Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus review: Middle child syndrome | Expert Reviews

Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus review: Performance and battery life

Unfortunately, Samsung has taken a bit of a backwards step with its approach to processors in the Galaxy S24 line. While last year it adopted Qualcomm solutions across the board, this year, the global model of the Galaxy S24 Plus – like the Galaxy S24 – runs on the company’s custom Exynos 2400 chip.

All the usual benchmark tests point to a broadly flagship experience, but it’s simply not as fast a component as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that powers the US models. Given the inclusion of that QHD+ display, it offers the slowest GPU performance in the range, barely nudging above the Galaxy S23 Plus in our usual tests.

Considering the £200 premium, I would have liked to have seen the Galaxy S24 Plus follow the S24 Ultra’s lead and go with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip across the board.

While Samsung’s approach rather damages the Galaxy S24 Plus’ competitiveness with some of its rivals (Pixel 8 Pro excluded), the practical truth is that it performs smoothly in general usage. As with the Galaxy S24, I had no issues with it running the most demanding games on high settings, and I didn’t notice any hesitation when unlocking or jumping straight into the Camera app.

However, the Galaxy S24 Plus suffers even worse than the Galaxy S24 when it comes to sustained gaming performance. Using the 3D Mark Solar Bay Stress Test, which runs 20-minute-long graphically intense tests mimicking a high-end gaming session, the Galaxy S24 Plus scored a pretty terrible 52.5% (10% worse than the S24), indicating that the phone is throttling back massively under load.

I would have hoped that the extra surface area for the Galaxy S24 Plus’s cooling provision might have helped here, but it seems the Exynos 2400 is struggling to run that extra-sharp QHD+ display efficiently. No wonder Samsung defaults to FHD+.

It might not be much cop for prolonged gaming sessions, but the Galaxy S24 runs reasonably efficiently when the load is lighter. While a 4,900mAh battery is relatively small for a bigger phone, it’s larger than the 4,700mAh Galaxy S23 Plus cell before it.

Despite the inclusion of that bigger, brighter, sharper display, the Galaxy S24 Plus lasted 28hrs 13mins in our looping battery test. That’s about 1hr 40mins longer than the Galaxy S23 Plus and almost nine hours longer than the Pixel 8 Pro, though also an hour and a half shorter than the OnePlus 12 and around six hours shorter than the Galaxy S24 Ultra. In general use, I was able to go a full day with around five hours of screen-on time, and still had around 45% left.

As before, Samsung has supported up to 45W wired charging here. Using a 65W Samsung laptop charger (there’s no brick in the box) I measured a zero to 100% charge time of around 1hr 12mins, which is very similar to the Galaxy S24. It’s not especially speedy, especially compared to the OnePlus 12.