Samsung has unveiled its new flagship phones for 2024: the Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra. In the context of Samsung’s usually conservative year-to-year changes, there are a lot of differences this year.
The S24 Ultra is now packing a titanium body, just like the iPhone 15. It also has a “fully flat display,”ending years of Android’s weird curved OLED panel gimmick that only served to distort the sides of the display. Samsung says the new Ultra design has “42 percent slimmer bezels”with a front hole-punch camera cutout that is “11 percent smaller”than the S23 Ultra. The rest of the design looks like Ultra models of past years, with rounded edges and a flat top and bottom. The bottom still houses an S-Pen for handwriting and drawing.
All that titanium will cost you: The S24 Ultra is $100 more than last year, coming to an eye-popping $1,299.99. An iPhone 15 Pro Max is $1,199.99, and a Pixel 8 Pro is $999.99, so that’s a tough sell.
The smaller S24+ and S24 models are aluminum and feature a new design with a flat, metal band that goes around the perimeter of the phone, making the devices look a lot like an iPhone 4 or 15. Both models have slimmer bezels and 120 Hz displays; Samsung says all the S23 displays can hit a peak brightness of 2600 nits in sunlight mode. The S24 and S24+ prices are the same as last year: $799.99 for the S24 and $999.99 for the S24+.
Another huge announcement is that Samsung is matching Google’s new update plan and offering “seven years of security updates and seven generations of OS upgrades.”Previously, it gave four years of updates. Apple doesn’t have a formal update policy, but with the iPhone X recently lasting from iOS 11 to 16, Samsung can now credibly say the S24 offers more major OS updates than a typical iPhone. (Let’s not bring up the speed of those OS updates, though, which can still take months).
Google announced seven years of updates for the Pixel 8, but as the maker of Android and with its own “Tensor”SoC, Google’s support system gets to exist outside of the usual Android ecosystem that most OEMs have to deal with. Samsung has somehow gotten Qualcomm on the hook for seven years of update support, which feels like a sea change in the industry. Previously, Qualcomm was very resistant to long chip life cycles, with Fairphone desperately sourcing an “industrial”Qualcomm chip just to get five years of support from the company in 2023. This change is what the Android ecosystem has needed for years, and we hope this level of support will be open to all companies in the future.
In the US, the Galaxy line is getting a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Last year, Samsung and Qualcomm signed a sweetheart deal to make the S23 line exclusively use Snapdragon chips worldwide and via an exclusive up-clocked “Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy”chip. This year, US Samsung S24s get a regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip in the US, while internationally, some models will be back to Samsung Exynos chips (specifically the Exynos 2400). Samsung only tells the US press about US specs, but an earlier SamMoble report claims that “the Exynos 2400 will power the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ in pretty much every country other than the US, Canada, Korea, China, and Japan.”Note that those are the two smaller models. If you’re in the market for an Ultra, the site says there is no Exynos Ultra model—they’re all Snapdragons.