Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review: Slab Phone Retirement Plan

Enlarge / Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.

Ron Amadeo

Is there anything left to do in the slab phone market?

Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S22 seems like a retirement plan for the company’s Slab line. After scrapping the Galaxy Note line and skipping a 2021 release, Samsung is merging the S-Pen-equipped Note line and the Galaxy S line, allowing the slab phone flagships to be released within a year.

Look at the Galaxy Note 10 from 2019 and you’ll see that Samsung has been recycling its design for essentially three years. It looks like Samsung is standing still, as if the slab phone plans to slowly go into the sunset, while the company directs resources toward the future in foldables.

We’re reviewing the S22 Ultra, but first, let’s talk about the lineup as a whole. The Ultra is a Galaxy Note with a Note-style design, while the S22 and S22+ share a design that resembles last year’s S21. The biggest change in performance is the SoC in both Exynos (international) and Snapdragon (US). Plus, it’s hard to credit Samsung with the year-over-year growth. The top-end S22 Ultra configuration has less RAM this year, down from 16GB to 12GB. Both the S22 and S22+ are thinner and lose the 300 mAh battery capacity. The S22+ and S22 Ultra are marketed as 45W fast charging, but they don’t actually charge any faster than last year’s models.

Prices are the same as last year: $800, $1,000, and $1,200, depending on where you are in the size range. All these prices seem very high in the face of Google’s excellent Pixel 6. You’d be hard pressed to find a single thing the $1,200 S22 Ultra does better than the $900 Pixel 6 Pro. There’s certainly not a $300 difference between the two devices, and if you’re in the market for an Android flagship and have the option of buying a Pixel 6 Pro instead of the S22, you should do so. Of course, Samsung’s big advantage is that most people No Google Phones is an option to buy because Google’s smaller, less-funded hardware division only sells phones in about 13 countries, while Samsung is in 100+.

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Enlarge / Rugged camera setup. There is an mmWave window on the side of the phone, below the volume and power buttons.

Ron Amadeo

The S22 line has been surrounded by controversy since its launch. Samsung announced the S21 and S21+ displays with dynamic refresh rates from 10Hz to 120Hz, and then a week later (after taking pre-orders), Samsung quietly changed the spec to read “48Hz to 120Hz”. Changed the sheet. Samsung markets the S22+ and S22 Ultra as “45 W” fast charging, but the devices don’t actually charge any faster than last year’s 25 W models.

We’re still not sure what’s going on with Samsung’s decision to throttle thousands of games and apps through its “game optimizing service.” Samsung’s Throttling app has a list of 10,000 apps and games that can reduce their CPU performance by up to 46 percent, and Samsung is controlling it all remotely via the cloud. Unsurprisingly, Samsung has managed to exclude every major benchmark app from its throttling scheme, according to geekbenchmakes it an offense of fraud worthy of de-listing from its benchmark charts.

Samsung has promised to ship an “off” button for this throttling app at some point, but it hasn’t come to us. review unit so far. Reports out of Korea say that Samsung is already facing a preliminary investigation from the country’s Fair Trade Commission over the feature, and S22 owners are gearing up to launch a class-action lawsuit.

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