Galaxy S22 Ultra Review
Update: Samsung has recently launched its latest flagship Galaxy S23 Series consisting of the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23 Plus and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Buy your S23 phone today!
Intro
As Samsung has already done with the Galaxy Z Fold3, the Galaxy S22 Ultra continues: finding that perfect phone that is just the right balance to move seamlessly between work and life. And like the Z Fold3, one of the many ways the S22 Ultra does this is by having a compatible S Pen – and with the S22 Ultra the S Pen is actually in the phone. Which, I don’t think, is something we’ve seen since the Note family.
The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (with the S22 and S22+) went on sale in Australia on 4 Mar 2022.
At a Glance
The design of the Galaxy S22 Ultra calls back to the Galaxy Note family, without a doubt – particularly the embedded S Pen. The sample phone I got for this review was in burgundy, which was a gorgeous, rich colour with a slight metallic sheen.
Everything about this phone felt elegant to me – the subtle metallic of the colour, the curved glass of the front screen, the individually housed camera lenses (so no big camera bump on this phone). On top of that, this phone has some powerful cameras and improved AI photo processing smarts to take some quite good photos, if that’s part of what you look for in a phone.
Optus is relying on product information supplied by Samsung in making the representations above.
Is there a headphone jack?
No, there isn’t a headphone jack, wired headphones (sold separately) would need to be USB-C.
Is there expandable memory?
No, the Galaxy S22 Ultra doesn’t have expandable memory capacity, you can get the phone in 128, 256 or 512GB internal memory.
Look and Feel
Unless otherwise specified all images are taken by the author, Amanda King
While I never owned a Galaxy Note myself, from what I’ve seen and heard, the Galaxy S22 Ultra is designed in that spirit.
For me, this is one of those phones that I wish I had a case for while I was using it. Both the front screen and back of the phone felt slippy – as I was taking it out of my pockets sometimes I actually ended up using the camera housings as grips to keep hold of it.
I liked the S Pen in concept, and appreciate it has a learning curve that takes time to climb up, though in reality I didn’t quite get there with the S Pen in my day-to-day use. It was great for scrolling through social media – it makes me feel like a classy professor – but for the handwriting for text/search, it didn’t quite gel. The space that was given to the S Pen for you to write in most non-native Samsung apps felt too small, too cramped for me to write fully. I also had to modify my standard writing style to make individual letters clearer. Both of these things, to me, made the handwriting use of the S Pen a bit less functional because I had to focus and think more than I expected in order to use it in a way that actually did what I wanted it to do.
I found myself more frequently using the S Pen to use the keyboard to text, rather than relying on my finger – like a lot of things with the phone, it just felt more elegant. It’s a strange moment when using your finger on the phone screen to type or scroll feels clumsy.
I’m confident if the Galaxy S22 Ultra became my day-to-day phone I’d climb that learning curve and find myself using the S Pen in all kinds of fun and useful ways. For me, during this review period, I just didn’t have the time.
Battery and Performance
I’m a relatively light user of my phone – Internet, emails, social media. No games, though, and I don’t usually watch heaps of videos. The battery initially lasted me through the day, with about 10-15% less. After that first day, I realised the battery saver function had yet to be turned on, and with that on I typically saw the battery lasting about a day and a half.
This level of battery life kept battery anxiety at bay for me, there wasn’t any point in time where I was concerned my phone would turn off at a point where I wasn’t able to charge it. Of course, with this phone the battery is adaptive, and I only had it for a few weeks – I’d expect after longer and more consistent use the battery life would extend as the adaptive battery learned how you used your phone.
We’ve discussed the performance to a certain extent in other articles about Nightography, as that’s honestly where a solid portion of the 4nm processor goes. That being said, the phone was fast to respond in terms of scrolling and opening apps.
Camera
One of the first things I was impressed by with this camera was the level of detail captured; these are some high quality camera lenses. It wasn’t until after I handed back the sample phone and went back to my everyday (the S20 Ultra) that I truly appreciated the detail in the photos of the S22 Ultra.
As with many other phones, at a personal level I have mixed feelings about Night Mode in the S22 Ultra. Because I often prefer to see in the photo the shadow and light I see in front of me, the brightness and detail that Night Mode adds I don’t always like. With Nightography though, and the specificity of getting people in photos taken at night better defined – that I can appreciate.
Portraits
Portraits on this camera in came out quite sharp. I will say if you (or your subject) has fine hair with flyaways, the AI to focus on faces in portraits doesn’t quite seem to catch that. You can see between the two images that the fine hairs coming out of my ponytail (thanks summer humidity) seem to be taken as a part of the background and blurred out, particularly around my right ear.
With portrait mode off:
and with portrait mode on:
Nightography
While I’m not an AI engineer, looking at these photos, the basic work done with your photos at night using Nightography seems to be brightening the mid-tones, which you can see in the building and pavement. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, this kind of Nightography mode isn’t something I prefer aesthetically – I can see a big benefit to this for when you’re trying to get a clear picture of people in lower light conditions, which is one of the primary reasons this Nightography mode was created. In that case, then, Nightography does exactly what you want it to when you’re out with your loved ones and want to capture the moment.
Night mode off
Night mode on
Zoom
The optical zoom on this phone impressed me. The level of detail on the 10x zoom was unexpected and I was genuinely surprised. While I didn’t take any photos of the zoom quality beyond that, I would expect some degradation of quality because it’s digital rather than optical zoom. That being said, at least one reviewer was massively impressed with the detail and quality of the images beyond 10x – specifically the 30x and 100x zoom.
0.6x zoom (ultrawide)
10x zoom
Responsiveness, Hertz and nitz
As I mentioned earlier, this phone was definitely responsive – and the latency with the S Pen is something ridiculously tiny, and a decent improvement from even the S Pen released with the Z Fold3 in Aug 2021.
The screen brightness is adaptive, as a part of the battery adaptiveness – and I had no trouble seeing this phone in full sunlight.
Final thoughts
This is a good phone to consider if you want it all in one powerhouse – work and life – taking down meeting notes and getting that perfect photograph of your loved ones.
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