The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is the new big dog in the pack of Android smartphones. While Samsung renewed the whole Galaxy S line this year, The S22 Ultra is a special update that resurfaces the forlorn Galaxy Note series at the same time. The phone’s design shows that it’s just as much a Galaxy Note as it is an Ultra variant of the Galaxy S series. With the Ultra starting at $1,199 – and up to $1,599 for the 1TB model – Samsung continues to charge premium prices for this phone, so it’s all the more important to make sure you’re getting a superior device when so many other quality phones are available for so much less.
Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra – Design and Features
While the rest of the Galaxy S22 lineup more or less stuck to last year’s design formula, the Galaxy S22 Ultra finds a middle ground with some cues from the Galaxy S series and some from the Note series. Most notably, it has a flat top and bottom with squared-off corners, but it maintains rounded sides with a display that curves right into them. The camera modules on the back all come in individual silos instead of a unified camera bump.
Samsung has once again used its Armor Aluminum for the frame, which feels quite robust, especially with the larger blocks at the top and bottom and fairly thick strips along the sides. Samsung furthers the protection with updated Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ on the front and back, which hasn’t shown noticeable blemishing in my time testing the phone. IP68 water and dust resistance is also on deck and fairly standard for phones in the class. The built-in S Pen stylus also gets that iP68 rating. Samsung notes that the phone can hold out in water at depths of five feet for up to 30 minutes, which is considerably shy of the bar Apple sets with resistance down to six meters (almost 20 feet) with the iPhone 13.
Aside from the few style changes and the inclusion of the built-in S-Pen, there’s not much to see on the Galaxy S22 Ultra that hasn’t already been seen on Samsung’s recent phones. There’s a 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a variable refresh rate from 1 to 120Hz and a peak brightness of 1,750 nits. That isn’t all that different from the display offered by the S21 Ultra, which had a 10 to 120Hz refresh rate range and a still plenty-bright peak of 1,500 nits. The S21 Ultra’s screen was also actually sharper with a 3,200 x 1,440 resolution while the newer model lands at 3,088 x 1,440. Also worth noting that the Galaxy S21 Ultra supported S-Pen input even though it didn’t have a built-in slot.
I can’t deny that the display on the S22 Ultra is stunning. It’s easy to see in broad daylight, and wonderfully rich for cinematic content like Netflix’s Silent Sea, which benefited from the pitch black of the OLED panel. Samsung has introduced a Vision Booster feature that may bug image purists though, as it dynamically changes the look of the screen depending on ambient conditions, and it can noticeably change the appearance of colors.
The S-Pen is an occasionally handy little extra for the phone. It’s easy to get in and out of the silo, though not so much as to easily lose it. Writing on the display is incredibly responsive, though it’s a bit odd writing on such smooth glass. The stylus supports handwriting and doodling in a number of apps and can write directly into text fields to have it transcribed. An extra useful feature of the S-Pen is its ability to double as a remote shutter for the camera.
As stylish and pleasing to look at as the phone is, it’s pretty much just as unwieldy and heavy in the hand as the S21 Ultra was. It’s also not bringing much else new. It has a 5,000mAh battery, 5G support, Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi 6E, an under-display fingerprint scanner, and no microSD slot or 3.5mm jack in sight – just the same as the S21 Ultra. Though this model supports theoretically faster 45W charging (with a charger Samsung hasn’t included), Samsung had previously topped the S21 Ultra out at 25W charging speeds and explained to TechRadar last year that it was optimized in a way that the increase to 45W wouldn’t matter, making for a dubious re-introduction of 45W charging here.
Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra – Software
The Galaxy S22 Ultra runs on Android 12 and the One UI 4.1 interface. The phone continues to look and feel like its predecessors, including defaulting to the classic navigation buttons at the bottom of the display instead of the gesture navigation that I actually find more sensible on larger phones. I don’t find many of the updates all that meaningful, though some Android 12 features, like seeing plainly when the camera or microphone are in use, are good for security. The phone also supports custom color schemes that can draw from the home screen background for a unified aesthetic.
Samsung continues to provide plenty of customization options, letting two users set their phones up in very different ways. Not everything works sensibly though. The S Pen doesn’t always do what it says it will, with the gestures for changing camera zoom never working. And Samsung’s floating windows still prove hard to manage. Samsung's use of its own apps over Google’s can also be a pain, forcing non-Samsung users to live with dual apps for calendars and contacts, which can get messy. The Samsung keyboard is also weaker than Swiftkey and Gboard, and voice typing falls way behind the truly impressive showing on the Pixel 6 devices.
Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra – Gaming and Performance
It should come as no surprise that the Galaxy S22 Ultra comes with plenty of power under the hood. It’s packing the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chipset. Oddly, Samsung opted for a base model with 8GB of RAM and a max of 12GB of RAM in models with more storage while last year’s model had 12GB of RAM at the base and up to 16GB in higher-storage models.
All the same, the Galaxy S22 Ultra is more than fast enough to set aside any concerns that the RAM shortcoming will hold the phone back in most applications. The only time I felt the phone hitch was when I tried jumping from settings to the home screen immediately after changing the launcher’s color palette, which needed a second to take effect. Launching and switching apps is a breeze, and the Galaxy S22 Ultra doesn’t show any signs of weakness running Asphalt 9 aside from the same visible aliasing that I catch on every phone with a big enough screen – the game just doesn’t seem to support high enough levels of anti-aliasing to get rid of it. The big car crashes in the game that sometimes cause weaker phones to stutter had no such effect on the S22 Ultra.
The phone has a curious relationship with heat, though. Most of the time, I don’t feel much undue heat coming from the phone. Even running games or streaming shows for a while didn’t make the phone start to cook. But sometimes the very top of the phone will get noticeably warm without anything actively running on the phone.
I’m happy to report a better relationship with 5G though. Where I rarely saw the Galaxy S21 Ultra or my Galaxy S20 get more than 100Mbps on T-Mobile’s 5G network, the Galaxy S22 Ultra more consistently managed to pull together more than 200Mbps of bandwidth. Some of this can just be attributed to network improvements, but the phone also frequently shows better signal than my Galaxy S20 in the same environment.
The 5,000mAh battery doesn’t step things up over last year, but it still is a beefy option. I streamed Watchmen on Netflix, running for about 2.5 hours at 50% screen brightness (more than bright enough for indoor viewing), and the phone only lost 15% of its battery. That’d make a 10-hour streaming session only cost about 60% off the battery. I didn’t struggle to make it through the day even with some extra camera action or after a 3.5-hour binge of The Silent Sea. I tried charging the phone with a 65W PD fast charger I had handy, but got unimpressive results, getting back about 1% per minute. That compares poorly to the OnePlus 9 Pro, which can get two-thirds of its charge back in 15 minutes with the charger – and I emphasize this because Samsung once thought it was important – that comes in the box.
Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra – Camera
Samsung beat its chest about the powerful cameras packed in the Galaxy S22 Ultra, and how it has the “highest res pics available on a smartphone.” What the company seems to like to gloss over is the fact that the Galaxy S21 Ultra also had a 108MP sensor.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra features the following cameras:
- 12MP Ultrawide at f/2.2
- 108MP Wide at f/1.8 with Nonabinning and OIS
- 10MP 3x Telephoto at f/2.4 with OIS
- 10MP 10x Telephoto at f/4.9 with OIS
- 40MP Front-facing at f/2.2
Looking at the photographic gear on hand, there are just a few small differences between this setup and those on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. A few of the cameras have gotten slightly shorter focal lengths, widening their field of view but lowering the zoom factor (including the telephoto cameras), and the 3x and 10x zoom cameras have gotten slightly smaller pixels in their sensors, which may have a small impact on their low-light performance.
Given the similarities, I haven’t been surprised at just how good the Galaxy S22 Ultra cameras are. The system on the S21 Ultra was incredibly powerful, and the S22 Ultra feels just as capable. It can get some stunning detail with impactful colors that shine through on the phone’s screen and monitors alike. In well-lit conditions, all four sensors can really come together to provide a ton of options for shooting. I was out in Chinatown on a sunny day, and the system shows excellent synergy, with long shots and wide shots all offering a cohesive style. The number of opportunities I find to use a 10x zoom continually highlights how useful it can be to have that handy, though the 30x and 100x settings remain more of a novelty than a game-changer.
In dimmer and dark settings, the power of this camera system falls apart. The main wide camera can pull through modestly in the dark – it even captured a surprising amount of detail when a blackout hit Chinatown and cut power to a dim sum joint. But the ultrawide gets noisy in dim environments, and the zoom cameras’ color is lacking. Samsung’s camera software is as annoying as ever when things get dark. It often uses a longer exposure than seems necessary, often spoiling a shot of a moving subject. The latest iPhones perform much better in this situation. And when I try to switch to a zoom camera in the dark, it frequently opts for digital zoom. Fortunately, the Pro Photo mode brings all the control right back to my fingertips, making it easy to call up whichever sensor I want and to focus it manually in tricky situations.
Video also looks elegant from the phone, though it's cropped in considerably from what the sensors pull in while in photo mode. Samsung still has locked out HDR10+ recording for anything above 4K30, so it still lags behind the 4K60 Dolby Vision Apple has been offering since 2020. I’m not sure Samsung put much thought into how people will hold their phone while recording video, though. The two microphones are the top and bottom edge of the phone, and they’re very easy to cover up while holding the phone record. The impact on the audio quality with my hands over the mic is dramatic.
There are ways the cameras could be better, but they’re still a killer tool. The Pixel 6 Pro may be the closest competition with its 4x optical, and I’d still rather have an iPhone if I had to snap a lot of photos in dim lighting. But the biggest threat to the S22 Ultra is probably the S21 Ultra, which hardly trails behind yet now is easy to find for a lower price.
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