Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus first impressions: Premium design with an equally premium price

Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone series — Galaxy S20 — is yet to be available in India but since all the specifications are already out, you should know that it will rattle the premium segment for sure. Out of the three phones — Galaxy S20, S20 Plus, and S20 Ultra — I tried my hands on the middle sibling for a couple of hours. These three handsets have a lot of design details in common like rectangular camera module and punch-hole display.

With this series, Samsung has overhauled various design aspects, along with an overhaul to its price. It has an amazing camera, awesome 120 Hz refresh rate display, a bigger battery, and a hi-fi price. Let’s take a more detailed look at my initial impression of the Galaxy S20 Plus. The Galaxy S20 is priced at Rs 66,999, S20 Plus will cost you Rs 73,999 and the top tier S20 Ultra is priced at Rs 92,999.

Gorgeous design but that grey colour is hurting my eyes!

How do I describe my first impressions of Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus when I unboxed it? I think I was drooling. The edge-to-edge display, sleek design, lightweight, and a tiny punch hole camera, made for a beautiful looking phone. BUT, then I turned the phone around, all the drooling stopped, and the blame is on the colour.

The model I have is a Cosmic Gray colour variant that has an utterly dull and washed-out look. That’s when the Galaxy S20 has some really great colour options, and even the  Galaxy Z Flip's Mirror Purple  is beautiful (you must hear Nandini trip on that!). That’s not to say that the overall design ergonomics at the back are bad. I actually liked the rear camera setup, the glossy body but it’s the gray colour that bothered me! The other colour option is Cosmic Black and Cosmic Blue. Most days I won’t suggest a black colour variant, but in this case, that seems to be a good option. Moving on, the smartphone features a 6.7-inch Infinity-O Dynamic AMOLED display that has a resolution of 3,200 x 1,440 pixels and an aspect ratio of 20:9. One of the headline-grabbing features of this phone is its 120 Hz display refresh rate. The display is beautiful, smooth and offers vivid colours as well.

At the back, Galaxy S20 Plus houses a quad rear camera setup that is packed in a rectangular camera a bump, which has become a consistent design language for all the phones that have debuted this year. I must say though, I am glad that the company ditched the unibrow-like camera module that we saw on the Galaxy S10 series last year! I also want to point out that, thanks to the glossy back, the Galaxy S20 Plus is a fingerprint fest at the back. So it would be best to keep the phone in a case (one comes bundled in the box).

It has a Type-C charging port, single speaker grille at the bottom edge. One glaring omission here is the 3.5 mm jack, so sorry folks but start making arrangements now, if you already don’t have any Bluetooth earphones. However, you can also opt for the AKG wired Type-C earphones that come in the box. Overall, the phone is pretty light, handy and will easily fit in your palm, although I did find it a little difficult to reach the notification bar while holding the phone and using it with the same hand, but that might not be the case with you if you don’t have tiny hands like mine.

Fantastic camera with fun new features

In the camera department, you will get a 10 MP front camera that also lets you take ultra wide images in case you are taking groupfie (that’s what they call it these days right?). Talking from my experience of using the phone for a brief period of time, the front camera manages to take good images and by that, I mean punchy colours, apt exposure, and good details. At the back, the phone features a quad camera setup that has a 64 MP 3x telephoto camera, 12 MP wide-angle camera, a 12 MP ultra-wide camera, and a depth vision camera. One of the most exciting things that I found out about this camera is its “single take” feature. So, all you need to do is switch to “single take” mode, make a short video, and the smartphone will offer you up to 10 options, how you can use the particular video. This will include slo-mo video, super-fast video, snaps in different filters and it will automatically put a cool sound in the background! Awesome, isn’t it? via GIPHY Click here to see the camera samples clicked by Samsung S20 Plus: I mean for all those who go through the pain to manually putting filters or editing, this is exactly what they need! But again, people who are picky about how a particular picture or a video looks, can choose to ditch that. Besides, from the little time I spent with the phone, I found the camera samples quite impressive. However, I am a little worried about the night mode since when I tried that in the demo mode, it took almost 30 seconds to capture one picture in night mode! I was told that this time depends on the magnitude of light at the given moment but I am really looking forward to testing that out. I mean 30 sec!? That is just absurd! via GIPHY Further, the S20 Plus’ camera lets you record 8K videos, which is again, one of the highlights of this phone. But 8K, do we really need that in a phone? Nope, but does that make it a cool phone? Duh! Of course!

Admirable performance but demands more digging

Galaxy S20 Plus houses a 4,500 mAh battery that supports 25W fast charging and wireless charging support. It runs on Android 10 and is powered by a 64-bit octa-core processor. Since it comes with an ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensor, I tried it out and I should say, it was fast! Swiping between apps was smooth, there is an app drawer as well.  I watched a couple of videos, the audio is also pretty loud and the quality also did not disappoint me as I increased the volume.

I must mention that it is not my final verdict as we will have to dig a little deeper to understand the performance of this phone. It is water-resistant so you don’t have to worry if you drop water on your expensive phone. All the three phones of this lineup offer up to 12 GB RAM which pretty cool in itself. Galaxy S20 Plus also offers up to 512 GB internal storage. It is still a bit early for me to give any opinion on the battery front as I will have to use it more extensively to come to a conclusion.

Conclusion

Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus has almost all the features that you look for in a flagship phone. You will get a beautiful design, brilliant display, amazing camera capabilities, huge battery, massive RAM and the latest Android 10 OS. But with a high-end price point of Rs 73,999, the phone goes up against Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Will it make a better buy than the iPhone? That’s what we will figure in our review of the Galaxy S20 Plus. Stay tuned!