Galaxy S24 FE, Samsung’s economic flagship, despite the significant increase in processing power, still has some of the weaknesses of the past.
Today, you can hardly find anyone who is not somehow familiar with the Samsung Fan Edition series. Samsung’s FE series products are very popular thanks to their hardware offerings and build quality on par with flagship phones with a lower price tag, and are often referred to as flagship killers rather than fan-pleasers. On the other hand, the presence of strong competitors such as Xiaomi’s T series is a strong reason for the life of the FE family to continue.
Artificial intelligence is considered to be the leading actor of these days in the world of technology; Therefore, companies like Samsung have seized the opportunity to make the most of the capacity of the prevailing psychological space to be in the spotlight and use artificial intelligence as an important trump card against competitors.
Now it’s the turn of the FE series to inherit the artificial intelligence capabilities from their flagship brothers/sisters in addition to the hardware features; But not everything is artificial intelligence, and we should not forget that the FE series, with all its merits, is under the microscope; Because its previous generations have not left a very bright record in terms of chip performance stability and battery life. Has Samsung been able to think of a solution for this problem? We will find the answer to this question in the Galaxy S24 FE review.
Galaxy S24 FE Design: Goodbye to the crowd
The first big change that can be seen in the appearance of the S24 FE is not a change in the design language, but an increase in its size; Now the dimensions of the phone have increased from 6.5 to 6.7 inches, which may be good news for some and unpleasant for others; But since most of the phones have similar dimensions, maybe it would be better if Samsung did not touch the size of the phone to maintain the distinction and have a better chance to attract fans of compact phones.
With the increase in the dimensions of the phone, the screen-to-body ratio has reached 88%, which makes the wide margins of the previous generation less noticeable; I emphasize that they are less noticeable because the width of the borders around the screen in the Galaxy S24 FE does not change significantly compared to the previous generation, and you still have to get used to seeing them.
The Galaxy S24 FE’s screen protection has been improved after a major setback in the S23 FE with Gorilla Glass Victus+; But the back glass frame of the phone is still made of Gorilla Glass 5, and due to its shiny and transparent surface, it still has a high talent for absorbing fingerprints; However, it provides good friction with the hand and does not allow the phone to slide.
The curved and matte aluminum frame of the previous generation has been replaced by a flat frame, lest the Galaxy S24FA defy the design language of the Koreans this year; This change helps to maintain the stability of the phone in the hand; But it reduces the elegance of the phone and even with a 0.2 mm thickness reduction, it looks rougher than the previous generation.
By increasing the size of the phone and using a larger battery, the weight of the S24 FE has increased by four grams and has reached 213 grams; Although the increase in the weight of the phone is not very noticeable; But due to the increase in size, the device does not fit easily in the hand of the previous generation. The combination of these two things made me feel more like a mid-range phone than a flagship killer; Although, nowadays, Samsung phones, from low-end to flagship, have more or less the same appearance.
Galaxy S24 FE is produced in green, blue, yellow, silver and gray (graphite) colors, relying on the IP68 standard, it can last for 30 minutes in 1.5 meters of water, on the bottom edge of the USB 3.2 Type-C port, groove Speaker and microphone holes and on the top edge hosts the SIM card port and secondary microphone holes and noise canceling. The power and volume up/down buttons are also placed on the right edge with the same arrangement as before.
Galaxy S24 FE screen and speaker: accurate and attractive
The Galaxy S24 FE uses the brand’s Dynamic AMOLED 2X OLED display, which renders content at FHD+ resolution, or 2340 x 1080 pixels, and a 120Hz refresh rate. Due to the 0.2-inch increase in screen size, the pixel density has decreased to a very small amount that cannot be detected by the naked eye.
The Galaxy S24 FE panel is not LTPO and low-power, and the refresh rate only moves between 60 and 120 Hz depending on the content; Therefore, the always-on display or AOD of the phone, unlike the S24 series, does not have the ability to display the background image and only shows the clock and notifications.
The S24 FE display, like other Samsung phones, uses 8-bit color depth with the ability to display 16 million colors; Therefore, standards such as Dolby Vision are not supported, and you can only watch content with the HDR10+ standard; But the good news is that the brightness rate of the device when playing such content reaches more than 2240 nits based on the measurement of Zoomit; Of course, the maximum brightness under sunlight does not exceed 1695 nits, which is still 30% brighter than before.
The S24 FE display has two color profiles, Natural and Vivid, which are defined in the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. From the S24 phones onwards, Samsung made changes to the Vivid profile that, according to its own words, shows colors more naturally; Therefore, by switching from the Natural profile to Vivid, by default, the colors do not recover the past freshness and wider coverage of the DCI-P3 color range, and we do not see any special change except the colors becoming colder.
To experience more vivid colors, you can use the slider in the Advanced Settings section to increase the color intensity. By increasing Vividness as much as possible, you can restore that past visual experience; However, a small part of the DCI-P3 range falls under the S24 FE and does not cover it 100%.
The Natural profile displays completely neutral colors with high accuracy; Of course, the accuracy of the Vivid profile is also very good with DeltaE 3.2; But you will see the same tendency to be cold in the display of colors by choosing this profile.
There is an optical fingerprint sensor under the display, which is slightly lower than the S23 FE and its performance is as fast and accurate as before; The speed and accuracy of the device’s optical sensor cannot be compared with ultrasonic sensors; However, you can rest assured that there is no problem with the fingerprint recognition on the protective glass.
The Galaxy S24 FE uses the speakerphone as a second speaker to produce stereo sound. Speakers provide high and balanced sound volume. As with the Galaxy S23 FE, sound separation is good as long as you don’t plan on playing loud music; However, the bass may not have that usual thump in some songs.
S24 FE performance and charging: with the power of a full-fledged flagship
The presence of Exynos chips in the heart of Fan Editions has become a tradition and Samsung has chosen to follow the same procedure this year. Now that, after a gap of one year, the basic and plus models of the S24 series have also been launched with the Exynos chip, Samsung is equipping it with the Exynos 2400e chip to differentiate between the flagship series and the fan edition. Also, unlike last year, there is no news about the Snapdragon version and all S24 FE models are launched with Samsung chips.
The Exynos chip at the heart of the Galaxy S24 FE is not much different from the Exynos 2400 at the heart of the flagships of the S24 series, and only the frequency of its powerful core is 100 MHz lower. Samsung says that the change in the frequency of the high-powered Exynos 2400e core helps to improve the chip’s energy consumption, higher stability and better temperature control in various applications.
Looking at the benchmark results in the table below, we can see that the 100 MHz decrease in processor frequency in the usual benchmarks does not have a noticeable effect on the performance of the S24 FE compared to the S24, and with a small difference, it appears weaker in single-core and multi-core processing. Due to the same graphics processor, the performance of S24 FE in this department is not significantly different from its flagship family.
The generational gap between the S24 FE chip and the S23 FE is such that any comparison is irrelevant. The Exynos 2400e not only beats its predecessor in all areas, including CPU and GPU processing power, but also beats almost all the pseudo-flagships of other brands that we have reviewed at Zoomit.
Samsung Fan Edition 2024 appears 30% better in single-core processing and 60% better in multi-core processing and graphic computing power than the previous generation. The game simulator test also shows that thanks to an 80% improvement in results, you can count on the S24 FE with more confidence in running games.
In playing a heavy game like Genshin Impact, you can have a better evaluation of the performance of the Samsung chip in heavy and more realistic scenarios. In the situation where we set the game’s graphics settings to the highest setting, the game ran for a short time with an average of 55 frames per second; But after a few minutes, as the device warmed up to about 43 degrees Celsius, the performance dropped to 40 frames per second. Sudden frame drops was another problem we experienced in Genshin Impact.
GPU performance stability testing can give a better view of how the chip handles performance and temperature during heavy and long usage. The Galaxy S24 FE starts the test with a nearly 1,000-point gap over its S24 sibling, but ends the test with an equal score. Such conditions show that the performance drop of the 2400e chip in heavy usage is less than that of the Exynos 2400, which somehow indicates better performance management.
In terms of temperature control, the situation is not going very well for the Samsung chip, and considering that we don’t have a very good memory of the temperature situation of the Exynos chips, we look at this category with more sensitivity. During the stress test, the temperature of the phone’s body rose to 46 degrees Celsius, which cannot be described by the words “progress” or “improvement”.
The Galaxy S24 FE battery has increased by 200 mAh compared to last year’s model, and considering that this year the screen size has also increased, the result obtained in the battery charging test looks promising. The Galaxy S24 Fe can have about 2 hours of charge in everyday use; That is, 2 hours of charging more than the previous generation.
We had the 256GB model for review. According to the results of the benchmarks, it seems that the storage space in the 256GB and 512GB models is UFS 4.0, which provides high speed in reading and writing data.
Galaxy S24 FE software: pseudo-flagship full of artificial intelligence
In addition to the flagship chip, the Galaxy S24 FE inherits many software features from the Galaxy S24 family. Since we’ve been hearing Samsung’s AI a lot since the S24 series was introduced, we expected to see at least some of Samsung’s native AI capabilities in this year’s Fan Edition. Fortunately, in the software department, the Koreans have been especially kind to their flagship this year.
Galaxy S24 FE offers a complete package of Samsung’s artificial intelligence features in its software. Functions such as Sketch To Image, live translation of calls or Live Translate, photo editing with artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence assistant functions such as Chat Assist and Note Assist, and of course, the attractive and extremely practical Circle To Search function are also present in S24 FE.
Thanks to the powerful chip, the Galaxy S24 FE can process some language models of artificial intelligence without the need for an Internet connection and also access the offline version of Google’s artificial intelligence, Gemina Nano. Since we have already talked about Samsung’s AI capabilities in detail in our Galaxy S24 Ultra review article, we suggest you check out this article.
The Galaxy S24 FE runs Android 14 out of the box, and even if we leave out the AI capabilities, we’ll find some interesting features at its heart. For example, S24 FE now uses the Super HDR feature; In the sense that the brightness of the display is adjusted based on the bright and dark points of the photo independently of the brightness of the device itself, and like HDR videos, you can watch the photos more vividly and brighter than before. In addition to the promise of 7 years of updating the operating system, S24 FE has another feature in common with this year’s Samsung flagships, which can encourage any user to buy it.
Galaxy S24 FE camera: more or less better and sometimes worse
For the S24 FE camera, the Koreans have not only adopted their usual procedure of using a triple combination of wide, ultra-wide and telephoto, but they have not touched the sensors and lenses except for the telephoto camera. As before, the same 50 megapixel sensor used in the previous generation as well as the S22 to S24 phones and the 12 megapixel sensor of the S23 FE ultrawide camera are present in this phone.
The telephoto camera uses an 8-megapixel sensor made by OmniVision instead of SK Hynix, which is not particularly different in terms of sensor dimensions and pixels, and offers three times magnification; Therefore, except for the role of the image signal processor in processing photos, no other factor can be considered to be involved in the difference in the output of the images.
Samsung says that the S24 FE uses the ProVisual Engine to improve the quality of photos and remove noise and blur caused by vibration, especially in the dark, and also prevents the loss of image quality in digital zooms. Also, thanks to the more powerful chip, it is now possible to record 8K videos at 30 fps and even 4K slow-motion video at 120 fps.
Galaxy S24 FE; A product still involved with constant challenges
The one-year absence of the Exynos gave a second chance to the Korean fan edition to experience a significant upgrade in terms of hardware; So, upgrading from S23 FE to this phone can be seen as more logical than upgrading from S21 FE to S23 FE. Longer battery life and seven-year software support, along with artificial intelligence capabilities, are two other important factors that bring the previous generations of the FE series to their knees against this phone.
If we refer to the question at the beginning of the article, we can see that the problem of performance loss and heat that have always plagued the FE series has not been solved this year, and even the weakened version of the Exynos 2400 could not help it. It seems that this issue will continue to be the killer of Korean flagships until Samsung gives up Exynos.