Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Review: Freakin’ Excellent

Want the best value Samsung phone with best-in-class performance this year? The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE is it.

Pros	Cons
Excellent app performance	Slippery in the hand
Nice cameras	No storage expansion
Decent battery life	Charging maxes out at 25W

Score: 4.5/5

	Buy The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Specifications
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Design
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Camera
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Performance
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Battery
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Conclusion

Design

Samsung’s FE phones – the FE stands for “Fan Edition”, a suffix that has never made a lick of sense to me – have long been its entry level tier for flagships, released a number of months after a new Galaxy S series debuts at a fraction of the price but with most of the critical features of that year’s phones present.

As such, they tend to very closely follow the design notes of that year’s phones, and the Galaxy S24 FE is no exception at all. Put side to side with the Galaxy S24, and you’d really only notice the size difference in screens and bodies as a result, with the same vertical triple lens jutting out of the back and a range of pastel tones built into the body.

For the Galaxy S24 FE in Australia, that encompasses Blue, Mint or Graphite finishes, though there are yellow and grey models that are not being sold here. Seems odd to me that the “Fan Edition” phone wouldn’t encompass letting Australian fans have access to all the colours, but that’s not an uncommon play for most phone makers and the models they sell down under.

Samsung sent me the Blue model to test out – somebody at Samsung Australia must know that I’m a sucker for blue phones, and I totally admit that’s a subjective matter, but it is what it is.

The Galaxy S24 FE is built around a 6.7 inch 1080x2340 pixel 120Hz capable AMOLED display with Samsung’s typically very bright and colourful default presentation. Bezels are minimal, and the phone is wrapped in the same metal frame as its more expensive S24 siblings.

It’s nicely durable, rated at IP68 and with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ front and back… though maybe it needs it, because without a case it’s quite a slippery device to hold. So far I've caught it every time it's slipped, but it feels like it's just a matter of time before it's going to head to the ground, fast. Buying a case for it is strongly advised.

One way that the Galaxy S24 FE keeps its price low relative to the slightly larger Galaxy S24 is with the use of a simpler optical fingerprint reader for unlocking; Samsung’s flagship phones typically have an ultrasonic reader instead.

It’s a touch slower than my recollection of the Galaxy S24 Ultra tested earlier this year, but not by a level that particularly bothered me during testing – and not to any level where it failed to unlock for me every time I wanted it to.

Camera

The Galaxy S24 FE features a trio at lenses at the rear, encompassing a primary 50MP wide lens, secondary 12MP ultra-wide and 8MP telephoto 3x lens, capable of punching up as high as 30x with hybrid zoom. At the front for selfies you get a 10MP sensor to play with.

That is a lesser camera recipe than you get on the Galaxy S24 range, though it’s one that I’ve generally found to be quite pleasing in day to day testing.

Samsung’s camera post processing tends towards slightly oversaturated colours, but for everyday consumer use that’s often seen as a desirable feature, and if you’re after a more natural look you could tone that down in post processing anyway.

I do like the flexibility of having everything from wide to a decent telephoto lens at my disposal, and the Galaxy S24 FE runs this gamut fairly well at its price point, though predictably pushing the telephoto too hard isn’t a good idea.

To give that idea some context, I took the Galaxy S24 FE with me to a Cold Chisel concert in Armidale recently where a number of other bands were performing. During the Birds of Tokyo set, I put the Galaxy S24 FE through its paces:

At the ultrawide setting… you can see how close to the stage I wasn’t.

The wide shot presents well, but I’m still not seeing much of the stage.

3x Telephoto, its true optical range presents OK, though the differences in colour representation to the primary wide lens are immediately apparent.

10x telephoto is actually OK; this is where I’d suggest you stop, though, because…

At 20x telephoto, the photographic cracks are really starting to show.

At 30x telephoto… oh dear.

This isn’t unusual; the long zooms on most of the phones of this type are usually not that useful for any actual photos you would want to use.

At the front, the selfie camera does as well as it can with my potato-shaped head:

It's me. No camera can make me look good, it's just the way it is.

Like Samsung’s other Galaxy S and Galaxy Z phones this year, you also get access to Samsung’s Portrait Studio, an AI tool that reimagines faces in a variety of styles.

I found this did an uneven job on the Galaxy Z Flip6, so how would the Galaxy S24 FE’s take on Portrait Studio with the above selfie fare?

Why did nobody tell me that I was secretly Homer Simpson?

This is my grumpy sketch face.

Maybe it’s just me, though.

What if I set the Galaxy S24 FE a challenge?

Here’s a photo of one of the video screens at that Cold Chisel gig, showing Ian Moss doing what he does best:

I'm a long way from the screen, but the Galaxy S24 FE handles it (and low light) well enough.

And here's what Portrait Studio did to that shot of Ian Moss:

Oh.

Wow.

Also, to be clear… NO.

Galaxy S24 FE Sample Photos

Performance

Samsung makes some very bold claims about the performance of the Galaxy S24 FE within its price range, which made me raise my eyebrows a little, if only because it’s running on one of Samsung’s own Exynos 2400e processors.

Exynos phones have (in my testing) typically been fine performers, but rarely best in class. Along with the Exynos 2400e, you get 8GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of onboard storage. There’s no capacity for microSD card expansion, however.

To my very pleasant surprise, Samsung wasn’t over-egging the Galaxy S24 FE’s performance, because it really is that good, not only within its price range, but above it.

To give that some perspective, here’s how it compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test against a range of similarly priced phones, as well as one that’s considerably more expensive:

The Galaxy Z Flip6 is significantly more expensive than the Galaxy S24 FE of course, so it’s surprising to see just how close the performance gap is between those two phones.

You can get a faster Samsung phone, but you’ve got to spend Galaxy S24 Ultra-level money to get there.

Also read:
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review

It’s a very similar picture at a GPU level too; here’s how the same set of phones compare using 3DMark Wild Life’s graphics benchmark:

While it wasn’t possible to get hold of a Galaxy S24 for testing here, I’ve little doubt based on the Z Flip6’s performance that what we’re looking at here is near-S24-level performance at a fraction of the cost – and who isn’t going to love that?

There’s very few Android apps that tax a processor beyond what the Galaxy S24 FE can handle, and that’s great for a phone that officially retails for just a shade over $1,000. More on that in my conclusions, however.

On the software side, the Galaxy S24 FE is an Android 14 phone with the promise of a full 7 years of OS and security updates, entirely in line with its bigger Galaxy S24 siblings, which is great to see.
It’s 2024, so of course you also get an infusion of AI, via Samsung’s Galaxy AI suite of tools.

These cover your basic text generation as well as image manipulation, and they’re… fine, I guess.

Honestly, I’ve find the endless hype around AI this year to be a tad exhausting, because to date at a consumer level, beyond the “party trick” level of adding or subtracting from images I’m not quite seeing the “killer app” potential of what’s been offered by anyone at all.

I do appreciate the fact that Samsung’s Sketch to Image manipulation tool watermarks everything it creates to make it apparent it’s an AI fake, though the positioning of that watermark could all too easily be cropped out of many photos.

As an example of what it can do, I took this photo of a hat:

It's... a hat. What happens if I sketch a cat face on the top of it?

Galaxy AI rendering isn’t particularly fast, because it is server-based, not local to the device, but it eventually gave me this rather cute kitten badge with quite appropriate shading too, as well as a watermark to show that it’s not a real item.

Samsung’s claims around Galaxy AI are that they will remain free to use through to the end of 2025, and that applies to the Galaxy S24 FE as well. While I can’t get that excited by them, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you are keen, at some point these features may attract a monthly cost to use.

At a network level, the Galaxy S24 FE tells a predictable story, with 5G sub-6Ghz capability built in via either a single nano-SIM or e-SIM. Network conditions can vary widely, but the Galaxy S24 FE had few issues hitting my typically seen speed peaks of between 200-400Mbps on the Telstra network in Sydney.

Battery

The Galaxy S24 FE has a 4,700mAh battery tucked behind its display, slightly lower than the near-standard 5,000mAh battery you see in just about every other Android phone of this size.

However, what I’ve generally found over the years is that Samsung’s Exynos processors have been a little bit better at preserving battery power than their comparable Qualcomm equivalents. In the past, that was at the cost of performance, but as we’ve seen the Galaxy S24 FE is a serious CPU competitor.

Can it repeat that trick in terms of battery life?

To comparatively test this out, I ran it through my standard YouTube battery test, streaming a 1080p video at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour.

What I’m always looking for here is at least 90% battery life remaining, otherwise a phone has the serious risk of running flat with a day’s moderate usage.

Here’s how the Galaxy S24 FE compares against that same crop of smartphones used for the CPU and GPU tests:

While it’s not best in class, given its CPU and GPU performance, that’s still a pleasing figure. I’m in the process of expanding my testing of phone batteries to a three hour test, and the Galaxy S24 FE just so happens to be the first phone tested that way.

This does mean I don’t have any comparative figures to pitch it against, but I can still illustrate how it handles a longer sustained load in terms of battery life.

The model that Samsung sent me for review was literally just the phone – not even a box – but when it comes time to recharge, you will need to supply a charger, with (from my understanding) just a USB-C cable and SIM ejector tool supplied along with the Galaxy S24 FE.

It supports wired charging at up to 25W, or up to 15W wireless charging. That’s not particularly fast compared to some of Samsung’s Android rivals such as Oppo.

Samsung Galaxy S24 FE: Alex’s Verdict

While it’s quite clear to see where Samsung has sliced down the capabilities of the Galaxy S24 phones to make the Galaxy S24 FE, the end result is absolutely one of the best phones in its price category.

It’s slightly disappointing to me that the FE range price point has crept up a little over the years and no longer sits more comfortably in the sub-$1,000 space, though I should note that at launch there’s some truly exceptional carrier deals bringing the price down by an impressive $300 if you sign up to a contract. Even at its asking price the Galaxy S24 FE is an exceptional phone, but at $799/$899 there’s just simply nothing else like it.

While Samsung may regard the FE suffix as standing for Fan Edition, this year it could also stand for ‘freakin’ excellent’, because it's fast, the cameras are generally good as long as you stay away from the sillier end of the zoom scale, the battery life is good and it's a great looking phone. There's really very little here not to like.

Samsung Galaxy S24 FE: Pricing and availability

The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE retails in Australia for $1099 (128GB) or $1199 (256GB), though it’s worth shopping around; while the carrier deal mentioned above may not last that long, the S25 series is only a matter of months away, and we can expect even more S24 FE deals when that happens.
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