Which Should You Choose? iPhone 11 Pro Max vs S20 Ultra 5G

Hi everyone, 

The iPhone 11 Pro Max and s20 ultra 5g are both great phones in different ways but in this video I’m going to compare both of them and I’ll talk about everything from the price to the displays to the cameras and much more and if you want to jump to any specific point in this video just check the description for the time codes below now the first thing is the price the iPhone 11 pro max starts at 1099 with 64 gigabytes of storage and goes up to 1400 and $49 with 512 gigabytes of storage there’s also 256 gigabytes of album with the s20 ultra 5g it starts at one thousand three hundred and ninety nine dollars and goes up to one thousand five hundred and ninety nine ninety nine with 128 or 512 gigabyte options but also offers expandable storage through the SIM card slot and if we pop out the SIM card tray here I’ll show you can pop in a micro SD card up to a one terabyte of storage in the micro SD card. 

So you have a ton of storage options for the s20 ultra now as far as colors the iPhone 11 pro max comes in space grey like I have here it also comes in silver gold and midnight green which is the newest color now for the s20 ultra it only comes in two colors cosmic grey that I have here and then a cosmic black and so you’ve only got those two color options of course most people are going to cover these with a skin or a case or something like that so the options may not be that big of a deal but when it comes to the colors on the s20 they’re very shiny and they’re very prone to fingerprints with the iPhone 11 Pro max the back is a matte finish and you don’t really see the fingerprints too much so that’s not a huge consideration but just something to mention now as far as the size and build overall you can see the s20 ultra is much bigger than the iPhone at least vertically anyway the iPhone comes in at 7.9 7 ounces or 226 grams and is made of stainless steel and glass.

So stainless steel around the outside edge and then glass front and back now when it comes to the s20 ultra it’s made out of aluminum and glass so it actually is a little bit lighter than the 11pro max despite its larger size so aluminum around the frame its coated in a little metallic shiny material sort of like Chrome and then it also comes in at seven point seven six ounces or 220 grams now both of them have ip68 ratings technically the 11pro max has a deeper rating for water its four meters for up to thirty minutes but the s20 ultra is 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes in many tests that other people have done they basically fare about the same in similar depths of water but either way.

They’re not meant to be in the water regularly it’s just resistance to splash of splashing and things like that and neither manufacturer will cover the damage if they find that a water sensor inside has been tripped so just keep that in mind they’re not meant to be showered with or anything like that you want to make sure you put them in a waterproof case since they won’t cover that now the displays on both phones are fantastic and they’re both made by Samsung Apple is using a Samsung made display but to their specifications where Samsung is obviously designing their own display with the iPhone it doesn’t really curve round the edges although it is slightly curved on the edge to give it a softer feel but with the s20 ultra Samsung has actually toned down how the water fall over the side displays happen on this phone. 

So they’re not really over the edge it’s just a little bit and that helps with accidental presses so both displays look great and when it comes to the iPhone 11 Pro max it’s a 6.5 inch Retina XDR display its 2688 by 1242 with 458 pixels per inch and it supports HDR the s20 ultra has a huge 6.9 inch quad HD dynamic AMOLED display 3200 by 1440 with 511 pixels per inch it’s the Infinity our display which is basically a way of saying it’s a hole-punch display for the forward facing camera it also supports 120 Hertz and HDR so 120 Hertz makes it super smooth and the iPhone is very smooth as well but it’s just the smoothness that’s hard to show on camera but is incredibly smooth so if you go into something like music for example and you just scroll the scrolling is just much smoother on the s20 ultra and it’s something that maybe.

You can see in the 60 frames per second YouTube video or maybe you can’t but if there is definitely a difference but it does eat into the battery and I’ll talk more about that in a moment now with the s20 ultra you have a really nice display it’s probably the best display I’ve ever seen but it does have a couple different odd options and what i mean by that is you have the option for 120 Hertz which is not turned on by default or you have the option to go into settings and change it to a higher resolution so you can have one or the other so for example it says motion smoothness here you can have a hundred and twenty Hertz or if you go to the standard 60 Hertz refresh rate you go down to the screen resolution now you can bump it up to why plus so you only get the full resolution of the display. 

If you don’t have a hundred and twenty Hertz turned on if you want the 120 Hertz motion smoothness you need to have it in a slightly lower closer to 1080p resolution so I’d rather have the smoothness that you can’t see the pixels anyway and this super-fast smoothness is just something that has to be seen in person to appreciate but it’s just so smooth and I haven’t seen any issues with it whatsoever now that does eat into the batteries a little bit and so on both of the phones they have pretty decent battery life but with the iPhone 11 pro max we have a 3969 milliamp hour battery and in my experience that will give me about 10 to 12 hours of screen on time so if we allow the battery to load here over the last 10 days you’ll see this was yesterday at 3 hours and 42 minutes of screen on time 3 hours and 23 minutes of screen off time with just over probably about 30% of my battery being used according to this graph the battery on the s20 ultra is a huge 5000 milliamp hours. 

But because of that 120 Hertz display it does eat into the battery life a bit and you’ll see it says 5 hours left lets go into the battery usage and you’ll see over the past few days I’ve had screen on time right now of 9 minutes but over the days that I’ve been using it I find that with 120 Hertz turned on I’m going to get about six hours of screen on time if you turn that off you’ll get much more but I think most people will want that 120 Hertz so if you don’t have the availability of a charger and you want this the battery to last longer I would suggest turning off the motion smoothness so that you can extend the battery then turn it back on when you’re in your normal environment and you can charge it regularly now both of these phones have similar ways to unlock them and different ways to unlock them. 

So the s20 ultra has an under the display fingerprint sensor and it works pretty well compared to say the s10 plus for example of last year the iPhone 11 pro max has face ID which is 3d and scans your face to match it with what’s in its secure Enclave and based off that 3d image information it allows you to unlock your phone very securely but you do not have a fingerprint sensor option aside from the fingerprint sensor option on the s20 ultra you not only have that

but you also have to deface unlocking which is less secure so with the s20 ultra you really want to use that fingerprint sensor it works well once you learn where it is it seems to be no problem once in a while I’ll have it miss read my fingerprint but it works 99% of the time and it really comes down to whether or not you want to use face ID or you want to use a fingerprint sensor you of course can use pass codes on either one of them now internally the specs are similar in some ways and different in others.

For example the iPhone 11 pro max has apples a 13 Bionic chipset with the third generation neural engine and 4 gigabytes of RAM with the s20 ultra has welcomes snapdragon 865 with an adrenal 650 GPU and 12 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes of RAM depending on which option you have this has 12 gigabytes of RAM and one of the interesting things you can do with this is pin apps so that they’re constantly open in the background so for example if I want to go into say music here I’ll go to my app switcher press and hold on the icon at the top and then we can keep open for quick launching that will lock this into memory and you can keep up to three apps that way locked into memory so that they never close.

When you’re using them so if we go and keep open for quickly you’re good to go and it won’t reload ever you also have the ability to split screen apps so well talk more about Android a little bit between iOS and Android in a minute but with locking that into memory you can just reload your apps more quickly now it’s debatable whether or not this phone will actually reload apps other than those three but it seems like you can load just as many apps into memory and have it work fine I find on the iPhone to be around 20 apps before it needs to reload them over time depending on what app that is so both of them are good in their own ways and I think that’s not an about an issue for most people when it comes to the overall speed of the devices both of them are incredibly fast and don’t ever really feel slow. 

So for example if I open the cameras on both of them at the same time they open it about the same rate if I spin them around you’ll see it’s about within probably less than half a second so both of them work really well that way and then if we go into a game for example maybe well go into say Real Racing 3 or asphalt 9 so well go into that and I’ll show you the speed at which they load and the one advantage that the s20 ultra has in this aspect is it has 120 Hertz for the refresh rate and so it’s just incredibly smooth all of the time so you’ll see it loaded a little bit slower on the 11pro max well hit play and well just get through this so that we can get to a game and I just reloaded this I haven’t played this in a while but I wanted to show you for example if you go through.

It at the same place so well go ahead and hit next and there we go so I loaded them at about the same time but this gives you an idea if you can see this and how buttery smooth it is on the s20 ultra I’m not sure if you can see it but the difference is definitely there and things seem very smooth most of the time so in general I’ll just let this run for a second so you can see it but it seems like everything’s nice and smooth all of the time so well hold the drift and it gives you an idea of the games difference they basically look the same but the actual smoothness of that of both games is definitely different if you can see that on this video I’m not sure so depending on what you’re doing its really going to be up to what app.

How many apps you have open but in general things are just fast all the time so if we go into the music applications you’ll see everything loads quick but the s20 ultra has that super smooth scrolling so it just depends which one you like as far as that goes but they’re both impressively fast no matter what you’re doing with the iPhone 11 Pro max we have a 12 megapixel F 2.2 lens that can record in 4k 60 with the s20 ultra we have a 40 megapixel F 2.2 that can record also in 4k 60 if we open both of them up you’ll see they open nice and fast let me spin it around on the iPhone here and both of them look pretty good but what I did is record a video to show you the difference between.

Both of them outside in a real-world situation so take a look at this and let me know what you think in the comments below I’m recording with the front-facing camera of the s20 ultra and the iPhone 11 pro max so here you can hear the audio from the iPhone 11 Pro Max and now from the s20 Ultram both settings are on default I turned off any face smoothing that I could and also it’s in 4k 60 so this should give you an idea of what the front-facing cameras can do when it comes to video now with the rear cameras they’re very different as far as specs and megapixel counts but that doesn’t necessarily mean better quality but I’ll let you be the judge as I’ve actually done a comparison but let’s first talk about the specs now the first thing is with the iPhone 11 Pro max we have three 12 megapixel cameras the first one is an.

Why deaf 2.4 then we have a wide F 1.8 and a telephoto that does 2 X optical zoom with f 2 they both have portrait mode and night mode and the iPhone has what’s called deep fusion that’s sort of for indoor or dim lighting with the s20 ultra we have a very interesting setup we have a 12 megapixel ultra wide f 2.2 a one hundred and eight megapixel wide-angle F 1.8 with optical image stabilization then we have a 48 megapixel telephoto F 3.5 with 4x optical zoom up to 100 X digital space zoom and we also have depth vision cameras as well and so again what I’ve done is record a bunch of video outside and photos to show you the difference between them in various situations both in daylight and one at night so let’s go ahead and take a look at those.

Now both phones look pretty impressive with regular video recording in 4k but the s20 ultra also can record in 8k so if we go into the settings here you’ll see a rear video size 16 by 9 8k 7680 by 4320 now its super impressive that this phone can do that but the 8k and the 4k don’t really look too much different and you get 24 frames per second and you don’t get tracking autofocus when you’re using 8k so there’s enough disadvantages to the 8k with the s20 ultra that I would just stick with 4k now also the autofocus on the s20 ultra just doesn’t even come close unfortunately to the 11pro max in my experience I really wish it did because other than that one thing its great but the s20 plus actually has dual pixel autofocus which should be the same or better than the iPhone so for some reason they didn’t include it with the s20 ultra and you’ll have worse autofocus on the ultra-version of this phone now one area where the s20 ultra is probably much better is cellular options and connectivity in general. 

So for example the 11pro max uses an Intel modem can do 4G LTE and Wi-Fi 6 with the s20 ultra we can do 5g sub 6 millimeter wave and Wi-Fi 6 so we have all of the same options plus 5g as you can see now I have 5 G and this is sub 6 5g millimeter wave is definitely not ready its only on specific street corners in specific cities and is more of a technology showpiece you have to sort of be in line of sight of that that millimeter wave antenna and so it’s really only useful in a few cities such as New York City Chicago and others around the United States big cities but on specific street corners if you have Verizon and soon ATT so sub 6 is really the 5g that seems to be everywhere right now and so I thought I’d do a comparison with 4G LTE on T-Mobile and sub 6 5g on T-Mobile this is using project fire Google Phi. 

But they also use T-Mobile sub 6 so let’s go to speed test here well open it up and lets hit go and you’ll see that we will get good speeds on 5g so let’s let it go here and well get speeds that usually are about double what I’m getting on 4G LTE in the same spot so again this is from T-Mobile and both are coming from T-Mobile as far as that speed goes up load speeds again about double or a little bit more so they’re not phenomenal changes like the millimeter wave with over a thousand megabits per second but there’s definitely a difference and the only other thing is 5g will use more power especially if you’re using millimeter wave so just keep that in mind it is better but I wouldn’t necessarily buy a phone just to get double the bandwidth.

If you’re already getting 25 to 30 megabits per second down keep in mind 4k video requires about fifteen or fourteen megabits per second streaming in full quality so you really don’t need that 30 megabits per second or higher but its nice to have the option if you’re using your phone as a hotspot for example now another thing to consider is the speakers both of them are fantastic in fact I don’t know that you could hear the difference and I’ll try and show you the difference but they both sound really good now I have one of my videos set up the same video on both phones and I wanted you to hear what it sounds like on both of them just so you can get an idea of the difference from Apple for 2020 this is every phone that Apple currently sells new on their website or in their stores and this is the current offering of iPhones from Apple for 2020 this is every phone that Apple currently sells new on their website or in their stores so both of them sound pretty good. 

I wouldn’t really buy them based off their speakers they both go equally loud I would see the iPhone sounds a little bit clearer at the high end but both does distort a little bit as you get to higher volumes the iPhone I think gets the edge a little bit in sound quality but in general they’re very close and in some cases I would say the s20 ultra has better stereo sound is well since its projecting sound out of the top speaker on both of them and the interesting thing is you can’t even see the top speaker on the s20 ultra it’s in the top of the phone above the camera in between the little aluminum outside edge so it’s a really good sound despite not being able to see it now finally we’ve got I oh s 13 versus Android with one UI and this really comes down to which one you prefer most both of them have about the same amount of apps.

You can see I have similar apps on both you’ve got Gmail or spark and YouTube of course and then Microsoft’s to do and then you can use Apple music or Spottily whatever you’d like you have the option on both of them but with Android you’ve got Google assistant built-in with iPhone you have to install the Google app so it just depends what you want to do so you could use Google  play music Spottily whatever you’d like and you have things like Netflix or anything else so apps are really not a consideration.

Now one thing you can do with the s20 ultra and many Android phones that you can’t with iOS is split screen so if I go into YouTube for example then maybe we want email split in another view go back and now we have both so I can watch a video while going through my email and I have the option to use both so its super nice that you have that option you’ve got picture-in-picture and things that you don’t necessarily get on an iPhone so it’s just which operating system you like best what environment you’re in as far as having Macs and iPads and Apple TV and the ecosystem in general if you have a lot of Samsung devices the Samsung will work better feel a lot of Apple devices the iPhone will work better so it really comes down to what works best for you both are phenomenally good phones expect discounts though on the s20 ultra later.

In the year as they tend to go down in price pretty dramatically halfway through and of course well have new ones from each manufacturer every year both get regular updates iOS 13 has been a little bit buggy on iPhones but with the s20 ultra you’re getting the monthly security updates that Google puts it puts out for Android so you have those security updates that keep things up to date along with bug fixes and things like that now both phones I can definitely recommend and both support things like wireless charging or fast charging and thus the s20 ultra supports fast why was charging so you’ve got lots of different options there’s accessories.