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Yesterday, February 2, Samsung launched the much anticipated Galaxy S23 Ultra, riding on good sales of the S22 Ultra a year back. Ever since the company retired the Note series, the Ultra line-up has become the de-facto phablet form-factor phone.
Understandably, one has to shell out quite a bit more than the lower models of the S series, but the S-pen functionality, bigger battery, and display make the Ultra series worth it.
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If recent trends in technology growth are any indication, the innovation and year-on-year growth of smartphones has started to fall sharply. This is not just true of mid-range phones, but rather true of flagships as well.
While trying to understand the launch of the newest member of the S series, the question of whether the S23 Ultra is a good upgrade over the last year's model is quite logical.
So people who already own a Galaxy S22 Ultra and are on the fence about upgrading to the Galaxy S23 Ultra need not fret. For today, we will try to answer if the upgrade season is upon us or not. Let’s dive into it.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are of the author.
What has changed in one generation of the Ultra series with the Galaxy S23 Ultra?
Qualcomm’s newest SoC, the 8 Gen 2, gets a decent performance jump over 8 Gen 1
This is a no-brainer. The benchmark scores were revealed long back when Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 had leaked online for the very first time. The data showed an almost 20 percent improvement over 8 Gen 1. The leaks were confirmed when multi-core and single-core scores from Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 surfaced, showing a decent improvement.
Another reason why the 8 Gen 2 got the mobile community excited was Qualcomm going back to the TSMC foundry. This meant that the SoC would be highly efficient with improved thermal performance.
The Galaxy S23 Ultra opting for this SoC certainly makes it a worthy upgrade over previous phones, but not its immediate predecessor, the S22 Ultra. 20 percent performance improvement may be visible in high FPS games, but the difference can barely be felt in day-to-day usage.
Base storage and storage type have improved
The S22 Ultra has a decent base storage of 128 GB, which is neither high nor low considering how much space the photos take these days. On top of that, the S22 Ultra uses a fast storage type in UFS 3.1, which reproduces amazing performance across the board.
With the new S23 series, the Galaxy S23 Ultra has increased the base storage to a massive 256 GB on the base variant and incorporated a much faster UFS 4.0 storage technology on the board.
The increment in read and write sequential speeds will only be a few milliseconds in app loading and opening times. Moreover, one will only need such speed if large files on the phone are regularly moved or copied on the device.
Screens and batteries are more or less the same, but cameras have improved on paper
Both the S23 Ultra and the S22 Ultra employ a 6.8 inch dynamic AMOLED screen that refreshes at 120 Hz and maintains a peak brightness of 1750 nits. The difference between the two comes down to the screen protection employed. The S23 Ultra uses a Gorilla Glass Victus 2 to provide shattering resistance to the glass compared to the Victus+ on the S22 Ultra.
Similarly, the battery on both the phones is 5000 mAh in capacity and supports 45 W fast charging. Samsung hasn’t claimed a massive increase in battery life over the older S22 Ultra, but thanks to the 8 Gen 2 SoC, there should be some improvement.
Coming to the cameras, the biggest changes happened to the rear wide and front selfie cameras. Samsung increased the rear camera pixel count of the S23 Ultra to a monstrous 200 MP, compared to the 108 MP over the last generation.
The selfie camera did see a drop in pixel count as it now has a 12 MP camera at the front compared to 40 MP from last year.
Surprisingly, the samples shared by the company in the Galaxy Unpacked event showed much better selfies even after reducing the pixel count. This just goes to show that megapixels aren’t everything. We'll have to wait for the test samples to drop.
The S23 Ultra will see an extra year of OS updates over the S22 Ultra
Samsung has been applauded for committing to a long software support cycle. This is true not just for its flagships, but also for mid-range offerings. The S22 Ultra will be supported till Android 16, while the S23 Ultra shall see support till Android 17. This is perhaps the only sound reason to upgrade to an S23 Ultra coming from an S22 Ultra.
Even so, this argument quickly falls apart for one reason alone.The entire point of supporting a device for long is to extract maximum usage in the long term. Had Samsung not provided four years of OS updates and five years of security updates, the reason for the upgrade would have been valid.
Since the S22 Ultra will see support till 2027, it makes little sense to upgrade to the new S23 Ultra.
In conclusion, better photography, a slightly faster processor, and storage technology cannot justify a pricey upgrade from the Galaxy S22 Ultra to the Galaxy S23 Ultra. The internal hardware differences would be minimally felt in the UI.
It is thus wise to take advantage of long-term software support to keep the phone for a longer period. People who have an older Note or an older Ultra model like the S20 Ultra may consider upgrading this year.
