Samsung’s Galaxy S23 lineup officially launches on Friday, Feb. 17. The trio of new smartphones includes the Galaxy S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra. Sitting at the top is the $1,199S23 Ultra which features all of the best functionality and hardware the company has to offer--and the experience matches that.
I’ve been using the Galaxy S23 Ultra for over two weeks, putting it through its paces, trying to see if the S23 Ultra is pure hype, or if it lives up to Samsung’s promises of an amazing camera experience backed up by performance that’s sure to impress.
And you know what? It delivers on all of that. Let’s take a closer look.
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Design
There’s not really a lot to say about the S23 Ultra’s design this year. It’s slightly, and I mean slightly different from last year’s S22 Ultra. The main difference is the S23 Ultra has a boxier design, whereas the S22 Ultra had a more rounded feel to it. But the difference is subtle.
The squared-off look and feel of the S23 Ultra is reminiscent of a Galaxy Note device, which is appropriate, due to the fact that Samsung replaced the Galaxy Note line with the Ultra.
On the bottom of the phone is a USB-C port for charging and data transfer, along with the S Pen silo in the bottom left corner. You press the S Pen in to remove it, and slide it back in when you’re done writing or drawing on the screen. Samsung hasn’t reinvented the S Pen experience, nor does it need to. It’s still smooth and easy to use, if you’re the type of person who needs it.
On the right edge of the phone is the sleep/wake button, just below are the volume up and down keys. The top and left edges of the phone are bare.
Related: Best Accessories to Complement Your Galaxy S23, S23+ or S23 Ultra
The display of the S23 Ultra hasn’t changed from the previous model. It’s still a 6.8-inch Super AMOLED display with a peak brightness of 1,750 nits, a variable refresh rate of 1–120Hz and a resolution of 3088x1440. Along the top of the screen is a hole punch cutout for the 12-megapixel front-facing camera. All of that marketing speak adds up to a display that’s clear, crisp, vibrant, and bright enough to use in direct sunlight. Regardless if you’re looking at photos, watching a video, gaming or looking at your Facebook feed, the display has a way of making everything look great.
On the backside of the phone is the rear camera array, consisting of four different lenses and its flash. The circles that house the cameras are slightly larger than they were on the S22 Ultra, but not by much.
Performance, Camera and Battery Life
The spec sheet for the Galaxy S23 Ultra does a fantastic job of checking off a lot of the boxes for features and components I’d want to see in my ideal smartphone phone.
It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy processor, a 5,000mAh battery, with options for 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of internal storage. Noticed the addition of “for Galaxy” to the end of the processor for the S23 line? That’s due to Qualcomm and Samsung working together for speed and performance improvements to the S23’s processor.
The $1,199 starting price for the S23 Ultra is for a build with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The price goes up to $1,379 for 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, with the 12GB of RAM and 1TB of storage topping out at $1,619.
I’ve been testing the 512GB model for just over two weeks now, and it’s been a machine. I’ve had no issues when multitasking between apps like Slack, Reddit, Blue Bubbles, FeedMe and Apple Music while at home. I’ve also taken a few trips during that time, and have had to rely on apps like TripIt, Southwest, Uber and Lyft to get me where I needed to go. I’ve even spent a bit of time gaming on the S23 Ultra in games like Asphalt 9.
The experience, whether I was working from home or on the road, has been buttery smooth.
Geekbench recently updated its benchmarking tool to focus on more real-world use scenarios. I took a few minutes to run Geekbench 6 on a few of the smartphones I have on hand, and the results match my overall experience. The iPhone 14 Pro Max’s performance is still unmatched, but the S23 Ultra is right on its heels, showing a big leap in performance over last year’s Galaxy S22 Ultra and the more recently released Pixel 7 Pro. Here’s a quick breakdown of the respective benchmark scores:
Now, keep in mind benchmarks only tell part of the story. A small part, if that. The biggest portion of the story is in everyday use, and, honestly, all four of the phones I benchmarked are phones I’ve had no hesitation or issues with using on a daily basis.
Another important aspect of any smartphone is its battery life. And with a 5,000mAh battery in the S23 Ultra, you shouldn’t have any issues getting through a full day of heavy use--something I put to the test while traveling home from the Samsung event in San Francisco, then a few days later to Miami, only to come back to Colorado and head to the mountains for a weekend getaway the next morning.
I did all of that while frequently streaming music, catching up with my Mastodon feed, checking emails, exchanging Slack messages, and, of course, testing the camera. Battery life has been stellar.
That said, I did run our battery test which consists of playing a 4K video on loop, with the display brightness set to 50 percent, and the S23 Ultra powered through 15 hours and 36 minutes before turning off. That number sounds high, but it’s actually somewhat puzzling on the low end of previous tests. For example, I just ran the same exact test on the OnePlus 11 5G and it lasted 20 hours and 44 minutes--over 5 hours longer than the S23 Ultra.
Related: Everything You Need To Know About the Galaxy S23 and S23+
But this returns me to my point about benchmarks only being part of the story. The battery test result doesn’t at all match my real-world experience of battery life that’s more than good enough for a full day of use.
Also listed on the spec sheet of the S23 Ultra is its camera setup, that, honestly, made me do a double take the first time I saw it.
There are four rear-facing cameras on the S23 Ultra. The main camera is 200-megapixels (yes, you read that right), which joins a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera, a 10-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and a second 10-megapixel telephoto camera with 10x optical zoom.
You won’t find another smartphone in the US with a camera list as impressive as that. But the $1,200 question is whether or not the camera in use is as good as it is on paper.
And… it is. Keep in mind that not every photo you take is going to be a 200-megapixel monster. Samsung uses software to combine 16 pixels into one larger pixel, whenever you capture a photo with the main camera. The result is roughly a 12-megapixel photo, in size, but with much more clarity and information in each pixel.
You can use the controls in the camera app to force the camera to take a 200-megapixel photo if you want to have the ability to zoom in and crop a photo, presumably, without forfeiting any of the photo’s quality.
I’ve taken a few test shots with the 100x Space Zoom feature of the S23 Ultra, with mixed results. More often than not, the 100x photos are pixelated and blurry. I’ve also taken similar photos with the 200-megapixel camera and cropped the same focal point to see how much of a difference there was--and for the most part, the 200-megapixel photos look better. They’re not perfect, but they’re definitely better.
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The rest of the camera experience, from taking low light photos to portrait photos, on the S23 Ultra is as good if not better than what iPhone users get with the iPhone 14 Pro lineup. It’s a subjective argument, as Samsung is known for slightly saturating its photos, while Apple takes a more true-to-life approach to its camera’s output.
Is the Galaxy S23 Ultra Worth It?
The Galaxy S23 Ultra is by far the best phone in Samsung’s lineup. Actually, it’s the best Android phone you can buy. Full stop. It’s earned that crown thanks to its solid performance, a big, vibrant display and a camera that downright impresses. But all of that comes at a cost; $1,200 to be exact.
The S23 Ultra is the smartphone to get for those who want the best. For those who miss the Galaxy Note and rely on the S Pen for notes and sketching--this is the Galaxy phone for you.
However, if paying $1,200 for a phone is too big of a hurdle for you to get over (and I can’t blame you), the Galaxy S23+ offers a lot of the same experience in a smaller package for $1,000. And if that’s still too much, Google’s Pixel 7 Pro is a consistent and reliable smartphone that’s consistently discounted to $749.
Samsung is also offering some very incentive pre order deals which can let you get the S23 Ultra on AT&T or T-Mobile for as low as $199.99, on Verizon for as low as $399.99, or unlocked for as low as $449.99.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Tech Specifications
Prices are accurate and items in stock at time of publishing.
