AI suite to be an amusing gimmick at best — and borderline useless at worst.
If you’ve ever worried about coming across the wrong way over text, you may be intrigued by Chat Assist, which can turn any message you’ve typed up into something more “professional,” “polite” or “casual” before you hit send. I was incredibly amused and even impressed at times by this feature — particularly when it was able to translate the Gen Z phrase “this is bussin fr” into a casual “this is really good” or a polite “this is truly delicious.” But I can’t think of a single instance when I would use this in a real-life conversation, especially when the “professional” options are often so robotic that it’s obvious a human didn’t write them.
There’s also Note Assist, which can summarize, translate, spell-check and organize your notes — complete with cute labels and color-coding — in a manner of seconds. While these features worked quickly and reliably, they feel like iterations on what most phones have been able to do for years and not necessarily a major new convenience made possible by AI.
These are very familiar phones
It’s hard to knock Samsung for not fixing what isn’t broken, but from a physical design standpoint, these feel like the most iterative Galaxy phones in quite a while. Folks coming from an S22 or older will likely be pleased to ditch the camera bump on their old phone, while those upgrading from a Galaxy S21 will see a bigger change, thanks to the jump from plastic to aluminum. But if you own a Galaxy S23, there’s not a lot for you here aside from the new AI smarts. which are set to come to the S23 series later this year.
How it compares
Bottom line
This year’s basic Galaxy phones are predictably great, but one stands out as a true winner. With an upgraded screen, superior storage and memory options, and the best battery life we’ve ever gotten out of a phone, the Galaxy S24+ handily earns a spot among the best smartphones — and it’s a better Ultra alternative than ever. That said, the basic Galaxy S24 has the same great performance and design as its bigger sibling and remains a great buy if you want something a little cheaper (or just like smaller phones).
As far as Galaxy AI goes? You don’t need to rush out and upgrade just for these new tricks, and if you are an AI buff, Google’s Pixel 8 series offers many similar features for a lower starting price. But AI tricks like Circle to Search and easy photo editing add some extra value to what are already some of Samsung’s best phones yet. If you’ve been holding on to your current Android phone for a couple of years now and you’re ready for something new, there’s a lot to love here — especially if you go plus.
Note: The prices above reflect the retailers' listed price at the time of publication.
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