Galaxy S22 Ultra:
This is the Galaxy S22 Ultra, Samsung's flagship phone for 2022. If the trends of the last few years are anything to go by, this should set a new benchmark for what a smartphone can do.
So here are the cool things I like about it, the sneaky things I don’t, and the big question: is it worth it? Is it worth dropping what you're doing, sprinting to your computer, and smacking that pre-order button right now?
First, the very first thing to note is that the S22 Ultra has an S Pen stylus built into it, and it’s kind of amazing. See, Samsung used to have two different flagship lines: the S series, which focused on faster chipsets and big camera improvements, and the Note series, which focused on productivity through the use of this pen.
But the S22 Ultra is both of these things in one, and the S Pen has never felt better. While their last version had a latency or lag of about 9 milliseconds, which was already almost indistinguishable from a real pen, this time around, thanks to AI that can not only know where the stylus is but also predict where it’s going to be, they’ve managed to trim that lag all the way down to just 2.8 milliseconds.
Next, we have the design. To give you some context, I loved the design of the S21 Ultra. It was comfortable to hold, clean, but still had character with the camera housing that kind of melts into the top corner. With the S22 Ultra, it feels like Samsung has taken the next logical step forward.
It’s almost identical in terms of dimensions, finish, and even the position of each camera lens, but now they’ve upgraded the glass for 12.5 percent more strength, and they’ve stripped away that bulky camera housing, leaving the lenses themselves as the only protruding parts. The result is a much cleaner look. And this green color—well, I think it’s enchanting. I love it. The fact that the housing is gone gives the phone a flatter, more uniform profile.
That said, having seen it and used it in person, I also can’t help but feel like it looks a bit plain now, almost too utilitarian, as if it’s lost some of its character. The lenses are a bit more exposed, but my biggest gripe with the design is why they made it so sharp.
I get that it has an S Pen and is meant to resemble the shape of a book that you might want to write in, but my hand is not a bookshelf. It’s just unnecessarily pokey and a bit less comfortable than it should be. This is an odd way of visualizing it, but just have a look at what the smooth S21 Ultra does to this cardboard versus what the S22 Ultra does to it. It’s still a good design, but if the last phone was a 9, this one is an 8. I’d give it a sweet, sweet 3.
Design, Display:
Now, if there’s one thing I could’ve told you five years ago that Samsung was going to nail here, it’s the screen. Samsung has become the largest display company in the world for a reason, and so, once again, I can confirm that this screen is beautiful.
Some part of me is disappointed that they haven’t tried to push themselves beyond this cookie-cutter display format. From the front, it doesn’t look much different from the 2019 Galaxy Note 10. But, on the other hand, you could argue that through iteration, they’ve perfected the format.
The S22 Ultra’s screen takes the last already stunning panel and dials the peak brightness up from 1500 nits all the way to 1750, and it does so while consuming less power. The last phone used something called LTPOTech, which meant that when you’re looking at something static—say, a webpage—it could dial back the refresh rate from 120 Hz down to 10 Hz. But the S22 Ultra can dial it all the way back to just 1 Hz.
Now we need to talk about Samsung’s software. My opinion on it has changed. There was a time when Samsung phones were so stacked with useless apps that they were more bloated than me after a Fish and Chips Friday.
They had a user interface that looked like it was designed for five-year-olds, and buying a Samsung phone felt like you were signing away any hopes of getting a software update on time. But they’ve really tightened up their game.
The bloatware is still a problem; Samsung really wants you to use Samsung apps and won’t stop trying to make you, but their updates are now much quicker, and they’re even promising four full years of them, which will take this phone all the way from Android 12 to Android 16.
As for the skin that sits on top of Android, the S22 phones all ship with Samsung’s One UI4, which is a fitting number because there are four things I like about it. There’s a color palette feature that automatically matches the theme of your whole phone to the color of your wallpaper, keeping it fresh without much effort.
There’s a new design language with more transparency, giving their phones a lighter feel. More importantly, I don’t feel like I’m in preschool by using it anymore. The camera app has been neatened up; it looks slicker, works faster, and now, you can hold down the photo button to immediately start taking a video.
Key Camera:
They’ve reworked the settings so that everything is laid out in a slightly more coherent structure. They even reward you with a smiley face if you manage to avoid messing up your phone. And now, we’re back to preschool again.
Oh, and the battery is looking great. We have the same high-capacity 5000mAh cell as the S21 Ultra, but it should last longer thanks to various efficiency improvements—just lots of little things, like the phone being able to put the Wi-Fi to sleep automatically when not in use.
It should also charge faster, thanks to the maximum charging power being bumped from 25 watts to 45. That’s incredible. But all this stuff—the S Pen, displays, software, battery—these are all pretty minor improvements over last year. To be honest, if this was all that had changed, I’d say to skip this phone.
But, there are two major improvements that really do matter. The first is the cameras. It might not be obvious because the hardware looks largely the same, and all the new features they’ve added on the software side are highly optional, like auto FPS, where the phone can decide the best frame rate for you based on lighting conditions.
I can think of one situation in my life where I might have wanted that feature or auto framing, which adjusts the zoom based on how many people are in the shot. It does add dynamism, but it uses digital zoom, which kills the video quality. Case in point. It’s only when you dig deeper that you find the actually cool stuff.
For starters, the main camera has a 58% wider optical image stabilization system. This gives the camera more room to move and counteract hand movements for stabilization. Even though the main camera has the same 108MP resolution as last year, each pixel is now 1.23 times bigger, which should mean more detail and more accurate colors.
The phone still has two telephoto cameras—one with 3x optical zoom and the other with 10x—but Samsung has upgraded the sensors so that when you zoom in further than that, the image should look cleaner. To be fair, we did try a 30x zoom shot vs. last year’s S21 Ultra, and the difference was enormous.
Is Pre-Ordering:
There’s a new camera app called Expert RAW that lets you shoot photos in 16-bit RAW format for insane editability. Samsung is also working with third-party apps like Snapchat to integrate their first-party features like My Mode.
The S22 phones all come with a new chipset, and they can use that chipset’s power to improve images. Now, when you take a normal photo with this phone, it can take two photos instantly—one super-high-resolution 108MP shot for detail, and one lower-resolution 12MP shot for brightness—and fuse them for the best of both worlds.
Thanks to the more intelligent neural engine that’s part of the chip upgrade, Samsung claims it can take the most realistic portrait mode shots ever. It will take better portrait mode video, and I tried this out, and can confirm it works.
It can also remaster your old photos more intelligently and take crisper photos and video in the dark. Again, in my brief testing, it seems like a surprisingly big improvement considering how similar the hardware looks.
None of this changes the fact that Samsung is 100% playing it safe with this hardware. You could easily argue this is the same company that unveiled a 200MP sensor last year—where is it? But I think this phone will be better off because of it.
It’s not as exciting from the perspective of having a new toy to play with, but based on my early impressions, the camera feels extremely fast and polished, likely because they didn’t have to rush around optimizing an entirely new set of hardware from scratch. It’s building on the strong foundations of its predecessor, and that’s never been more important. The S21 Ultra’s camera moved up an entire grade in terms of quality over the course of the year it’s been out. Optimization is everything now.
The final exciting prospect here is the performance. This is the first phone in the world powered by Samsung’s Exynos 2200, their next-generation chipset made in collaboration with AMD, using the same graphics architecture as the PlayStation 5.
These guys have self-titled this chip as “game-changing,” even going as far as to use the slogan "Playtime is over," an odd choice of words considering it’s geared for gaming. But the point stands: this should load things faster, multitask more fluidly, and provide higher fidelity gaming than ever before. The key thing to stress here is “should.”
I wouldn’t say I feel any particular speed improvements while milling through the UI, but Samsung says we’re waiting for a big update that will drastically improve it. When we get that update, we can decide for ourselves and compare this chip to the Snapdragon chip you’ll get if you’re in the U.S.
All that said, it’s not completely smooth sailing. There are a couple of sneaky quirks I think you should be aware of. Number one is the memory. This is a 1200-dollar 2022 flagship, but the base model only starts with 8GB of RAM. Last year’s phone had 12.
Samsung’s justification for this is the new virtual RAM feature in their latest version of One UI, which repurposes some of your storage into temporary RAM when needed. But that’s still not a reason to cut the amount of physical RAM.
I mean, they still sell an S22 Ultra with 12GB of RAM, so clearly that option has merit. You just now have to pay more for it. Remember, last year’s phones are also getting this same software, and they started with 12GB of RAM, so it’s kind of a wash.
The second gray area is related to the company’s eco agenda. Samsung, like every other tech company, has set a bunch of sustainability goals they want to hit by 2025. Don’t get me wrong, this is great, but I think the way they’re going about achieving this is a bit cheeky.
For starters, one of Samsung’s main selling points here is that the phone now charges at 45 watts instead of the old 25 watts. But for eco reasons, they don’t include the charger with the phone. So if you want this feature, you’ll have to buy it separately, which will end up wasting more packaging than just including it in the box.
I can almost guarantee the charger will be more expensive than the old one. Another thing they’re touting is that some parts, like the mechanisms behind some buttons and the S Pen housing, are made from recycled fishing nets. Again, the idea is great, but first of all, this plastic isn’t quite as durable as the plastic they used to use.
More importantly, the whole operation feels like it’s just ticking a box. Samsung claims that by the end of this year, through a combination of all their products, they might help recover 50 tons of discarded fishing nets. Assuming all of that comes to fruition, that’s still less than the amount dumped in the sea every hour.
Conclusion:
I’m just saying this looks like a fantastic phone, but don’t buy it on the basis that it’s a positive contribution to the world. There are literally a thousand more eco-friendly things they could have done, like improved repairability, made the batteries replaceable, or provided a case in the box so you don’t have to order one separately.
So, all of this leads us to the big question: Should you pre-order the Galaxy S22 Ultra right now? Probably not. Not because it’s going to be bad. I’m actually pretty confident it’s going to be great, and I’m strongly considering switching from my iPhone to it.
It’s just that there’s no point in pre-ordering before reviewers have had time for in-depth testing. What I’d recommend is waiting until I’ve had time to do my detailed camera and battery tests, and assuming those go well, because they might not. This chip might turn out to be an overheating disaster. Then we’ll know if we’re golden. All I can say for now is that this has all the ingredients of a potential 10 out of 10 smartphone of the year.
To understand why Apple AirTags are becoming a problem, check out this video, or to try and wrap your head around the crazy world of NFTs, check out that video. My name is Aaron, and this is The Boss. I’ll catch you in the next one.
