OK, new phone showed up.
First thing is that the screen is definitely brighter than my S20. Not by some crazy amount, but definitely enough that I notice.
Second thing is that the under-screen fingerprint scanner is so much better that it's upsetting. It takes just a tick longer than my old LG phones did, but it's something that doesn't actively piss me off. HUGE improvement.
Samsung's old-to-new transfer is a little weird. It transferred over some device settings and preferences but not others. Notification noises are a particular pain point for me. I understand that most people just shut all of them off but I actually rely on my phone making noise. I have scripts to set some but not all of the custom sounds I want. I also notice that RCP Ringtones, my go-to for neutral but identifiable noises, is no longer able to update system sounds on Android 14. My favorite circa 2012 Bubble Shooter game is marked specifically incompatible with the S24. Which is weird, because it works on the three month old Tab S9 and my partner's S22+.
During the setup process, I had to re-set my default launcher three times. The transfer process kept changing it back to OneUI. I use Nova Launcher on everything with the same icon layout and settings. I kept thinking the transfer was done, then finding out it wasn't. Hopefully, this isn't an ongoing confusion. I was signed in to Amazon-Everything and Philips Hue from the moment those things were installed, but not Spotify or Firefox. It also didn't bother to copy over my Gboard dictionary.
Samsung also really seems to push Microsoft software, with Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn front and center on the device. It also copied over and restored my progress in Microsoft Mahjong. I only play that on tablets and I didn't sync from a tablet, so I'm curious how and why that showed up. Facebook was also preinstalled. My adb pimp hand has been exercised much this day.
Interestingly, apps I've gotten from F-droid were copied over. I never noticed that in dealing with other Samsung devices. All the simple open source tools I have were copied right over.
I can't see a subjective performance difference yet but I did watch the battery on the new phone drop by about 40% during the ~90 minutes it took for the phone to copy over data and install all my apps. I find that somewhat alarming. Is the battery life bad or is the process of doing a data transfer just a ton of work? I also haven't done carrier activation yet. I'm interested to see how much better the 5G service is on a much newer device; I live very close to a T-mobile tower and my old S20 sometimes gets test speeds of 150Mbit down.
I can barely tell the difference from the old phone to the new one. It's just a high quality Android device. I mess with budget-ish tablets fairly regularly, and on those I can see differences almost immediately, particularly if the SoC or RAM aren't up to snuff. My old guy was fast and fine. My new guy is fast and fine. The only big difference is that the new one is going to get seven years of updates and the old one is done as of now.
The S24 is supposed to do AI nonsense. I'm kind of annoyed, because they changed my Google Assistant shortcut and moved it to "swipe from a corner." I see how circle to search is supposed to work and I can't even begin to care. I can already highlight text and send it off to Google and as far as I can tell, everything else it does is a normal function of Google Lens. Circle someone's shoe in a photo and it'll tell you what kind they are and where to buy them. Just like Google Lens. Hopefully, I'll be able to put the old gesture back the way I'm used to. The photo editing and other BS seems to be locked to Samsung apps and it turns out that I just don't use any of them.
So what I really have is a newer version of the same thing I had but with a better fingerprint reader. That's not nothing.
I'm sure I'll have more thoughts later.