Well, Vikram was right. I caved and purchased the S20 Plus for myself. So let’s get on with the review.
The Samsung s20 plus, the mid tier or the goldilocks zone for a phone that’s neither too big nor too small and has just the right amount of features that you don’t feel left out.
Pricing is at Rs 73,999 for a 6.7 inch QHD AMOLED 120-hz refresh rate screen, 8gb of ram which is down from 12 in the US version and 128 GB of storage.
The indian variant also uses the Exynos 990 instead of the Snapdragon 865 and there’s no 5G in the indian variant.
Why all this neutering, to bring down the prices of course. 128GB does seem paltry for a flagship, but the S20 series also have a hybrid sim tray, which can either hold two sim cards or one sim and one micro-sd card.
I have a 128 GB card from my s9+, so adding that to the phone I now have approximately 247 Gb of space. You can add larger cards for even more space, all the way upto 1.5 Gb if you get the 512 gb internal memory variant, which is still not available in india.
The design of the s20 plus is iterative to the s10 plus’s design, with the relocation of the front facing camera to the top-center of the display. The display is edge to edge, and if it was not for the front camera would have been all screen.
The curved edges have been flattened out, which is a good thing as ghost touches are reduced, and repairing would be a bit cheaper, but the overall frame still has Samsung’s signature roundness.
This phone is slippery, I’m happy that Samsung includes a transparent case in the box. But these cases end up yellowing a few months down the line. Official samsung cases are still not active on the Samsung store, but they do look awesome.
Colors available are Cosmic Gray, Cloud blue and cosmic black. I have the Cosmic gray version which is not that flashy and muted enough to carry to the office. But it looks like only the gray and black variants are available as of now.
The power button and the volume button are on the right side of the phone, this makes it easy to reach, but at the same time being used to the volume control on the left on the s9+, I keep hitting the power button instead. I dont understand why they moved it to the right, the entire left is devoid of any buttons.
Also the power button is a multifunction button, and can be mapped to any function in the settings. Also you will notice that the bixby button is missing. I mapped it back to the power menu as I am used to it that way.
The display supports 120 hz refresh rate, which makes everything on screen to scroll smoothly. This setting is not enabled by default as this feature will use more battery, almost a 25% hit, so you will need to activate it manually.
Also the 120hz is supported only upto FHD+, at QHD the device rolls back to 60HZ.
Samsung’s one ui is well designed and one hand operation is quite comfortable. I’ve been using it on my s9+ for some time now ever since the update to android 10, one ui 2.1 is very well designed. Gestures are supported for navigation, but i still like the old back, home and options buttons on screen. If you switch to gestures, the bottom area of the screen also becomes available as screen real estate.
Security options are plenty. It does lose the iris scanner from the s9+, which was removed in the s10 series itself, available now face-unlock and the in display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. Being used to the physical fingerprint sensor on the back of the s9+, this is a bit slow comparatively.
Being ultrasonic it should work even if your fingers are wet. People have been complaining it doesn’t work normally itself, so wet fingers. It works, this was one problem I had on my s9+ with a standard fingerprint sensor.
AKG earphones are also provided in the box, and these are USB-C as ….
We don’t have a headphone jack anymore.
I’ve been using the Jabra Elite Active 65t’s for some time now, so i generally don’t carry wired earbuds anymore.
But in case you are travelling and you forgot your’s at home then purchasing earbuds would be expensive.
We have the Galaxy Buds plus at rs 1999 as a pre-order offer, which if you don’t have any wireless earbuds is a great offer, the original being 13k. Also these can be charged using the power share feature off the phone.
I dont have the buds yet, but power-share can also recharge my Gear S3 smartwatch or I could even share power with friends who have phones that support wireless charging.
This being the goldilocks tier phone as i had said earlier, it doesn’t have the 108 megapixel camera that the ultra does, but it does have a respectable 62 megapixel telephoto lens with a f2.0 aperture and capable of zooming 3X optically, a 12 megapixel primary lens at an f1.8 aperture and the 12 mp ultrawide lens with a f2.2 aperture. A fourth camera would be visible, but this one is mainly a VGA time-of-flight sensor which is used to calculate depth information which are used with live photos and videos. The primary 12 mp lens is also larger, which allows more light in.
Photo quality is of course great with AI based HDR enhancements as per the scene being shot.
The dual pixel autofocus which is missing on the S20 ultra is fast as ever on the s20+, using Sony’s IMX555 which avoids the focus hunting problems as on the Ultra. Beauty more is something that irritates most people, which can be turned off in the settings.
Pro mode allows more control of the shutter,iso settings and does not process the image as in standard shooting modes.
Low light is one of the s20+’s USP, with night mode you can take better pictures even in low-light.
Another fact, the camera doesn’t shoot at full 64mp from the back camera and needs to be set like so to use the full resolution. But this locks in to using the telephoto lens, and the file sizes are much bigger. So use when necessary.
Another new feature is the hybrid zoom. The telephoto lens cannot actually zoom, but actually crop into the 64 mp photo, producing 12.2 mp photos. They look great, but it’s not actually zooming. Upto 3x it’s great, at 10x it’s still usable, but at 30x it just goes bad.
Also supported is 8K video recording support, which writes around 600mb for a 1 minute video and you would lose the stabilization features. I would suggest shooting at 4k60 or even more stable 1080p.
Single take is another new feature, that records using all the lenses and also video and gives you a wide range of options to choose from. This is great when shooting kids, where they’re quite fast and this option allows getting the shot at least from one of the cameras.
Battery has been upgraded to 4500 mAh, which is a big improvement, and you will need this with the 120 hz refresh rate. All day battery is a much more reasonable target.
The 25W charger allows for super fast charging and is included in the box.
The s20 plus is a great middle child of the new s20 series, with the right blend of size, weight and features.
It’s slim and well balanced, and ergonomics other than the volume buttons are great.Nothing much to actually complain, samsung as usual has released another great series of phones, prices have gone up substantially which is it’s only drawback. If you have older samsung phones, you can always earn an exchange bonus which i used to replace my s9+ with a S20+ making it more affordable.
I feel the S20+ is the best you can buy in the s20 series with a great balance of features and size as compared to it’s siblings.
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