Fingerprint Scanner and Security


One of our biggest complaints with the S10 series and then the Note 10 series was the fingerprint scanner. Samsung used a fingerprint reader embedded under the screen and one of the ultrasonic kind, meaning that it uses sound waves to read the ridges and specific pattern of your finger to recognize it. This is different from most other Android phone makers that use an optical solution that uses light. Unfortunately, the S20 Ultra does not seem to have improved much from the Note series last year and the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner still feels like a hit-or-miss experience. Sure, it works most of the time, but we were having far more missed readings than on other phones.

You also have face recognition as an option. The Ultra uses 2D picture based face recognition, so it's not quite as complex and secure as the 3D models used on Apple's Face ID, or Google's Pixel 4 series, but we do recommend you try it out. Since the fingerprint scanner experience is not quite perfect, you might find it a better experience to use both the fingerprint and face recognition in tandem. Just don't forget that this face recognition system could theoretically be tricked by some malicious actor using your photo.

One UI and Android


The S20 Ultra is running on a slightly newer version of the Samsung One UI that we have already seen on the S10 and Note 10 series. You have One UI version 2.1 on the Ultra and the looks are the same as on the S10 series, but there are a couple of new features, chief among them a new Quick Share option that is basically Samsung's alternative to AirDrop and allows you to quickly send big files between devices without the need to deal with slow Bluetooth speeds.

The feature is not supported on the S10 series yet, so we could only test it between the new Galaxy S20 Ultra and Z Flip. To illustrate the speeds you can expect to get, we tried sending a 1GB video from the S20 Ultra to the Z Flip, and it transferred in just 21 seconds, which works out to transfer speeds of nearly 50MB per second, impressively quick. QuickShare works even when the devices are not connected to a network or even Wi-Fi. What it does is create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network for every file transfer. While it worked great most of the time, it did not always work so fast, and on a couple of occasions we noticed slowdowns as the same transfer took nearly 40 seconds and once even two minutes, but most of the time, the speeds that you will get will be pretty incredible. We can only hope such a feature arrives on a much wider range of Android smartphones in the future.