Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Review

The Samsung Galaxy S22 series is the latest in Samsung’s flagship series. The S22, S22+, and the S22 Ultra are the new babies of the S-flagship lineup and we have got the S22 Ultra to test right now. First off, we just want to say from the bottom of our hearts – we missed the Note line terribly.

Having said that, the Galaxy S22 Ultra is the new Note. Or is it?

The S22 Ultra now features a silo to “dock” your new improved S-Pen into. The Ultra gets a new design lifted straight from the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra which was launched back in 2020. Also, now global variants of the S22 Ultra come powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip which means the Indian market gets it too. It also gets a bigger camera sensor, a brighter display, and longer software support.

So, is the S22 Ultra the new Note? Yes, we have been asking ourselves this constantly. Time to find out.

Design and display

The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is uncomplicated yet gorgeous. We like the clean, squared-off angles, as well as the fact that the cameras aren’t hidden behind a honking hump. They are more flush with the handset’s rear. The overall appearance is clean and minimalist. The 6.8-inch display is also slightly curved, which provides some visual appeal without causing inadvertent screen presses. Our main gripe is that entering text or moving the pointer to the far left or right of the screen might be difficult at times. Despite having a slightly larger display than Apple’s 6.7-inch iPhone 13 Pro Max, the S22 Ultra weighs 229 grams versus 240 grams.

To be frank, the S22 Ultra gathers a lot of design cues from its older siblings – the Note 10 Plus, the Note 20 Ultra, and the S21 Ultra. The camera island is now missing with the lens sitting on the back panel. Lens layout is still the same as the S21 Ultra but with improvements. 

The frame is solid Armor Aluminium which does not bend. Believe us, we tried. The frame is finished in a gloss Burgundy shade and sit sandwiched between two Gorilla Glass Victus+ panels. The front is a glossy panel while the back panel gets a satin finish which is not a massive fingerprint magnet – but a magnet nevertheless. The body is IP68 rated so it’s safe against splashes of water. 

The phone is huge, massive, large, sizeable, substantial, great, huge, immense, enormous, colossal, mammoth. The dimensions are 163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9mm which makes it too big for small hands. Not us. The Galaxy S22 Ultra was easy to handle thanks to its curved edges, but it’s slippery as heck.

The S22 Ultra retains its super-premium-esque Samsung’s tried and tested curved-display look. There is a massive 6.8-inch display – an OLED display to be exact. Unlike the S21 Ultra which featured smaller curves, the S22 Ultra gets bigger display curves. We did miss the S21 Ultra’s camera module on which we had slapped a carbon-fibre design skin. 

Even though the design is somewhat similar to the Note 20 Ultra in terms of design – the display size is slightly smaller. However, it’s bigger than the S21 Ultra because of its curved nature. 

The rear part is a piece of glass curved at the edges and gets five cutouts for the camera – three large rings for primary, ultra-wide, and long telephoto lens. Two smaller ones are the short telephoto and laser AF. The downside of all this new camera design – is dust between the lenses.

The Armor Aluminium frame is familiar – having been introduced with the Fold 3. It’s touted to be the strongest aluminium ever in a phone. The frame includes a power button and volume rockers on the right side of the phone – both having been made with recycled fishing nets.

There’s an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under the display which is quick and reliable as compared to its earlier iterations. There’s no expandable storage slot and since we mentioned the S22 Ultra gets an IP68 rating meaning you can safely dunk the phone in water. No surprises here considering this is not the first time Samsung has done it. 

The S22 Ultra’s display segment is where it shines. It gets a massive sun-dwarfing, eye-searing, vampire-killing, jadoo-overdosing 1750 nits of brightness. It also features an adaptive refresh rate, QHD resolution, S Pen support, and more.

Samsung has clarified that the 1750 nits are for small patches on the display. The phone gets a 1200 nits value in “high brightness mode” – thanks to the ambient light sensor.

The display looks great in all kinds of lighting conditions. Thanks to the Vision Booster feature, the phone can apply different tone mappings to boost shadows and colour. One of the best phone displays right now.

Software and performance

The Galaxy S22 Ultra runs Android 12 with OneUI on top. Also, because this is a Note, it comes with a hearty amount of S Pen-related features. The S Pen is basically the very same unit as the one available on the Note20 Ultra, and it has the same features as the Note20 Ultra, plus a few more. Quick Note is one of the new features, and it allows you to add full web pages as scrapbook items in Samsung Note. We had a few issues with cookie consent popups appearing multiple times in the captured note, but you should be alright if you’re not in Europe. Quick Note, on the other hand, only works with the Samsung Internet browser and not with third-party browsers.

Collaboration View, the other new feature, allows you to use Samsung Notes on the S22 Ultra in conjunction with a Galaxy tablet. This mode transforms your phone into a tool palette, freeing up the tablet to be used solely as a canvas. Handwriting recognition for an extra 12 languages is now available on this latest generation of Galaxy S Pen-equipped devices, increasing the total to 88. We’re guessing this is merely a Samsung Notes feature that will be accessible on the S21 Ultra and Note20 Ultra at some point.

Samsung Notes is where you can make use of the improved latency of the new S Pen. AI point prediction, which debuted on the Note20 Ultra, analysed your S Pen input and predicted where your writing will take you so it can switch up those pixels in 9ms, a significant improvement over the 42ms of previous Note models. The S22 Ultra, on the other hand, reduces that time to as little as 2.8 milliseconds.

The OneUI 4.1 feels much better, smoother, and cleaner than its previous versions. Basics are the same but this time there are Smart Widgets that gets the capability of combining different pieces of data and also take of lesser space.

One new feature of the OneUI 4 is Color Palettes – which is basically a feature carried over from Android 12’s wallpaper’s colours. It comes with four Color Palette options in addition to the standard OneUI Blue/Black one. 

A new Privacy Dashboard has been added to the Settings menu. You can quickly discover which apps are using some of the most crucial (privacy-related) permissions. You can restrict the camera and access across apps, enable clipboard access warnings (helpful if you copy passwords, social security numbers, or IBANs, for example), and, of course, there’s a full-featured permission manager if you want to go deeper.

In terms of performance – the Indian variant finally gets the Qualcomm treatment which means gaming is faster, smoother, and overall feels better. Our unit shipped with 256GB of internal storage and 12GB of RAM and at no point did we feel any dip in performance except the times we tried editing a 4-minute FHD video at 60fps on Instagram and the app froze and crashed multiple times.

Cameras

The Galaxy S22 Ultra has a quad-camera system that is nearly identical to the one found on the previous year’s model. A nona-binning 108MP main sensor, one of only two auto-focusing ultrawides in Samsung’s lineup, and not one but two telephotos with up to 10x optical zoom are among the highlights.

While they appear to be identical to those on the S21 Ultra at first glance, they are not. The nominal resolution of both is 10MP, and the zoom magnification and aperture of the lenses are the same – the 3x zoom unit has an f/2.4 aperture, while the periscope 10x has an f/4.9 aperture. Both are still in good shape.

Located in the sensors. The S22 Ultra replaces the 1/3.24″ type units in the S21 Ultra with smaller 1/3.52″ units, and the pixel size is now 1.12m instead of 1.22m on the previous model.

The S22 Ultra’s ultrawide camera remains retained, featuring a 1/2.55″ sensor with 1.4m pixels and dual pixel autofocus. The lens has an aperture of f/2.2 and a 120-degree field of view.

This S22 Ultra and the S21 Ultra are the only cameras with autofocus, which should be commonplace by now. The primary camera, a 1/1.33″ type imager with 0.8m pixel size, employs the same ISOCELL HM3 sensor as last year’s model. You could think of it as a 12MP camera with 2.4 million pixels thanks to its Nonapixel colour filter array and 9-to-1 pixel binning, but that’s a pretty simplified view. The lens has an equivalent focal length of 23mm, which is one mil wider than the S21 Ultra. The lens is optically stabilised and the aperture is f/1.8 once more.

Meanwhile, the selfie camera appears to be identical. Behind a 26mm, f/2.2 lens is a 40MP 1/2.8″ Tetrapixel sensor with 0.7m pixels. In Samsung jargon, tetrapixel refers to 4-to-1 binning, so expect 10MP photographs. However, keep in mind that the phone shoots in crop mode by default, resulting in 6.5MP images with a 32mm equivalent focal length.

However, the technology that underpins these lenses has been improved. While the image sensors remain the same as the S21 Ultra, Samsung has improved optical image stabilisation, digital image stabilisation (for a better Super Steady system), and image processing. As a result, all lenses perform well, but zoom lenses perform much better.

The zoom capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra far exceed anything we’ve ever seen from a mobile phone camera. Obviously, the 3x and 10x optical zooms are not only reliable, but they also provide clear shots of distant objects with enough detail to crop in on details without noticing much pixelation. You’ll notice substantial imperfections in your images when using the 30x and 100x Space Zoom, at least in previous incarnations of Samsung’s technology. Part of this is due to the stabilisation, which takes control of the lens at 100x and keeps a subject (such as the moon) in the frame. Although it may feel as if you’ve lost control of the lens, it does an excellent job of compensating for your shaky hands.

Wide and ultrawide photos benefit from the new Samsung’s stable of magic as well. Samsung launched Adaptive Pixel with the Galaxy S22 Ultra. This combines the entire resolution of the 108MP wide-angle original with nona-binning (originally introduced with the S21 Ultra), which takes nine pixels of information and combines them for enhanced colour and contrast. 

What appears to be a fifth lens on the phone’s rear is actually a Laser Auto Focus sensor, which assists that lens with auto-focus. A small red laser light may be seen poking out from behind the glass if you look attentively.

Even if we detected a hint of over-saturation (it wouldn’t be Samsung if they didn’t over-saturate the image), almost every image we shot looked great.

Meanwhile, the front-facing camera employs tetra-binning, which combines four pixels into one for a high-resolution 10MP image.

Battery life

The Galaxy S22 Ultra has a 5,000mAh battery, which is higher than the Note20 Ultra’s 4,500mAh capacity and the same as the S21 Ultra’s. It is a good thing that battery capacity hasn’t suffered as a result of the S Pen’s inclusion. In our usage, the S22 Ultra performed admirably. With the display set at adaptive refresh rate mode, we achieved around a full day with full WQHD+ resolution kicked in, 5G, normal calls and messages, social media, light gaming, and music and videos.

The S22 Ultra is capable of 45W fast charging which it introduced with the Note 10 Plus. We did not have the 45W charger but the 25W charger was able to charge from zero to full 100 per cent in about 80 minutes – that is if you do not use the phone during charging. 

Verdict

The S22 Ultra brings a whole new experience in terms of cameras, performance, and S Pen support as well. You can pen handwritten notes on the go, use Air gestures, and basically every feature under the Note lineup. The cameras are phenomenal and so is the performance. No longer we can crib about Samsung flagships getting Exynos chips. Although, to be honest, the last Exynos 2100 chip on the S21 Ultra was good in terms of performance.

Overall, if you are a smartphone junkie – the S22 Ultra is the one for you. No ifs, no buts, only Ultra.