It's been a couple of days since Samsung officially unveiled its "next big thing", the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, and as the dust around the announcement settles, we have noticed one very interesting detail.
While generally the trend in the smartphone industry is that technology marches forward, Samsung has actually taken a step back and the new Note 20 Ultra cuts down on one of the best features of last year's Note 10 Plus.
See, the Note 10 Plus was a pioneer: its design cut on the bezels around the screen for a radical, true edge-to-edge experience, and it was a beauty to behold, but it was also one of very few mainstream phones that shipped with a whopping 256GB of on-board storage. iPhones, for example, only have 64GB of storage in the base models and require you to pay more for extra storage, while most Android phone makers only provide 128GB of on board storage. This made the Galaxy Note 10 Plus a bit of a rarity on the market, a phone with enough storage to last you for years.
So you would only expect that this year's Galaxy Note will also ship with 256GB of storage, right?
Well, unfortunately not if you live in the United States!
The US model of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra only comes with 128GB of on-board storage at the base version, half the storage of last year's model. What a bummer! Samsung does provide a 512GB model as well, but upgrading to that model will cost you an extra $150 dollars.
Interestingly, the rest of the world will get the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with 256GB of on-board storage, just as you would expect after the Note 10 series.
If you are confused with Samsung's strategy for different markets... well, we are a bit confused too. But the bottomline is that while US users have the advantage of getting a Galaxy Note 20 Ultra device equipped with the superior Snapdragon processor instead of Exynos, they are also getting a worse deal when it comes to the storage with just 128GB for the base model versus 256GB of storage in other markets.
