Samsung’s Plus phones in the S-Series lineup have been the “middle” phone for years. They were fine, but missing just enough that you’d be better off choosing the standard or Ultra models. With theSamsung Galaxy S24+, that has changed, and for the right person, this model could be your best choice.
Samsung Galaxy S24+
With a large, crisp, and colorful display, powerful hardware, and great battery life, Samsung’s Galaxy S24+ is the sweet spot for the product line for the first time ever. It’s not the perfect upgrade, but if you’re buying your first new Galaxy phone in a while, this is the one to get.
Price and Availability
The Samsung Galaxy S24+ comes in two configurations. I’m looking at the version that comes with 256GB of storage, which retails for $999. If you need more storage, Samsung also sells a model with 512GB storage for $1,119.
When it comes to colors, there are plenty of options available. The S24+ is available in Onyx Black, Marble Gray, Cobalt Violet, or Amber Yellow (the color of my review unit) from any retailer that carries the phone. Additionally, you’re able to also buy the phone in Jade Green, Sapphire Blue, or Sandstone Orange, but these variations are only available via the Samsung website.
While the phone has only been out for a few months at the time of this writing, it has already been on sale a few times. So, if you’re searching for a deal, it may be worth waiting a few weeks and keeping an eye out for a sale before making your purchase.
Specifications
New colors aside, you’d be forgiven for not being able to immediately spot the differences between the new S24+ and its predecessor. Both use an iPhone-inspired design with a rounded overall shape with squared-off edges. It’s a good look, and I don’t blame Samsung for sticking with it, though I wouldn’t have minded if the company took inspiration from the more angular Ultra model.
Not everything is the same. For example, the Galaxy S24+ is slightly thinner, measuring 158.5 × 75.9 × 7.7mm. It also has a more matte-style finish on the sides, unlike the mirror-polished sides of the S23+.
While the S24+ shares much of its screen DNA with the bigger, more powerful S24 Ultra, Samsung has made one concession. This model uses Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for its screen, instead of the Gorilla Armor used on the Ultra model. Unfortunately, this means that you’ll need to be more careful with the S24+ than you would with its larger sibling.
Not that this is a fragile phone. The Galaxy S24+ is IP68 rated dust and water-resistant. No phone is waterproof, and you don’t want to use this one as a pool toy. That said, if you get caught out in the rain with the phone in your pocket, you shouldn’t need to worry about its safety.
The button layout is, well, what you’d expect from a phone in 2024, with all the buttons roughly where you’d expect to find them. Despite the larger size, the phone is easy to hold and use. It weights 0.43lbs or 196g, and the weight is distributed well, so it never feels top-heavy or unbalanced.
A Slightly Bigger Display Is Much Better
The display is the first area where the Galaxy S24+ easily pulls clear of the standard model. While that model has a 6.2-inch display with FHD resolution, the S24+ features a 6.65-inch dynamic AMOLED 2X display with QHD+ resolution, so not only is it larger, but more crisp as well.
A feature that is now standard across the entire Galaxy range is the 120Hz Adaptive Refresh Rate. This is variable between 1Hz and 120Hz, depending on what’s happening on screen, and if your screen is often static, this can have a significant effect on battery life.
Brightness is standard across the entire Galaxy S24 range as well, with each model boasting 2,600 nits of peak brightness. This is quite bright, and I never had trouble seeing the screen, even previewing photos I’d taken outdoors on a sunny day.
To make things even easier to see, Samsung’s Vision Booster feature makes sure that streaming video looks great regardless of where you watch it, even if that means under the bright sun. This, combined with the great off-angle support you get from an AMOLED, means you’ll likely never struggle to see what’s on-screen.
Phones have come a long way when it comes to sound, but they’re still limited by their overall size. While that remains true for the Galaxy S24+, it does sound markedly better than many phones, and the sound from its stereo speakers puts it on par with a similarly sized iPhone model.
Software: AI Isn’t Everything, But It’s Handy
The Galaxy S24+ runs Android 14, but with Samsung’s One UI 6.1, it looks unmistakably like a Samsung phone. If you want to change the look, the One UI software is fairly complex but quite customizable. That said, I was happy with how things looked right out of the box, and the UI felt quick and snappy throughout testing.
Samsung’s DeX (short for “Desktop Experience”) is present here as it was on the past few Galaxy S releases. I didn’t test this, and most people are unlikely to replace their desktop computer with their phone, but it’s better to have the feature available than not.
Samsung’s Galaxy AI is very much the star of the show in this generation of its flagship phones. To the company’s credit, certain features are quite handy. Built-in automatic translation of messages, for example, is promising, and the AI summarization features like Note Assist are genuinely useful.
That said, not everything is usable. Chat Assist, for example, can alter the tone of messages to make them more formal or casual, but seems to lean too hard in either direction. This is a promising feature, but you get the feeling when you use it that it’s going to take a few iterations before it becomes truly useful.
On the other hand, Circle to Search is an instantly useful feature. It doesn’t work perfectly 100% of the time, but it makes searching for things you’d otherwise have a difficult time defining in words much easier.
Samsung has also added several photo-focused AI features, but we’ll look at those later in the review.
Big Performance In A Somewhat Smaller Package
While I mentioned the two main configurations earlier in the review, there is another difference between Galaxy S24+ versions, depending on where you live. As with the last model, the chipset you get depends on the region in which you buy the Galaxy S24+.
I’m reviewing the US version of the S24+, which uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. If you’re located in any other region, your version of the phone will instead use Samsung’s own Exynos 2400. There are minor performance differences between the two, with the Snapdragon chip being somewhat faster, but overall, it’s not too likely to make a noticeable difference in most cases.
In the case of the US version I’m reviewing, this isn’t a standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. Apparently, this version is fine-tuned to work with the Galaxy S24 lineup. If I had to guess, this means it likely leans into Samsung’s heavy AI focus slightly more.
Looking at benchmarks, running the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme test gave the S24+ a score of 4,730 with an average frame rate of 28.33 frames per second. To compare it to another phone, this means the Galaxy S24+ beat the iPhone 15 Pro in the same test.
Looking at gaming performance, the phone performs as well as you would expect a flagship-level phone to perform. More hardware intensive games like Genshin Impact and the newer Honkai Star Rail performed smoothly and without a hitch.
In daily use, interacting with the phone never felt slow, though admittedly, I didn’t expect it to and would have been somewhat shocked if it had. Still, it seems much of the horsepower here is going toward powering the Galaxy AI features, and this uses power in bursts instead of consistently dragging performance down.
Same Old Cameras, Improved By New Software
While Samsung keeping the same overall design as the previous generation is unlikely to upset longtime fans of the brand, the lack of changes to the camera system will be more controversial. It’s not that the changes are minimal, either. Instead, the hardware specs for the lenses are exactly the same.
As with the Galaxy S23+, you get a 50MP wide lens (f/1.8), a 12MP ultra-wide lens (f/2.2), and a 10MP telephoto lens (f/2.4) with a 3x optical zoom. Looking at the front, you get a 12MP selfie camera (f/2.2) which, again, is exactly the same as the previous model.
That said, the power of a phone’s camera comes as much in the processing as the actual hardware capturing the image. Samsung says that its ProVisual engine has seen major upgrades for the Galaxy S24+, and while I don’t have much experience with the previous model, I was always happy with the photos this phone took.
One of the major complaints of the S23+ in terms of the camera was that the processing was too aggressive, often artificially sharpening images to their detriment. I didn’t notice any of that here. While the images were sharp, I never noticed the telltale artifacts that software sharpening can add.
Colors are handled well, though certain images leaned ever so slightly toward over-saturation. More importantly, the colors were well-matched when switching between the various lenses. If you’re serious about photography or video capture with your phone, the consistent colors between lenses will make your life easier.
Speaking of video, the S24+ has a handy new feature that lets you record video across a combination of its various lenses. While this may not be that useful in daily life, this will likely be a popular feature among content creators.
Samsung’s Galaxy AI plays a big part here, thanks to features like its AI Edit Suggestions, which, as the name implies, will give you smart suggestions to improve your photos. This isn’t as impressive a feature as the Generative Edit, which can fill in image backgrounds with appropriate AI-generated content to remove passers-by or objects you’d rather not have in your photos.
Great Battery Life, With a Surprising Omission
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S24+ with a 4,900mAh battery. This is an increase over the previous generation, but only slightly. That model had a 4,700mAh battery, so the latest model has 200mAh of extra capacity.
That doesn’t sound especially impressive, but regardless of the differences between this model and its predecessor, the battery life is impressive. During my testing, I frequently went a day and a half between charges, and this was with some fairly heavy use, since I was testing the phone during this time.
When it comes to recharging, the Galaxy S24+ has plenty of fast charging options. With support for up to 45W wired charging, you can charge it to full fairly quickly. Even opting for wireless charging, you get 15W charging, which is fast compared to wireless charging even a few years ago.
Unfortunately, speaking of wireless charging, it’s strange not to see Qi2 wireless charging support here. Considering Samsung backed the Qi2 standard and Apple’s iPhone 15 had Qi2 support months before the Galaxy S24 series launched, it seems like a major misstep not to include it here.
Should You Buy the Samsung Galaxy S24+?
TheSamsung Galaxy S24+is the first Plus model in the company’s Galaxy lineup that makes the jump from just okay to truly great. There are enough upgrades over the standard model—the better screen and improved battery life among the more notable steps up—to easily make this the better buy between the two.
Before the S24+, recommending a Plus model over the Ultra wasn’t easy to do, but this time around it is. While photography enthusiasts and mobile-first content creators may need the more powerful camera from the Ultra, there isn’t much that makes it a massive improvement over the S24+, unless you can’t live without the S Pen.
The Galaxy S24+ isn’t a perfect phone, but many of its drawbacks, like a lack of Qi2 support, are found across the entire Galaxy S24 line. If you’re looking for a phone that comfortably sits in the Goldilocks zone of the Galaxy line, this year’s Plus model is just right.
