Yes your heard right, Samsung Note 20 Ultra Gains Gaming Advantage Over Apple’s iPhone 12 .......

The timing of the Samsung and Microsoft partnership could not have been better.

The Korean company announced at its unpacked event last Wednesday that it has partnered with Microsoft to bring three months free subscription of game streaming service Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, via the Project xCloud app, to the phablet.

One day later Business Insider reported that the game streaming service will not be available on iOS because Apple says it violates its app store policy. Apple’s reasoning appears to be that it cannot individually review each game on the service, and there are specific clauses in the app store guidelines, as The Verge points out, that restrict access to services like xCloud.

Because xCloud provides access to content that can be played on an iOS device that hasn’t been reviewed by Apple, then it may fall afoul of these guidelines. There are some additional optimisations in cloud and controller latency, alongside battery optimisations via the Game Booster app, but it seems to be mostly about the exclusive free trial period and some exclusive in-app purchase options.

I suspect the Galaxy maker had planned the free subscription deal to be a small incentive to buy a Galaxy over Apple and other Android rivals that would've also supported xCloud, but now it is one of the Note 20's stand-out features against the iPhone.

We’ll have to see if those yet-to-be-quantified optimisations actually offer anything tangibly different to streaming Gears of War on a $200 Android phone, but in the higher-end market there’s now a clear advantage for Samsung’s phone over the presumably similarly expensive iPhone 12.

Despite its historic troubles, cloud gaming is going to be a big deal on mobile, especially if OEMs make it as easy as possible for players to, well, play. Back in 2014 I was baffled why -the admittedly less impressive - PS4 remote play wasn’t more widely used considering Sony had gone to great lengths of creating a very useful suction mount to connect the Dual Shock controller to smartphones.

In recent years that extra functionality - drawing, annotating etc. - has never been that convincing for me.
I saw no reason to spend hundreds more on a phone that’s too big to fit into my pockets and doesn’t have the actual large screen of a tablet, many of which also come with a keyboard-case cover. But for gaming? It works. I can stomach the bulk of a phone like the Note 20 if I can play AAA games on the go, especially if I don’t have to carry around an even larger tablet in a bag.

All of this will only be available on Android, with Samsung’s Note 20 leading the way.