If the Samsung S22 Ultra was the ultimate evolution of a slab-style smartphone, then the Galaxy S23 Ultra is a victory lap — everything that the S22 was and a little extra.
The S23 Ultra offers a handful of updates and a new main camera sensor. There are no groundbreaking new features. It doesn’t fold in half. Until someone invents radically improved battery technology or holographic displays, that’s just going to be the case for the Ultra for the foreseeable future.
The other side of that coin is that the S22 Ultra was already really good, and the S23 Ultra is a little better. Performance — delivered by a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset — is whip fast. The updated camera system is capable of stunning feats. And a couple of small tweaks — the phone’s slightly reshaped side rails and screen — have a big impact on the device’s likability.
The phone’s slightly reshaped side rails and screen have a big impact on the device’s likability
That’s all good news. The bad news is that it remains a very expensive device at $1,200, which is a bit more than a $1,099 iPhone 14 Pro Max and a big leap from the Pixel 7 Pro’s $899 starting price. There are some familiar sore spots with Samsung software, like its insistence on including its own app store in addition to Google’s. And although the camera system can produce stunningly good images, it occasionally makes weird choices and comes up with a photo that’s just downright bad.
But if you can stomach the price and the occasional weird photo, then I think you’ll find the S23 Ultra’s maximalism highly rewarding.
Looking at the S22 Ultra and S23 Ultra side by side, you’ll see the slightly different shape on this year’s model — a display with a little less curve at the edges and side rails that are flatter. It doesn’t sound like much, but I think it makes a big difference. It feels much more secure in my fingers every time I pick it up off a table than the curvier S22 Ultra did. I realized I was actually bracing myself for it to slip out of my grasp every time I picked it up, which happened a lot with its predecessor. The S23 Ultra feels more secure as I pick it up but also in my hand as I’m using it, too, which is especially important when you’re writing on it with the S Pen.
This slight flattening makes the S23 Ultra look a little boxier than the S22 Ultra, and you know what? I like it. In the cream color especially, it’s kind of late-’80s chic. I don’t know how else to describe it except for fancy. It feels worthy of a high price tag.
All that said, it is still a very big and relatively heavy phone. The screen is still a 6.8-inch 1440p LTPO OLED panel with a top 120Hz refresh rate. It’s lovely to use and basically the same as last year’s. My one complaint is with the embedded fingerprint sensor, which is inconsistent and a beat slower than the one I just used on the OnePlus 11 5G. Thankfully, face unlock is pretty speedy. With both biometric security methods enabled, I found that one or the other worked quickly enough.
There are, of course, all the other trappings of a high-end phone: a robust IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, all flavors of 5G, wireless charging, fast 45W wired charging (charger not included), and built-in storage of at least 256GB — Samsung doubled the base-model storage this year.
a:hover]:shadow-highlight-franklin dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-highlight-franklin [&>a]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a]:shadow-underline-white”>Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra performance and battery
The Galaxy S23 Ultra uses Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Excuse me, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 For Galaxy. It’s a slightly different version of the company’s top-shelf processor that’s a tiny bit faster than the garden-variety 8 Gen 2.
Compared to the OnePlus 11 5G with the non-Galaxy 8 Gen 2, I could not tell you what difference this makes in practical use. The S23 Ultra simply feels fast. Whipping through recently opened apps feels almost dizzying. There’s nothing I throw at it in day-to-day use that makes it flinch. It comes with 8GB or 12GB of RAM. The unit I tested has 12GB, but either one should stand up to demanding tasks.
The new chipset also runs much cooler than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 — after downloading Genshin Impact install files for 10 minutes with the loading animation playing (and the phone resting on a heat-insulating couch cushion), it was only slightly warm to the touch. The S22 Ultra was borderline uncomfortable to hold after doing something like that. Gameplay is incredibly smooth, with a barely perceptible hiccup here and there as it loads more area data.
The S23 Ultra has the same 5,000mAh battery capacity as last year, but Samsung claims that battery performance is improved, thanks to the processor upgrade — it’s theoretically more battery-efficient than its predecessor — and some tweaks to the display. Battery stamina does, in fact, seem to be improved over the last generation. The S22 Ultra often felt like it was coasting on fumes at the end of a day of moderate use, and I feel like I can wring a little more juice out of this one. It’s not worlds better, but it gives you a little more breathing room to get through your day.
My typical day includes about four hours of screen-on time, and the S23 Ultra usually got me to the evening with somewhere around 30 percent left. That includes using the always-on display, which puts extra drain on the battery. I tried putting it through the wringer on a day with more intensive activities — navigation, a 30-minute Zoom call, 40 minutes of streaming video, lots of camera use, including 4K video recording — all off of Wi-Fi. That knocked the battery down to about 25 percent by the end of the day. Truthfully, I could have gone a little harder on the phone, but I came down with food poisoning in the afternoon, which put a damper on my ability to use the phone or do anything at all.
All that is to say you can get through a day of moderate use with the S23 Ultra a little more comfortably, and it stands up a bit better to heavier use. If you plan on doing a lot of processor-heavy stuff like gaming or, I don’t know, measuring every room in your house in VR, then you’ll probably still need to recharge before the day is done. For most of us, this is an all-day battery, with a little more wiggle room than last year’s.
This is an all-day battery, with a little more wiggle room than last year’s
Something that’s becoming more and more important is how well a smartphone integrates into the rest of your digital ecosystem. The S23 Ultra is armed with no shortage of connectivity features, including the much-improved DeX for Windows PC integration, Samsung’s SmartThings app for smart home, and a feature called Smart View to quickly mirror your device to a Samsung TV.
The latter worked flawlessly on my 2016-era Samsung TV. And despite it being an older model, the TV connects to the S23 Ultra via SmartThings, too. From the SmartThings app on the phone, I have control of all the basic functions of the TV, like volume, channel, and source. At long last, I thought I’d conquered my need to get off the couch and find the remote. Unfortunately, my TV is just old enough to lack support for a crucial feature — powering on via mobile. Looks like I’ll still need that remote after all.
a:hover]:shadow-highlight-franklin dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-highlight-franklin [&>a]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a]:shadow-underline-white”>Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra S Pen and software
The Galaxy Note lives on in the S23 Ultra by way of its embedded S Pen stylus. There are no major updates to the S Pen or its features this time around, though the slightly flatter screen edges are designed to provide more surface area for writing. With the S22 Ultra’s curvier edges, you’re more likely to accidentally run the stylus off the side of the screen as you’re writing.
That happens less often with the S23 Ultra, but I still found at least one instance where the slight curve threw me for a loop. One of the templates in the notes app includes a left-aligned column of boxes to write in, but when I started writing in letters to mark days of the week, I had very little space to work with since the stylus kept running into the curve. I’m hoping for a totally flat display in 2024.