Samsung Delivers A Big Hit With The S23 Ultra
Prefer Video? Check out my S23 Ultra Review on YouTube.
Let’s talk about the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It’s Samsung’s new flagship phone and it’s an absolute beast. I mean literally. It’s the biggest phone I’ve ever had. The screen is a whopping 6.8 inches and it weighs half a pound!
But this just may be the best phone money can buy. We can talk about a lot of reasons. We can talk about the big beautiful display, the massive battery, the custom snapdragon chip, or even the wildly specced out camera system. And you know what, we will.
Let’s get into it!
So if you have watched my channel for a while you’ll know that I’ve been an iPhone user since I could get my first smartphone. I’m reasonably deep into the Apple ecosystem. I have an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and all the Apple Services. But truthfully I’ve been pretty curious about what else is out there.
And that led me to try out the Pixel 6 last year and more recently I did a review of the Pixel 6a as a budget phone alternative. I have been pleasantly surprised with Google’s phones. You should definitely check out my video about the 6a, but it provides a lot for the price. From an always-on display and an in-display fingerprint sensor to the Tensor chip which means it’s the fastest budget phone available, to solid battery life and camera system. You can’t go wrong with the Pixel 6a if you’re looking for a budget phone.
But today we’re going to the opposite end of the spectrum. What if you’re not looking for a budget phone? What if you’re looking for the best phone, with the best specs, and performance?
This year Samsung introduced a lineup of three phones. The S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra. The S23 Ultra costs the most at $1649 Canadian.
Display
Where to begin with this phone? Let’s start with the display. First off, the screen size. The S23 Ultra has a massive display size of 6.8 inches. That’s definitely more screen than I’m used to, and makes for a bigger phone too. My daily driver, my iPhone 13 only has a 6.1-inch display, and the Pixel 6a I reviewed last week is 6.1 as well. That screen size has generally served me well but I suppose bigger is better right? Well, it’s not just the screen size that matters, because you’re also getting a super high-quality 3088 x 1440p “Edge Quad HD+” screen on this thing. Plus, as has been standard for a couple of years, the refresh rate can be anywhere from 0–120 Hz. What that means is the adaptive motion smoothness will automatically adjust the refresh rate based on what you’re doing on the phone, and it generally means you’ll get smoother animations and scrolling since the phone will crank up to 120 Hz anytime you’re on your home screen or in menus. It should also make for smoother gameplay.
This is definitely the best smartphone display I’ve used. It’s as buttery smooth as advertised. Plus, I’ve watched a couple of movies on Netflix and was loving the screen quality. I almost never watch movies on my iPhone. Maybe it’s the screen size or the higher pixel count or the peak brightness of 1750 nits, or all of the above. But I could watch movies on this screen all day.
Biometrics
In terms of unlocking the phone, you get a dual biometrics setup. You can use face unlock, fingerprint scanner, or both if you want. I find the face unlock to be ok. Realistically it’s not as good as the iPhone. There’s just more need to have the right angle for it to see your face. I pretty quickly set up the fingerprint scanner as a backup option which is quite fast and reliable. I know that this tech has been around for a couple of years now, but I still can’t help but be amazed by the in-display fingerprint scanning. It’s just cool and feels genuinely futuristic.
Always On Display
The always-on display is a nice feature as well. Again, coming from my iPhone 13 which doesn’t have this feature it’s just great to have it. It’s awesome to look over at the time and date without picking up your phone. Plus, you can see the battery life remaining, as well as icons for the apps that have sent you notifications recently. You’ll also see what music is playing while the screen is locked.
S Pen
Another feature you’ll find on the outside of the phone is hidden in the bottom left corner, it’s the built-in Samsung S pen. Simply press it in the unlock it, and it will sort of pop out, at which point you can pull it the rest of the way. As soon as you do that you get a prompt that allows you to create a note. There are also some other interesting features like smart select if you want to screen grab part of the screen, and there’s even a feature called live notes which allows you to create kind of a cool animated drawing or writing over top of an image or background. And there’s an app called PenUp which is basically the drawing app that allows you to do all of those artistic things you might want to do.
I’m no artist by any means but I could see how this would be useful for the artist. The phone is about the size of a sketch pad that folks might carry around. This means you can draw or sketch anytime inspiration strikes! I’d say the S pen is on par or at least close to the quality of the Apple Pencil which is kind of the standard in terms of what a stylus can do.
In fact, there are some other cool things the S pen can do. It supports gestures and quick actions with the use of the button on the side as well as motion controls.
For example, there are media controls. You can play and pause with the side button. If you double tap it will go to the next song. Or you can turn the volume up and down by holding the side button and gesturing up or down.
You can use the android controls like going back and forth by using the back gesture which is like drawing a left-facing arrowhead in the air. These gestures take some getting used to but they’re genuinely useful if you have the stylus out anyway. That’s the thing though, I personally probably wouldn’t pop the S pen out that often. Even writing a note which is admittedly cool, feels slower than just typing it out, so I just wouldn’t do it that often.
Performance
In terms of performance, this phone flies. Samsung is using the latest Snapdragon 8 gen 2 system on a chip which is an 8-core CPU with a built-in Adreno 740 GPU. Samsung has a special partnership with Qualcomm so they got the chip further customized and have a special “For Galaxy” version of the chip in here. Apparently, that gives Samsungs phone about a 5% performance boost over other phones with the standard version of the chip.
When you compare it against the iPhone 14 Pro Max, the iPhone still eeks out the win in terms of CPU performance, but the S23 Ultra slightly overperforms the iPhone on graphical performance. And honestly, if you’re anywhere near the performance of the latest iPhone, you’ve got a fast chip.
And you know what? Yeah, it’s fast. I haven’t noticed a shred of hesitation in this phone. And gaming not only looks crisp on this display but the performance is undeniable. The frame rate is super high and the movement is smooth. I’m not a huge mobile gamer but if you are then you won’t be disappointed here.
The S23 Ultra starts at 256GB of storage. I got the 512GB version and you can go up to 1TB if you have the coin. Basically, you can store as much media, games, movies, or anything else you can think of with the storage options. The S23 Utlra is a media powerhouse with its combination of speed and storage.
In terms of battery life, you’re in for a treat as well. We’ve got a 5,000 mAh battery in this thing. You also have support for wireless and fast charging when you’re out of juice but you won’t need it very often. I used this phone around my house for a few days without plugging it in at all. We’re talking about a few hours of use every day for about 3 days, plus another 36 hours of standby time and I still had 41% remaining battery. Now mind you I was on wifi the whole time so I’d expect a different real-world experience but it’s still really impressive.
Software
Now in terms of the user interface, this is a whole new world for me. Samsung phones use a specially customized version of Android 13 with their own software layer called One UI. It’s kind of like a skin on top of Android, but it’s much more deeply integrated into the OS. It means that although the S23 Ultra is running the same Android version as the Pixel 6a, their user interfaces look completely different.
This isn’t something I’m used to as an iPhone user. And I’m sure Android fans will be in the comments boasting about the infinite customizability and variety of options you can get with Android phones, essentially saying this stark visual difference is a good thing to have because it means consumers can decide what they like rather than than the sheeple who buy Apple phones being stuck with the same old interface. And I think that’s a fair point.
Just like on the Pixel, Samsung One UI offers a version of Material You. This allows you to not only change your wallpaper but also your system color palette and even your app icons. I definitely like this on Android and would love to see something similar on iPhone. It means you can really customize your interface based on either your personal style or how you’re feeling today.
But Samsung goes even further with this concept. There’s a Galaxy Themes store that allows you to not only change your wallpaper but also the look, feel, and shape of your app icons and system elements. This is super fascinating to me and I wonder how many people use these themes. It reminds me of the early windows 95 and 98 days when there were these customizable skins you could put over your standard windows theme. Most of the time the themes would actually crash my crappy old computer back then but it was kind of cool. Some of the themes are free, some are paid. Some are interesting and cool, and some are really ugly.
This kind of infinite customization is pretty cool, to be honest. And that really is the big difference between Android vs iOS. I don’t think you’ll ever see anything like this on an iPhone.
Photography
Alright, now I think it’s time to talk about photography, which for some people is the most important feature of a new phone. And an area where the S23 Ultra is no slouch.
We used to talk about a smartphone’s camera and how good it was. But now we talk about cameras, plural, and the S23 Ultra takes that to the next level with 5 cameras. Yes, I will say that again it has 5 cameras.
We have a 12MP selfie camera on the front, then on the back, it’s a 12MP ultrawide, a 200MP wide camera (wow), and a 10MP 3x telephoto, as well as a 10MP 10x telephoto.
The number that stands out for me is 200. Yeah, 200MP. That’s actually kind of hard to comprehend. I know megapixels aren’t the only thing to consider in a good camera but obviously, it plays a role.
Now essentially what is happening when you take photos with the main camera is that it’s using a process called pixel binning to combine data coming in from multiple pixels into one pixel. Each individual pixel captures the light coming in but it’s putting it all together to make a 12MP photo in the end. This theoretically means you’re getting a better 12MP photo. I went for a winter walk to test the cameras a little bit. Here are a couple of shots comparing an iPhone 13 to the S23. The field of view is a bit wider on the S23, but other than that I can’t really tell which shots I like better.
Now you can also take an actual 200MP photo. And you definitely are going to get more detail than the 12MP photo. The photo will also be about 15 to 20 times larger in terms of file size. The 200MP photos I took were about 30 MB in size. And I think you’ll notice a difference if you were to zoom in on your photos, where specific details get lost in the lower resolution photos, you can still make them out in the larger ones. I’d say you should probably stick to the 12MP photos normally. However, if you are taking a photo you know for sure you’ll be printing out, you can switch to either 50MP or 200MP shooting for better print quality.
Now with 3x and 10x optical zoom lenses, you also have some great zoom capabilities. And the photos that come out of those sensors look just as good as the main sensor. But that’s where it ends, although the phone allows you to zoom in 30x or even upto a 100x just remember it’s all digital zoom after 10x. 30x actually looks ok as long as you’re not planning to crop the photo down even further. But I’d stay away from 100x, to be honest. It’s a cool marketing line that the phone has 100x zoom but that’s just it, it’s all marketing. Also unless you have your phone mounted on a tripod it’s decently hard to hold the camera steady on the subject when zoomed in that much.
I also took some low-light photos in my office with just a bit of light coming through the window at dawn. These photos look like it’s the middle of the day with how much brightening is happening but I assure you that it was decently dark in this room. Really impressed with how much detail is retained and how the colors look. Compared to the iPhone 13 in the same lighting, they both still do a good job. The slightly more contrast-driven look from the S23 is a bit of a signature look from Samsung and I don’t really mind it.
Portrait mode looks great on the S23 as well. Here’s portrait mode from the rear camera, and here’s portrait mode from the selfie cam. You can of course play around with the background effects on the portrait mode photos, there are some cool ones to choose from.
In terms of video, the S23 can shoot in 1080p at 30 or 60 fps, 4k at 30 or 60 fps, and 8k at 30 fps. I did a test at 4k and 8k 30 fps on the frozen pond. It was a peaceful day with folks skating and dusk about an hour away. It’s lovely footage. About a minute of footage produces a file that’s roughly 500MB so, uh, you might want to use this mode sparingly.
One other useful feature for video is a feature called Super Steady which uses optical image stabilization to create a gimbal level of stability on shots when you’re walking, panning, or otherwise moving the camera.
Not sure it would replace a gimbal but this mode, along with everything else this phone offers for photography is pretty fantastic. The fact that you can take this phone to your kids’ sporting events and take a video that won’t give you motion sickness to watch later is pretty awesome. The fact that you can shoot 4K and 8K video, get some excellent low light shots, zoom in up to 10 times with optical zoom, or take a straight-up 200MP photo, it all adds up to a phone that professionals will happily use when they don’t have their DSLR on them. And you know what average folks will love it too — it’s very forgiving for the novice photographer. And that’s good. People just want to pick up their phone and snap a photo and get a decent result at the end of it. And to me, these results are well beyond decent.
So is the S23 Ultra Worth It?
In conclusion, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is an impressive flagship phone that has a ton of outstanding features. The phone’s display is one of the largest on the market, and with a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it provides a buttery smooth experience, with a visual quality that is fantastic for media, reading, and any activity you can think of. I also like the dual biometric security with face unlock and fingerprint scanning, the always-on display, and the customizability of the OS. Additionally, the built-in Samsung S pen adds to the phone’s versatility, making it a great choice for creative professionals. Although it is pricey, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra offers excellent value for the money and is arguably the best phone money can buy. At least for now!
What do you think? Did you pick up an S23 Ultra? What do you think about it? Anything I missed in my review? There’s so much to this phone so it’s hard to cover everything. Let me know what you think.
