Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra – “Stylish but impractical”

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In the news feed after Samsung’s mammoth launch of the new Galaxy series, I see the headline “Android’s answer to the iPhone” flicker past in the feed. It’s not the hottest of hot takes, but it certainly sums up the situation well.

Samsung has long established itself as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, and since the South Korean company dropped its Note series, we have landed in a new bike with a single giant launch every year. It presents the flagships, the most expensive, advanced and most expensive Android phones you can buy.

The slogan for the S22 series is actually something as tasty as “the epic standard”.

The nicest of them all, the flagship flagship, is the Galaxy S22 Ultra. A brick for a camera monster that weighs in at a hefty 229 grams and an entry price of as much as SEK 13,990 – which is actually more expensive than the Iphone 13 Pro Max itself.

It is also an uncompromising phone. It has everything. It has a new, lightning-fast processor, an impressive camera set and the best of Samsung’s fantastic monitors. Now it even has a stylus built into the chassis. A bit like a Galaxy Note.

Because that’s what we have to work with. Last year, Samsung practically increased its Note series. Nothing to complain about here, except for the stylus, it was already almost impossible to understand the difference between the different models.

Stylish with impractical

In order for no one to be able to avoid the S22 Ultra being the new Note, it has inherited the predecessor’s design language. Where previous Ultra models had rounded corners, we now work with a mobile with completely flat short sides and curved long sides in hard-wearing aluminum, and the screen curves down along the edges.

The phone has become a few millimeters narrower, and a few millimeters longer. A format that makes it a little easier to hold in the hand, even if it is still, to say the least, solid with its 6.8-inch screen.

Both the front and back are covered by the new protective glass Gorilla Glass Victus Plus, which makes its debut on Samsung’s mobiles. It should provide both better protection against fall injuries and scratches, the manufacturer claims.

The back is wonderfully matte, on the test phone in a dull black tone, but there are a number of colorful variants to order.

The camera module is the big difference both against previous year models and against the rest of the S22 series. Instead of a large camera body that encloses all the sensors, they are cut out separately on the back of the phone.

It looks distinct and maybe nice, but is unfortunately really impractical. I quickly notice that dust and dirt accumulate between the lenses, and they easily get stuck when I pick up or put the phone in my pocket. In addition, they make the phone uncomfortably unstable when it is lying on the table. Not least, it’s annoying when I use the stylus when the phone is flat, and the whole phone starts to wobble.

The legacy of Note

The stylus pen is familiarly recessed in the lower short side of the phone and folds out with a small click. It is significantly smaller than the one that was available to buy for the S21 Ultra (the one that was attached to the case instead of sitting recessed in the phone), to draw another parallel, it is rather in the same class as the S-pen in the Note 20.

It still fits well in the hand, and those who are fond of navigating or writing with a pen will like it.

Over the years, Samsung has honed the software to use the S-pen to the point that it feels completely seamless. The function for automatically converting handwritten notes to text has also become really good. Even my sloppy crow’s feet almost always pass the magic of algorithms with perfect results.

Performance monster that chews battery

The OLED screen is, as usual, a pure pleasure. It measures 6.8 inches and has a resolution of 1,440 x 3,088 pixels. Samsung has spiced it up with an even brighter display that can deliver up to 1,750 nits when watching HDR video, and it delivers great flow at 120 Hz. The adaptive image refresh rate can now still go down to 1 Hz to save battery power when viewing non-moving material, such as reading an e-book.

To watch movies or play games, it is one of the absolute best mobile screens you can get. The screen is preset to a picture mode that Samsung calls “intense”, which gives quite warm and colorful tones, but it is possible to switch to a mode that gives a more “natural” picture experience.

The phones from the S22 series sold in Sweden have Samsung’s self-designed system circuit Exynos 2200, the first that the company has manufactured with 4-nanometer technology. Like all manufacturers, Samsung boasts that it is the fastest on the market, but as usual, it seems to be about the type of workload we are talking about.

As a normal user, you hardly need to worry. You get a processor that without shame can be compared to Apple’s or Qualcomm’s top chip.

However, the combination of solid performance and a huge super screen has a clear downside.

Despite a 5,000 mAh battery, I carry a constant charge anxiety. When you turn on the highest screen settings and use your mobile phone frequently, you can really see how the battery percentage ticks down.

Now it’s a little special to compare when I hard test the phone for a few days, because it is used properly to say the least. If you lower the settings, or switch on battery saving mode, and use the phone moderately, you can go for 24 hours without charging, but during the test period it starts to go down to red already at the end of the working day, even though the phone was fully charged in the morning.

Of course, fast charging of 45 watts partly alleviates the problem (although it feels a bit poor when we look at Chinese manufacturers such as Oneplus and Xiaomi), but then it is important to have a good charger as well.

Samsung has stopped sending power adapters to their phones, so if you want a brand charger, you have to add around SEK 400.

Camera in absolute top class

After Huawei left the Swedish mobile market behind, the camera battle is now between Samsung’s and Apple’s top models.

Samsung’s top model now works with a camera system with four lenses, which is basically the same as the predecessor S21 Ultra.

We have a main camera with 108 megapixels backed by an ultra-wide angle and two telephoto lenses with 3x and 10x zoom respectively. To help them, they also have a depth sensor, and a new ai-chip that helps with image processing.

The very short summary is that it is a really impressive photo experience.

Overall, I get nice pictures in most conditions, with really good color reproduction. With Samsung’s patented supersaturated colors in standard design. The portrait mode has become sharper than ever, and the ultra-wide angle can, thanks to the software, avoid deforming the subject to any great extent. There you can see that the mobile industry has taken huge strides since the ultra-wide angle was introduced on a broad front a few years ago, and the images often became really skewed and the motifs looked like stretched rubber bands.

The optical zoom is really good, even 10x gives nice pictures, at least when the lighting conditions are right, and is a joy to play with. The digital zoom, which goes up to 100x, is and remains a fun thing. Somewhere north of 30x zoom, images become unusable, even though the automatic image stabilization in zoom mode has improved significantly.

Samsung brags that the night mode has improved significantly as well, but I probably do not think it is quite as impressive. That’s good, period. Like most expensive phones today, capable images shoot in the dark. I find it difficult to see any extreme progress in my tests.

Also on the video side, the automatic image stabilization has improved, and you can now film with 8k with the main sensor if you love giant video files.

If you want to shoot in RAW format, Samsung now also has full support for this, but it requires that you download a separate app called Expert Raw (at the time of writing it is only available in Samsung’s own app store Galaxy Store which is pre-installed on the phone).

The phone with extra everything

It’s hard to land on anything other than that the Galaxy S22 Ultra really is Android’s answer to the Iphone 13 Pro Max. You pay a hefty price tag to get the best of everything (except battery life then).

But just like with the Pro Max, the S22 Ultra is also a clear niche product. It is the mobile phone for you who can afford and want to open your wallet for the latest technology. Which, frankly, does not mean any revolutionary progress against last year’s model.

You who want a brand new top-class Android (and can live your life without a stylus) can in good conscience click home the regular S22, and save thousands.

Samsung gets an extra plus on the edge because they now promise at least four years of Android updates. The S22 series will be released with Android 12, and will thus continue to get new iterations of the operating system up to and including Android 16. There are few Android manufacturers that give their phones such a long life, and that may help justify Samsung’s slightly higher pricing .

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