I struggle to look at any other Samsung smartphone now that I’ve been living with its foldables. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 has effectively changed how I use Android. Most of the time, I’ll only bother with my Google Pixel 7 if someone is calling the number linked to that phone. Otherwise, you’ll see me primarily on the foldable. It’s just so much more versatile for the life I lead.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time with the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I missed the Fold while reviewing this one. Samsung’s ultimate new flagship device is everything you could want in a smartphone, but there is also a lot here that feels like overkill now that we’re in the second iteration of the Ultra and its stylus-wielding ways. In fact, I forgot to use the stylus until about two days ago (I don’t draw). And while four cameras are a great back-of-the-box brag, I still don’t understand how to push them to the extent they’ve been marketed as being capable of, and I realize I probably never will. And I like high spec phones!
Regardless, the Ultra still has plenty going for it, including a better design than the last generation. Those rear-facing cameras may not be enough to justify the price to casual users, but their post processing algorithms are just as good as Google’s—better in some cases. The Ultra even has a few features I think foldables are still missing—like that stowable stylus.But when it comes to targeting genuine innovation as opposed to niche specialty features, the Ultra might miss the mark compared to both the competition and Samsung’s other phones.
Samsung's ultimate flagship offers everything you could possibly want from a smartphone, but that doesn't mean you should pay for it.
Samsung's ultimate flagship offers everything you could possibly want from a smartphone, but that doesn't mean you should pay for it.
If you like big phones, you’ll love the Galaxy S23 Ultra (I don’t—it’s not foldable). It has a 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED display, categorized as such because it’s based on tech that allows the display to dynamically change refresh rates without killing the battery. The jury is still out on how much battery that display tech saves, and I’ll get more into that when we talk about the battery rundown results later. Still, the display that Samsung has going here is like carrying a tiny version of its TVs in your pocket.
You might have gotten into the Galaxy line because you love Samsung’s displays. I can’t blame you. Like on the S22 Ultra, the screen on the S23 Ultra is a 1440p resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate. I love watching TV on this thing, even the 720p classics like Taxi and One Day at a Time. What I especially appreciate about Samsung is how low the brightness can go so that I can fall asleep to those shows at the end of the night without lighting up the room. Samsung enables the use of Android 12's extra dim mode, and with that turned on, the phone doesn’t go any higher than about 350 nits—the standard rate is around 430 nits, or a whopping 1,750 nits if you’re out in direct sunlight and using the adaptive brightness feature.
The best part about the new Galaxy S23 Ultra is that Samsung fixed some of what I didn’t like with the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s design. Mainly, it squared off the edges instead of rounding them, so it’s easy to cradle the phone one-handed. I finally felt confident that I wasn’t going to drop it. I’m glad Samsung stopped with the overtly rounded edges, which are also annoying to use when you’re tapping on the edge of the screen.
This is still a gigantic smartphone. I hope you have big hands if you plan to play games on this thing. My small hands and long claws had difficulty cradling the Ultra to play with on-screen controls in games like Dreamlight Valley through Xbox Game Pass, and my wrists got weary holding the phone to control my character in Riptide GP: Renegade. The first-gen Razer Kishi controller that I use for Android gaming also feels as if it’s stretched to capacity on this phone, as if the Galaxy S23 Ultra will pop out at any minute. Unless it’s a point-and-tap game, I use a Bluetooth controller to play games on the S23 Ultra. The OnePlus 11's similarly sizeable 6.7-inch display, comparatively, feels less ginormous because it doesn’t have the Ultra’s squared-off corners and the chassis is narrower.
The Galaxy S23 Ultra utilizes an in-display fingerprint sensor and face unlock for added lock screen security. It’s best that Samsung didn’t carry over the power button fingerprint sensor like on the Z Fold 4, because I am constantly accidentally pressing that one and locking myself out of it. Scanning in a fingerprint or smiling at the Ultra felt fast and responsive unless I wore a mask or sunglasses.
The default sorage space on the S23 Ultra has thankfully been bumped up to 256GB. It starts there and goes all the way up to 1TB, if you can stomach paying for it (doing so will add $420 on top of the base storage’s cost). The Ultra is also IP68 rated for water and dust resistance.
Something to note about this year’s Galaxy S23 lineup is that it runs a unique flavor of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. Rather than use the one that came right out of the box, Samsung infused some of its AI smarts to tune camera and performance algorithms to its liking. The company already does this to some effect with its Exynos chips overseas, and it’s bringing that expertise to the phones sold in the states to one-up Google’s homemade Tensor processor. Sometimes it works.
The Galaxy S23 Ultra is available with 8GB and 12GB of RAM, which seems absurd. The Ultra should have 12GB of memory as the standard, since it’s technically the ultimate Samsung phone. Even with the 12GB of RAM, you can’t tell that the chip inside the Galaxy S23 Ultra is any beefier than what’s inside the similarly-specced OnePlus 11. On paper, and in Geekbench 5 (which will be Geekbench 6 in our reviews going forward), the Galaxy S23 Ultra performed better than OnePlus 11 by only about 300 points on the single-core score and 400 points on the multi-core one. But that proves little about whether Samsung’s infused chip is faster or more able than OnePlus’s vanilla one in actual use. Considering the Google Pixel 7 Pro is a laughing stock on the benchmark charts but not in real-world use—it ranks with 400 points less than the Galaxy S23 Ultra—it’s hard to use these benchmarks as the sole test for what’s possible. Anyway, neither of these Android devices can hold a candle to the numbers that Apple’s A16 Bionic spits out.
The upside to having such a powerful smartphone is that it can do everything: play games locally and from the cloud, create and edit documents, quickly export edited videos, process RAW photos, and chat with whoever. The Ultra can handle each of these cases with absolute ease, but that’s expected from a phone that I’ve been running for about three weeks. The real test for these devices is how they do after a year in the hand.
I echo the sentiments of a few other reviews: the Galaxy S23 Ultra doesn’t get as hot as previous versions of the device or even other Android phones. I fell asleep next to it a few nights in a row while it was charging and playing Pluto TV, and I didn’t feel the usual heat emanating as the battery fueled up for the next day. It did get toasty once while I was mindlessly scrolling through TikTok (as I often do), and it was significant enough that I remember saying, “I should probably mention this in the review.”
I’m sorry to include Apple in the subhead of a Samsung Galaxy review. But I remain impressed by the battery test on Apple’s latest flagship, and it’s now the benchmark for every other flagship phone review.
Samsung’s 5,000 mAh battery is enormous while remaining the same size as in last year’s Ultra. Whatever Samsung did on the backend to extend battery life has worked thus far—the S23 Ultra beat out the S22 Ultra by about two hours, lasting 18 hours and 33 minutes. But that’s nothing to Apple’s nearly 24-hour battery life on its large iPhone 14 Pro Max. I want some of whatever magic Apple has going on with its software to come to Android land.
These results translated to using the phone daily, too. As I mentioned, I’m a TikTok freak, and I was surprised to see that the Ultra chewed through only 23% of its battery life in five hours after mixed-use, which included tuning into my Disney streamer.
Because the Galaxy S23 Ultra is being dubbed as “ultimate,” its cameras are appropriately extreme. They’re also the key upgrade point here, and took up the majority of Samsung’s announcement event for this phone. The primary camera is a 200-MP standard wide-angle lens with optical image stabilization (OIS) and an f/1.7 aperture. The ultra-wide camera is a 12-MP sensor with an f/2.2 aperture. And the two telephoto lenses on the back also have OIS, though one has an f/2.4 aperture with a maximum 3x optical zoom, and the other is f/4.9 with a 10x optical zoom. The maximum digital zoom for this camera is 100x, just like the S22 Ultra.
Whenever someone outside of the Android bubble realizes the Galaxy S23 Ultra has four cameras on the back, they often ask me, “why?” The answer is so it has camera lenses for every foreseeable situation. For instance, if you’re chasing your kid around the park, you want that quick 3x optical zoom to capture them in the frame and up close. The result is a background bokeh effect that helps make the image instantly shareable on Instagram without using Portrait mode. Or if you happen to be lying down at the park, only to hear the roar of a jet engine approaching overhead, yo Source: Gizmodo