Samsung Galaxy S24 review

The ‘bigger is better’ philosophy is a completely valid one when it comes to flagship smartphones, and the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and S24+ are indeed better equipped than the Samsung Galaxy S24 in most ways. However, the S24 has a big advantage over these - its compact size and easy-to-handle form factor, along with its weight of 167g. The idea of a truly small phone is largely lost these days, but at least a few brands like Samsung are keeping the concept alive in some form.

While the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra takes over the old ‘Note’ philosophy and comes with a stylus and sharp corners, the S24 gets rounded corners, sharp edges, and flat sides that make it easier to hold. The power and volume buttons are on the right, the SIM tray is at the bottom, and the whole thing feels like it should for a high-end smartphone.

At the back, things are rather tastefully minimalist. The three camera sensors line up without any distinct module or fanfare, the matte finish is rather good at hiding smudges and grime, and the Samsung logo is pretty good at hiding itself until you shine some bright light on the phone. You honestly won’t find a nicer looking compact smartphone than this right now. There are also plenty of colour options, but we find the gold to be the most elegant and sophisticated of the lot.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 has a 6.2-inch screen, and while there was a time when this was considered ‘phablet-sized’, it’s firmly compact-class in 2024. The screen resolution of 2340x1080 (full-HD+) is also a fair bit lower than that of the S24+ and S24 Ultra with a lower pixel density, but you won’t find the dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X screen lacking in any practical way. There’s also support for HDR10+ format content, 120Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 2600nits, making this a flagship-level display in every sense.

Like other phones with LTPO AMOLED displays, the Samsung Galaxy S24 can run its always-on mode at a 1Hz refresh rate for optimal battery consumption, but Samsung also does its always-on mode a bit better than competing brands. Not just the time and notifications, but also the battery level, under-display fingerprint sensor zone, and elements of the wallpaper are visible, and it looks impressive. The adaptive brightness is also pretty good, usually getting the level right for the amount of ambient light.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24+ in India are the Exynos 2400 variants, unlike the S24 Ultra which gets the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It might seem a bit odd but don’t consider this a bad thing; the Exynos chipsets are practically as good in all the ways that matter, and you’ll get the kind of performance you expect from a Samsung S-series smartphone. 

As mentioned, the Samsung Galaxy S24 isn’t quite as well equipped as the S24 Plus and S24 Ultra, and a key point where it falls short is in the RAM. You get 8GB of RAM as standard regardless of the storage (256GB of 512GB), unlike the bigger and more expensive siblings which come with 12GB of RAM as standard.

Fortunately, the Samsung Galaxy S24 doesn’t sacrifice any other key features due to its size and price level positioning. You get fast wireless charging apart from fast wired charging, eSIM support, Bluetooth 5.3, UFS 4.0 storage, and USB Type-C 3.2. The battery is a bit smaller than on the S24+ and S24 ultra at 4000mAh, but the smaller, lower-resolution screen will largely cover for any differences to ensure similar practical battery life.

On the software front, you get Android 14 with Samsung’s One UI 6.1. The software itself is fairly straightforward, especially if you’re already familiar with Samsung devices. If not, you’ll find things a bit different from the ‘stock-like’ versions of Android, but it’s easy to get used to and looks very nice once you do get used to it.

There are a fair few AI features built into the S24, including tweaks for photography, photo editing, and zoom levels, live translations, and the ability to enhance your text messages through Chat Assist, among others. You can also choose to process all of this AI data on device for better privacy.

Flagship smartphones tend to come with a triple-camera setup at the very least, and buyers tend to scowl at anything less when they’re paying big bucks. Fortunately, the Samsung Galaxy S24 does come with this, and there’s no difference between the S24 and S24+ when it comes to the camera setups, so you don’t need to sacrifice on camera capabilities if you opt for the smaller device.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 features a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 10-megapixel telephoto camera capable of 3X optical zoom, and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera. While the default photography mode is the 12-megapixel one, you can also choose to shoot at the full 50-megapixel resolution, and then get an effective zoom level of up to 5X by cropping into a section of the full-resolution image.

In practice, it all works rather well. Performance is top-notch in regular daylight photography, and you can get similarly good images with the optical zoom or crop zoom in use, or when shooting portrait shots which utilise the multi-camera setup to get proper depth of field. Low-light shots are sharp and fairly on point when it comes to getting the colours right, but the AI tends to work a bit too much in brightening the images for the sake of visibility. 

It’s a good all-round performer in the photography department and you’ll get decent performance even with the other modes. However, performance is exceptional where it counts - the ability to point and shoot quickly. You’ll get some excellent shots for social media in most everyday scenarios with very little effort.

Samsung flagship smartphones - even variants powered by Exynos chipsets - haven’t really given us much to complain about in recent years. Performance on the whole is excellent, and you’re unlikely to face any oddball issues even a couple of years into your S-series ownership. It’s a very refined smartphone, not just in the way it looks and feels but also in how it works.

The only real question mark here is the 8GB of RAM, which is a fair bit lower than what you get on competing Android devices such as the OnePlus 12 and Vivo X100 Pro. Realistically, 8GB is more than enough for most things, and the Samsung Galaxy S24 does a decent job of RAM management when it comes to handling everyday apps and multitasking. 

Even intense use cases such as gaming will work well enough by redistributing available resources or cleaning up apps that have been idle for a while. This usually means relaunching and reloading apps more often than on smartphones with more RAM, but it’s a small price to pay in the larger scheme of things. 

You can also set up the Samsung Galaxy S24 to prioritise battery life and cooling efficiency over performance, but we found that the standard mode struck a pretty good balance on the whole. Battery life of a little under two days even with relatively heavy use was a given, and it could be stretched to over two days if we ran process-heavy functions such as gaming and the camera less often.

Annoyingly, there’s no charger included in the box, but the Samsung Galaxy S24 does support fast wired and wireless charging. When using a 45W wired charger, we were able to get a full charge in a little under two hours, and you can get it done faster if you use a faster charger. Of course, the silly bit is having to buy one of those yourself.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra might be the more awe-inspiring flagship device from the Samsung stable, but the S24 manages very nearly as much despite its smaller dimensions and lower price. Compact smartphone fans will find the S24 to be more than capable of being a proper flagship daily driver, matching up to its more expensive siblings in the ways that count.

Perhaps the only real long-term concern here is the 8GB RAM limitation, and if this matters to you then you’ll want to consider the Samsung Galaxy S24+ with its 12GB of RAM at the very least. That said, did we mention we love how compact this smartphone is? Maybe we did, but we’ll still say it again and again.