I've spent some hands-on time with the Samsung Galaxy S24, and it's already made quite a case for itself as one of the best phones you can buy, thanks to its many Galaxy AI-powered tools for productivity, photography and entertainment, and a very long update schedule ahead of it.
Granted, the hardware's not changed that much from the year before. But with a larger display and bigger battery than the Galaxy S23 series, and a better chip and more storage in most cases, the value of upgrading is not entirely concentrated in the software.
You can expect a full review of the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus with in-depth comparisons and testing in the near future. But here are our first impressions of the S24 and S24 Plus after some hands-on time. If you're interested in the top model, you can read our standalone Galaxy S24 Ultra hands-on review.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Specs
Samsung Galaxy S24: Price and release date
Samsung starts selling the Galaxy S24 as pre-orders from today (January 17), and as a regular retail release from January 31. It'll cost you $799/£799 for the basic S24, or $999/£999 for the Plus. This is the same price as you'd have paid for the Galaxy S23 or Galaxy S23 Plus last year, so we're grateful there's not been a price hike this year.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Design and display
The look of the Galaxy S24 isn't too far off that of the S23. The screen and back panel are both flat and are joined by metal side rails, but the phone has adopted a unibody-like design that blends all the separate panels together brilliantly. The Galaxy S23 already felt like a refined and well-built device but the S24 takes it that little bit further.
It's a pity that the frame's made of aluminum again, rather than the titanium offered on the Ultra. Similarly, the new Gorilla Armor Glass material used to protect the Ultra’s display is not found on the base or Plus. Although you still get the previous-gen Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which is rather tough already. Both phone benefit from their IP68 rating, ensuring they’ll survive water splashes in the shower — or worse — being completely submerged under water.
Looking at the screen itself, the base model Galaxy S24 gets a larger 6.2-inch OLED display with slimmer bezels, compared to the Galaxy S23, while the Galaxy S24 Plus has gone from 6.6 inches to 6.7 inches.
The phones feel no larger than before but offer more display space, a rather excellent combination that ever so increases their screen to body ratios. And the screens' brightness, which Samsung rates for up to 2,600 nits, was plenty high enough to be visible under the harsh lighting of Samsung's demo zone.
Both models also get an upgrade to a full 1 - 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, which was an Ultra model exclusive. The S24 Plus also gets a QHD+ display, allowing it to offer more detail on its larger panel.
Last thing to mention is the color selection. There’s four choices by default for both the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus, with Cobalt Violet being my personal favorite for its rich purple tone. The other bold color choice for the range is Amber Yellow, which is oddly pale under bright light but otherwise an appealingly cheerful hue. Onyx Black and Marble Gray are very smart-looking.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Cameras
Both the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus have the same cameras as last year. Those are a 50MP main camera, 12MP ultrawide camera, 10MP 3x telephoto camera and 12MP selfie camera, in case you're not familiar already.
It would have been nice to have some sort of camera sensor upgrade, like the Ultra got for its higher-res telephoto camera, but in my time with the S24, I found it capable of taking sharp, vivid photos, backed up with some of the best photo processing in the business though, especially with the AI abilities I'll get to later. It's also good to see Super HDR support. These means brighter and more colorful images in the preview window when taking photos and when looking at them later in the Gallery app and also on Instagram.
How that matches up to the Galaxy S23, or rival phones like the Google Pixel 8 series or iPhone 15 series, remains to be seen, but we'll be testing thoroughly to see if the Galaxy S24 deserves a spot on our best camera phones guide.
Samsung Galaxy S24: AI features and software
With Android 14 with One UI 6.1 installed by default, you get plenty of features to play with as standard on the Galaxy S24 series, like enhanced lock screen customization and a sleeker Camera app design. But the real treat with the Galaxy S24 are the Galaxy AI-branded features that will hopefully make common smartphone tasks easier or more powerful.
One you'll likely come across quickly is Chat Assist, which lives in your keyboard. This tool gives you the option to rewrite a text or email to make the tone fit the purpose you have in mind, or even translate it to one of Galaxy AI's 13 available languages at launch. Or just run your message through a spelling and grammar check if you're confident you're not being too impertinent to your boss in your message asking him to go ahead and present without you.
When you come across something you want more information on, you no longer have to open your browser to search thanks to Galaxy AI. Its Circle to Search with Google ability lets you press and hold the home button or gesture bar at the bottom of the phone, then simply draw around something on-screen to send a query to Google. You can then ask the AI follow-ups, such as asking it to plan a trip for you to the interesting landmark you just circled.
Then there's Live Translation, either during calls, where a robotic voice will translate for you, or in person, where you can use a special two-sided interface to talk to someone opposite you. I attempted to speak a little French to the S24, and it (mostly) got my sentence correctly translated back into English. We will need to test it further to see if this is because the AI needs work, or my accent does.
Transcribe Assist, part of the voice recorder app that can detect up to twenty speakers, label their contributions during a conversation and summarize the transcript for easy digesting at the end. The labelling feature worked brilliantly during my demo, but it didn't quite catch every word I spoke accurately, perhaps due to the background noise in the venue.
The good old Notes app has received a lot of Galaxy AI-powered treats too. For one, it can straighten up hand-written notes to make them more legible. But you can do more with typed text, such as translate it, re-format it or summarize it automatically with the phone's AI. It looks great for people like me who have trouble getting their thoughts in order after jotting things down.
The Galaxy S24's summary function can also be used in the Samsung Internet browser, where it's known as Browsing assist, to quickly make long articles more readable, and translate it into other languages.
For photos, there's been an upgrade to the photo object eraser tool for eliminating unwanted parts of your image, but that's now backed up with a generative AI system that can help you move or re-frame images too. So if you want to straighten up a photo you accidentally shot on a slant, or move yourself closer to the front of the photo, you can do that quite easily. And so you can't falsely claim these altered images as originals, the Galaxy S24 adds a watermark and a metadata flag to ensure responsible use.
Also, the S24 can use what Samsung calls "Instant slo-mo" to slow down regular video. This uses, AI to builds frames in-between the ones you captured at the time, which produces okay-looking clips from a distance, but are in-fact strangely murky if you start poring over the details.
If all of this isn't enough for you, then you'll be happy to hear that Samsung's offering seven years of full Android updates on all Galaxy S24 models. That's equal best in the industry for updates, alongside Google itself, so the S24 could be quite the investment if you plan to keep using it for a long time.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Performance
The chip you get in the Galaxy S24 or Galaxy S24 Plus depends on where you buy it. For U.S. customers, these models are equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chip just like the Galaxy S24 Ultra. But outside of the States, including in the U.K., these two handsets get Samsung's own Exynos 2400 for Galaxy.
We're confident that S24s with the Snapdragon chip will offer some of the best phone performance available to date, but given previous Exynos chips have offered weaker performance than equivalent Snapdragon chips, buyers outside the U.S. may be getting a worse deal.
Let's move on to other specs. The Galaxy S24's default 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage spec is a bit stingy, although you can upgrade that to 256GB of storage if you wish. The S24 Plus has a more generous 12GB RAM and 256GB package as standard, and can be specced up to 512GB if you need more space.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Battery and charging
Samsung's upped the battery capacity of both the Galaxy S24 and the Galaxy S24 Plus. The S24 now has a 4,000 mAh battery instead of the S23's 3,900 mAh, and the S24 Plus a 4,900 mAh instead of a 4,700 mAh.
To power these batteries, Samsung is using the same charging systems as their Galaxy S23 equivalents. For the base S24 that's still 25W charging, which Samsung claims will charge the phone to 50% in 30 minutes. That's a sedate charging pace compared to some rival phones, but on par with Apple and Google's latest.
Samsung's 45W charging standard is only for the Plus model and above, and is rated to power the Galaxy S24 Plus to 65% in half an hour. Slightly better but still not that quick in the grand scheme of things.
Samsung Galaxy S24: Outlook
The Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus use familiar hardware in a lot of places, but several welcome upgrades and the Galaxy AI package have likely given them enough to challenge the Google Pixel 8 series when it comes to AI features, and the iPhone 15 series for photography smarts and raw computing power.
How much you'll appreciate these phones seems to rely a lot on how much mileage you'll get from the AI features. Between the camera, notes, translation and transcription options you should hopefully find at least one you're interested in, leaving the main decision then if you want the extra value offered by the cheaper base Galaxy S24, or the additional size, battery capacity (presumably longer battery life too) and charging speed of the Galaxy S24 Plus.
Be sure to check back soon for our full reviews of the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus, but as it stands now, these phones seem like big upgrades from the Galaxy S23, even if the bulk of the changes can't be seen from the exterior.
