For the Ultra and Plus there's also a Cosmic Black,which is reminiscent of the Jet Black iPhone 7 and attracts just as many fingerprints. As you go down the range there is a Cloud Blue for the Plus and S20,and a Cloud Pink for the S20,which in bright light look a lot like the shiny pearl unicorn horn colour of thePrism White S10.
The phones are all quite similar,with slightly larger screens and batteries as you go up from S20 to Plus to Ultra,and with more RAM in the Ultra too. But the main thing setting the Ultra apart is the camera.
The large lens protuberance on the back looks reasonable on the S20,but by the time you get to the Ultra it looks like someone sliced the front off a garage door opener and stuck it on the back. Although it has the same number of lenses,the Ultra offers significantly fancier specs,with a massive 108MP sensor on the main shooter compared to 12MP on the other phones,and a periscope lens for zoom rather than a standard telephoto.
Taken together these give the S20 Ultra a maximum"hybrid optic"zoom of 10x,and a digital zoom of up to 100x. According to a spokesperson at the briefing,this is the biggest change that’s come to the Galaxy S cameras since the S7,and has been redesigned from the ground up.
In my hands-on time,I took a photo of a small globe from roughly three metres away. The photo of the globe looked like a pretty standard photo of a distant object,nothing too exciting. But when I zoomed in to take another photo,I could see a tiny pin that had been stuck in San Francisco. I sure as anything couldn’t see that pin with my bespectacled eye from that distance,and yet thanks to the software stitching the best bits of 20 simultaneous shots together I could see it on the screen with surprisingly little grain.
I was also shown a picture of a stadium someone took from a plane,where I couldn’t even see it from the unzoomed picture. This feature is going to be great for people who want pictures of birds or particularly tiny things,and a nightmare for people with windows and a false sense of privacy.