At a time when hardware advancements are slow and AI junk is absolutely everywhere, it’s not hard to write off a phone like the Galaxy S24+. It looks nearly identical to Samsung’s lastPlusphone, and the selling point Samsung talks about most loudly is a suite of Galaxy-branded AI features that most people won’t want or need.Who cares?
Well, after using the phone for a couple of months, it turns out I care — and you should, too. Not about the design (that is indeed getting stale), or about Samsung’s AI features (many of which are moderately useful at best), but about the phone as a whole. It may not be as flashy as theflagshipflagshipGalaxy S24 Ultra, but in the S24+, years of iterative refinement have culminated in a rock-solid high-end smartphone that does everything most people need it to do, better than it needs to. If you’re in the market for a new flagship Android device, don’t sleep on the Galaxy S24+: it’s a very safe bet.
Samsung Galaxy S24+
Samsung is leaning hard into AI to sell its new phones, but more importantly, the Galaxy S24+ nails the fundamentals. With unflappable performance, strong battery life, and great hardware quality, the S24+ is a proper flagship phone — even if it’s not Ultra.
Availability, network, and specs
Available wherever smartphones are sold
Samsung’s phones are easy to find. In the US, the Galaxy S24+ is available unlocked directly from Samsung, as well as at Amazon and Best Buy. Every carrier you can imagine is selling it, too, from the Big Three (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile) to MVNOs like Visible and Google Fi. The S24+ is also widely available internationally — though, in markets outside the US, it comes with a Samsung-built Exynos 2400 chipset, rather than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the US version I’ve been using.
The S24+ is available in several colors, including black, gray, purple, and yellow, plus exclusive pastel orange, green, and blue varieties at Samsung.com. The base model S24+ has 256 gigs of storage and costs a cool $1,000, though various trade-in offers and carrier incentives will lower the real-life cost for many buyers.
Specifications
Hardware design and display
Plain, but well executed
The Samsung Galaxy S24+ is plain in the extreme: a rectangle with rounded corners, sporting a flat display with a hole-punch selfie camera and super thin bezels, flat metal side rails, and a largely featureless backside only punctuated by three circular cameras, a flash, and Samsung’s unassuming wordmark.
There are only so many ways to style a smartphone, but what Samsung’s done here is notably bland compared to what competitors are offering, especially in the aggressively forgettable “black” colorway I’ve got for review (it’s really a dark gray). I don’t so much mind that the design is largely unchanged from last year’s Galaxy S23+, but more that there’s no visual element in the S24 or S24+ to point to as a distinctlySamsungfeature.
Google and OnePlus’s recent smartphone designs might be divisive, but they’re pretty unmistakable in the US smartphone landscape. And while I don’t personally like the brutalist, squared-off design of the S24 Ultra, it’s undeniablya look. The lesser S24 models look like what you’d get if you stopped someone on the street and asked them to draw a smartphone: plain, rounded rectangles.
But Samsung is still outclassing its Android competition when it comes to hardware quality, and the Galaxy S24+ is indeed a very nice rounded rectangle. The phone feels dense and sturdy and doesn’t creak or flex if you twist on it. The biggest visual change for this year is that the side rails have gone from rounded on the S23+ to completely flat on the S24+, with a sharp edge around the display and a slightly softer one around back.
I think the flatter edges make the S24+ look more modern, but the change doesn’t help Samsung carve out a unique visual identity. The S24+feels a lot like an iPhone in the hand, and if we can believerecent leaks and rumors, the upcoming Pixel 9 series will have similarly squared-off sides. What’s more, the iPhone 16 has been tipped to launch witha more Samsung-like camera layout— not Samsung’s fault, but again, not helping this design language stand out from the crowd.
The display nested inside the S24+’s newly squared-off frame is one of the phone’s biggest upgrades. It’s a new 1440p, 6.7-inch OLED — higher resolution and a touch bigger than in the S23+’s 6.6-inch, 1080p display. It gets incredibly bright outdoors (2,600 nits peak) and can adjust its refresh rate between 1 and 120Hz, depending on the content on screen. Colors are vivid, viewing angles are good, and the panel is as responsive as you could hope it’d be. In short, it’s an excellent screen, though it lacks theGorilla Armor glass that reduces reflectionson the Ultra.
Everything else about the hardware is solid, too. The ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is super quick, the buttons are clicky, and the stereo speakers — one downward-firing, the other in the earpiece — are plenty punchy enough for listening to music in a pinch.
Software features and performance
Lots of AI, but it doesn’t get in the way
Like every company in tech today, Samsung is making noise about its new AI features, which debuted on the S24 series. They run the gamut from useless to niche to broadly helpful. On the less useful end of the spectrum, Samsung’s software keyboard on the S24 series offers a feature that canchange the tone of your text messagesacross different messaging apps, to make your texts more “professional,” “polite,” or “social.”
More usefully for some, various Galaxy AI features can translate bilingual conversations in real time — over the phone, via text, or even in person. Samsung’s Recorder app also provides transcripts of recordings on S24 phones, similarly to Google’s Pixel-exclusive Recorder app. Samsung Gallery can apply an AI-generated slow-motion effect to videos after they’ve been recorded, and the results are actually okay sometimes (recording high-frame-rate videos in slow motion is also still an option, though only up to 240 frames per second).
Then there’sCircle to Search, arguably the most useful of the S24’s AI features. You fire up Circle to Search by holding down on either the home button or gesture bar, depending on your setup. Then you may circle, highlight, or scribble through anything on your screen to perform a quick visual search that’ll turn up different results depending on what you’re searching — highlighting clothes will find sites where you can buy similar items, highlighting a food will help find recipes, highlighting a movie poster might return results with info about the movie and showtimes near you.
It’s a handy new spin on visual search, and a solid addition to Android generally. But it’s not exclusive: Google announced Circle to Search for thePixel 8andPixel 8 Probefore the S24 series even left its preorder phase, and it’s since made its way to the Pixel 7 series, too. I’d be surprised if it didn’t show up on more phones in the near future.
Samsung’s suite of Galaxy AI features iscoming to Samsung’s premium 2023 devices with One UI 6.1 in March, but as of now, will not be available on Galaxy S22 phones. Samsung is also thinking aboutmonetizing Galaxy AI featuresafter next year, though we don’t yet know which or how. The notion that these features might eventually cost extra on phones that retail for $1,000 or more is a little insulting, and I really hope Samsung isn’t set on charging a fee for them. For most users, what’s on offer now wouldn’t be worth it.
Trend-chasing, kitchen-sink AI aside, One UI 6.1 over Android 14 is solid. Elements like the quick settings menu have gotten a minor visual overhaul, but the experience is mostly what we’ve come to expect from Samsung, with lots of additional functionality hiding around every corner. Standbys like Edge panels are still here, as are Samsung’s multitasking tricks like opening apps in floating windows. An especially handy implementation of the latter feature lets you swipe down on notification previews to open a windowed view of whichever app — super helpful for firing off a text reply.
There’s a new option to display your wallpaper on the S24+’s always-on display. I didn’t like it at first; even dimmed, I found all my usual wallpapers a little distracting when they were always visible. The always-on display specifically shows your lock screen wallpaper, though, and I eventually took to setting a different wallpaper there than on my home screen, with an eye to subtlety on the AOD. I’ve come around:I want this option on every phone. If you feel differently, it’s easy to hide your wallpaper on the always-on display in the phone’s settings.
Possibly the most interesting software feature is Samsung’s new update commitment. The company has pledged seven full years of both feature and security updates for the S24 series, a timeline that ends in 2031. That matches what Google offers in the Pixel 8 series. We don’t yet know if either company can hit such an ambitious target, but it’s still great to see Android OEMs competing on software support like this. Fingers crossed it’s not all talk.
Performance is excellent on the Galaxy S24+. It’s got the same 12 gigs of RAM and, in the US, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (for Galaxy) chipset as the S24 Ultra. I can’t speak to the global version that ships with an Exynos 2400 chipset, but the Snapdragon S24+ is as fast as anyone could reasonably want a phone to be today.
Without many exceptions, apps open in a flash and run without a hiccup, and I’m regularly surprised to find apps I last interacted with hours ago kept my place when I eventually open them up again. I noticed that in my first few weeks with the phone, my favorite mobile game, Marvel Snap, tended to crash more frequently than it does on other phones — but those crashes are already fewer and farther between than they once were.
Camera performance and samples
Low-light struggles
The S24+ has a lot of the S23+’s camera DNA: it’s the same loadout, with a 50MP f/1.8 primary camera, a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide, and a 10MP f/2.4 3x telephoto. As always, the versatility of that three-camera setup is great, letting you capture lots of different types of photos at lots of different distances.
Samsung’s S-series phones launch in the middle of winter here in the US, and living in the Midwest, that typically means testing their cameras in crummy, flat light. So in my first few weeks with the S24+, I was really disappointed in its camera performance: in light like what was what I was working with, photos often came out with unnatural contrast, and motion blur was a much bigger issue than I anticipated.
Photos from the S24+’s 1x camera, taken in cloudy January weather.
But as I’ve continued using the phone through February and into March, the sun has started to reappear, and as you’d expect, the S24+’s camera performance is much better in better light. When there’s adequate tonal contrast in a scene and enough light to keep shutter speeds fast, the S24+ produces vibrant, contrasty images that can go toe-to-toe with what you’d get from a Pixel or an iPhone in the same setting.
Photos from the S24+’s 1x camera, taken after this review was initially published.
I often complain that mobile photography processing (both on Samsung phones and others) tends to overbrighten shadows, which can diminish natural contrast and make images look uncanny. My photos from the S24+ seem like Samsung is letting shadows stay darker than they did in photos from last year’s S23+, which I appreciate.
But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken on this phone still show mid tones — the parts between highlights and shadows — that look conspicuously brighter than they were in real life, again making for weird, unnatural contrast. Color can also come through looking exaggerated, with certain colors looking much more vivid in pictures than they did on the day. These issues are more pronounced in less-than-ideal lighting.
Photos from the Galaxy S24+’s 3x telephoto camera, taken in cloudy January weather.
Samsung is still having trouble with motion blur, too: photos of moving objects will often come out blurrier than I would’ve expected, even with what seems like adequate light. Getting a clear shot of a fast-moving kid or pet indoors is a feat for plenty of phones, but I feel like one that costs $1,000 should be able to get clear photos of my dogs playing outside during the day, even if it is cloudy.
Why so blurry, bud?
Having had more time to test the S24+’s camera setup, I’ve naturally gotten more good photos with it. Experience has shown me how much better the phone performs with good light than it does in cloudy or indoor settings. That’s true of all phones, of course, but I think the gulf is wider for Samsung than it is for its competitors. Cloudy weather doesn’t seem to challenge Google’s or Apple’s photo processing quite as much.
Ultrawide, standard, telephoto.
The S24+ supportsUltra HDR photography, meaning photos from the phone show, well, much higher dynamic range when viewed in compatible software (like Chrome or Google Photos) on compatible hardware (like the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 series). Even so, after spending a couple of months with it, I don’t think this camera setup is quite as good as what you’ll get on the Pixel 8 Pro — which retails for the same $1,000.
Battery life and charging speeds
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 sips battery
Courtesy of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, the Galaxy S24+ offers great battery life. I haven’t been able to tap its 4,900mAh cell in a single day yet, even a couple of months in. On one typical heavier-use day, I took the phone off the charger around 7:30 in the morning and racked up five hours and 10 minutes of screen time, including about an hour of gaming and 20 minutes of GPS navigation, before going to bed around 11 with 23 percent left in the tank. You could kill the thing in a day if you really tried, but you could also feasibly make it last two days without much effort.
There’s wired charging that peaks at 45 watts, but that rate won’t hold for an entire charging cycle. Samsung says the phone should reach 65 percent in half an hour with the right charger, which lines up pretty neatly with my experience so far. A full charge will take over an hour, but with such strong battery life, I don’t really have any complaints about the charging situation here.
Well, no complaints about the wired charging situation, anyway. Wireless charging tops out at 15 watts, and the S24 seriesdoesn’t support the new Qi2 standardthat opens up compatibility with MagSafe-style magnetic chargers. Qi2 is still in its infancy, though, so I can’t be too upset Samsung couldn’t get it in the S24+ on time. Maybe next year.
Competition: Plenty of big, fast phones
Flagship pricing, flagship competition
At $1,000, the Samsung Galaxy S24+’s nearest Android competition is the Google Pixel 8 Pro, which retails for the same price. Google’s phone takes better photos and has many similar AI features, but the Galaxy S24+ beats Google on hardware quality, day-to-day performance, and battery life. Both the Galaxy S24+ and the Pixel 8 Pro should get software updates for seven years. The S24+ is a little newer, so its window closes later — but we’re talking late 2030 versus early 2031, so it shouldn’t make much difference in choosing between the two today.
Google Pixel 8 Pro review: Living up to its name
If you want to see the future of Google, the Pixel 8 Pro is the phone to buy
There’s also theOnePlus 12, which starts at $800. It has a very similar Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and 12 (or 16!) gigs of RAM, so it offers similarly great performance and battery life. It also comes with wild fast charging: up to80 wattswith OnePlus’s first-party charger. OnePlus isn’t offering any AI-branded features, though, if that matters to you. And OnePlus’s current update policy means the 12 should get OS updates until 2028 and security patches a year longer — solid, but a far cry from the seven years of support Samsung has pledged with the S24 series.
OnePlus 12 review: All flagship, no AI
This phone leaves nothing on the table, making for a truly complete package
Should you buy the Galaxy S24+?
The S24+ is a well-rounded, premium package
I think the Galaxy S24+ is the S24 most people should buy. I’ve thought that about thePlusmodel of each generation of Samsung’s S-series phones for years, but it’s truer than ever this time: while the S24 Ultra got a $100 price hike over last year’s nearly identical S23 Ultra, the S24+ starts at the same $1,000 the S23+ did. And it enjoys some notable upgrades: the newer S24+ is just a little bigger than the S23+ was; it has a higher-resolution, brighter display; and it comes with 12 gigs of RAM — a jump from the eight gigs found in its predecessor.
I really don’t think most people will care about most of Samsung’s new Galaxy AI-branded features. Some of them, like Samsung’s various live translation features, will be game-changing for some users. But even flashier AI features like Circle to Search andInstant Slow-moare hardly breaking new ground in areas average users will appreciate, and by its own admission, Samsung may eventually lock these features behind a paywall.
Setting aside all the AI-powered tricks, though, the Galaxy S24+ is a really great Android flagship in ways most peoplewillappreciate: it’s fast as hell, the battery lasts all day, the screen looks great, and Samsung says it’ll stay up to date longer than any other Android phone you’re able to get today. Camera performance might not keep pace with Samsung’s biggest competition in challenging lighting, but the Samsung Galaxy S24+ is still easy to recommend to almost anybody looking to spend flagship money on an Android phone in 2024.
