The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the best phone Samsung has ever made, but it’s such a gradual update to the S22 Ultra that it’s hard to recommend it to an owner of last year’s model.
So, here again are the most familiar features. The S23 Ultra still uses Samsung’s excellent 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. The screen is slightly less curved this year, giving it a boxier look and freeing up a bit more real estate for stylus users.
That stylus is the thin and light S-Pen, which slides into an enclosure at the bottom of the device that sits flush with the frame when put away. It surprisingly lets you take notes quickly on the lock screen, and its accurate and quick handwriting recognition means you can turn your chicken scratchings into regular text. It’s also capable of clipping and sharing sections of the screen, annotating documents, and signing PDFs. You can also use it as a slide presentation clicker or to remotely activate the camera shutter.
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To top it all, this year’s phone is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which is new for the UK version of the device. On paper this means better performance, things like loading speeds, camera performance, gaming, desktop mode and app switching, although it’s incremental enough that anyone upgrading from the S22 Ultra won’t notice a huge speed boost.
the design
There really isn’t another Android phone that looks and feels as premium as the S23 Ultra. It’s a big old boy, measuring 6.8 inches from corner to corner (even bigger than the mighty iPhone 14 Pro Max) and it feels reassuringly weighty in the hand. All 1,249 of it makes itself known.
The edges are slightly flattened, which makes the phone a bit more pleasant to hold with one hand when using the S-Pen. The volume rocker and power button are also easy to find for your fingers.
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One minor annoyance for S-Pen fans is the position of the camera lens on the back of the device. Because they’re at a corner, the phone wobbles back and forth a bit if you’re writing with the stylus while the S23 Ultra is flat on a desk. Otherwise, the shape and size haven’t changed much since 2022, but there are new colors available green, black, cream, lavender just in case you really need to let everyone know you’ve got the latest model.
Display
The S23 Ultra continues to deliver the best performance of any smartphone in the market. The 6.8in QHD+ screen uses the latest AMOLED technology and employs a dynamic refresh rate, which boosts the display’s frame rate from as little as 1Hz up and down to a silky smooth 120Hz when scrolling and browsing. Dials automatically when nothing is running on it. ,
Movies and TV shows look vivid and rich. There is enough color detail in low-contrast and dark scenes. The display is also incredibly bright, which means excellent legibility even in direct sunlight. At full intensity you could light up a football match with some of these things.
camera
The camera is where Samsung has made the biggest change since last year. The S23 Ultra uses a new 200MP sensor, which lets the device do some impressive things with photography.
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First, the S23 Ultra uses improved pixel-binning to boost detail and brightness in dark scenes. This technology combines a group of physical sensor pixels tiny dots that measure light entering the phone to produce images that are brighter, more detailed and less noisy. The result is exceptionally good night photography and impressive portrait photography indoors and outdoors.
Samsung’s image processing is still excellent even at snapping faces: depth mapping and object recognition produce selfies and portraits with convincing, DSLR-style bokeh effects. There’s still plenty of detail when zoomed in up to 30x, which uses a hybrid of pixel-binning and optical lensing to produce crisp telephoto images even on slushy February days.
The S23 Ultra easily takes the best telephoto photos of any phone we’ve tested, and matches or beats the cameras on the iPhone 14 Pro Max and Pixel 7 Pro when it comes to most types of night-time photography Goes ahead.
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Enthusiasts can make full use of the 200MP sensor thanks to the return of the RAW shooting mode, which does away with all the software trickery to give you a pure image ready for editing.
battery life
Switching to a Snapdragon processor not only means better performance, but also better power efficiency. In our tests the S23 Ultra offered noticeably better battery performance than the S22 Ultra, which already had a decent amount of juice packed in.
With high-usage we’ll reach the end of a workday with the Galaxy S23 Ultra hovering around the 40 percent mark. That’s plenty of battery life for anyone planning on editing large photos and watching media on the go.
