Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review

Best Prices Today: Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

When the Galaxy S23 Ultra was announced, I said it showed Samsung doesn’t have to try anymore because the phone is so similar to the Galaxy S22 Ultra from 2022.

I stand by that. This phone looks and feels like the one that came before it in the range. But that doesn’t stop the newer S23 Ultra being one of the best phones ever made and one of the best phones you can buy.

If you want a device with every conceivable smartphone feature crammed into a glass block you can (just about) fit in your pocket, then you probably don’t need to look any further.

The best screen on a phone, a stylus, a 200Mp camera, and the latest in mobile processing power don’t come cheap though. The S23 Ultra starts at $1,199/£1,249/€1,419 and only gets more expensive if you want more storage.

But with five years of software support it’s a phone built to last.

Design & build

• Large but premium glass sandwich
• Almost flat screen
• S Pen stylus

So yes, the S23 Ultra looks a lot like the S22 Ultra, which means it’s a very large heavy (234g) block with glass on both sides, aluminium rails around the edges, and squared off corners to make the screen rectangular. Many phones have rounded screen corners these days, so it lends the Ultra a serious, computer-ish look.

The back is covered in Gorilla Glass Victus 2, same as the screen. This is the strongest phone glass going, but I still recommend putting this very smashable phone in a case even if it makes the phone even larger. There’s no pre-installed screen protector either.

Though the phone is tough to use with one hand, it feels incredibly premium. The side rails are almost flat but curve off towards the front and back of the very slightly curved edge screen, with the top and bottom of the device the only parts that are completely flat. It’s a better feel than the iPhone’s completely flat sides and screen.

The only buttons are the volume rocker and power buttons on the right edge – thankfully there’s no dedicated voice assistant switch (good riddance). The bottom edge has a USB-C port, dual SIM tray, mic, speaker grille, and S Pen that slots into the far left side.

If you want a device with every conceivable smartphone feature crammed into a glass block you can (just about) fit in your pocket, then you probably don’t need to look any further

My green review unit was a lovely hue though you might prefer the other colours of cream, lavender, or black.

Worth mentioning also are this phone’s top tier haptics. That is, the quality of the vibration motor for notifications, calls and alarms, but also for within the system for going back or for keyboard feedback when typing. They are truly excellent and make the phone feel as premium as its price tag.

Screen & speakers

• Incredible 6.8in AMOLED
• 1-120Hz refresh rate
• Dual stereo speakers

The display might be the best thing about the S23 Ultra. It’s stunning. I say this often about the latest top of the line Samsung phone, but it’s true: it’s the best screen I’ve seen on a phone to date.

It’s a 6.8in AMOLED with incredible clarity thanks to a 3088 x 1440 WQHD+ resolution, though you can tune that down to 1080p in settings to save battery life (there’s also a 720p setting, don’t go there).

Colour is uniform even at peak brightness, which Samsung says is 1750 nits. You can see the screen in total direct sunlight, which isn’t true for most phones.

With LTPO tech, the screen can also refresh between 1 and 120Hz depending on what you’re doing, and the lower Hz usage also saves on battery.

The display might be the best thing about the S23 Ultra – it’s stunning

The phone also ups the touch sampling rate to 240Hz when in game mode, which helps for reaction-important games.

The dual stereo speakers are also some of the best on a phone. Music played out of phone speakers is usually heresy but here it doesn’t distort, even at the highest level.

The audio quality is nowhere near as good as a small Bluetooth speaker such as the UE Wonderboom 3, but it is passable, and the speakers in general are excellent for YouTube and podcast sessions.

Specs & performance

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform for Galaxy, apparently
• 8/12GB RAM
• Up to 1TB storage

Samsung sometimes gets dinged for the slightly laggy feel of the performance and software on its phones even when new, but that’s not the case here. I’m not sure what the company has done differently, but this phone absolutely flies. It feels as fast as the Google Pixel 7 Pro and OnePlus 11.

It could be down to the chipset, which is a custom version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 specifically tuned for the Galaxy S23 Ultra (and for the regular S23 and S23 Plus). The chip has been set to reach a higher clock speed than other phones with the 8 Gen 2 (such as the OnePlus 11) and paired with the 12GB RAM of my review sample it made for flawless operation.

The CPU can allegedly reach a single core clock speed of 3.36GHz instead of 3.2GHz on other phones and 719MHz for the GPU vs 680MHz. That’s great, but in reality won’t equate to much of a performance gain.

The extra bit of oomph is at least reflected in a multi-core Geekbench 5 score of 4996, the best Android score we’ve seen, beaten only by the iPhone 14 Pro’s A16 chipset.

My review sample came with 256GB non-expandable storage, though in the UK Samsung appears to only be selling a 256GB model with 8GB RAM. There’s also a 12GB RAM/512GB storage option or a huge 12GB/1TB.

… this phone absolutely flies

Camera & video

• Very good 200Mp main sensor
• Superb 3x and 10x optical lenses
• Bad selfie camera

Samsung is making a big deal of the 200Mp f/1.7 main lens on the S23 Ultra but it’s not the first phone to reach the 200 megapixel mark – we’ve reviewed the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra with one already.

Having more megapixels doesn’t always equal better photos on a phone. The Google Pixel 6a takes phenomenal photos with a 12Mp lens thanks to Google’s superlative software processing.

Whatever Samsung’s doing with its lens is very good – but there’s not much of a jump in quality compared to the S22 Ultra’s 108Mp camera unless you shoot in full 200Mp mode and really look hard.

By default, the S23 Ultra doesn’t shoot at 200Mp resolution. Instead, it uses pixel binning, a technology that here combines a 4×4 area of pixel squares into one larger pixel area that improves detailing, particularly in low light. It means shots out the box are 12.5Mp, but the camera app lets you select 50Mp and 200Mp if you want to shoot in higher resolutions.

Here’s a selection of shots showing what the phone can do:

Alongside that lens are a 12Mp f/2.2 ultrawide, 10Mp f/2.4 2x optical telephoto, and a 10Mp f/4.9 10x optical zoom lens. Those four sensors make for the most versatile camera set up on any phone on the market, bar the similarly equipped S22 Ultra.

Having a 3x optical and 10x optical zoom is pure mobile photography luxury. I took shots at 10x with the S23 Ultra that won’t win a Pulitzer but are sharper than anything I could achieve on the iPhone 14 Pro, whose optical zoom is limited to 3x.

Check out the gallery here of the zoom ranges in action:

The 10x lens can also do Samsung’s ‘space zoom’ which can go to 100x and is pretty much called that because you can get a grainy photo of the moon’s craters. Don’t get me wrong, the fact it can do it is amazing, the results themselves are not that. Space zoom is this phone’s gimmick.

Better to focus (ha!) on the excellent software portrait mode, which gives a very good bokeh effect, even if phones like the Vivo X90 Pro with larger sensors are starting to do it with just hardware now.

The 12Mp f/2.2 selfie camera is an on-paper downgrade from the S22 Ultra’s 40Mp lens but the S23 is doing something cleverer with the processing. Shots looks sharper and more detailed, with better colour.

That’s only in daylight though – the selfie shooter is very poor in low light, with bad detail and blurry shots unavoidable. The lighting in the pub was bad, but other phones at this price can take better shots than this:

Even with its PDAF autofocus the main lens can’t cope with fast moving subjects either (though many other phones cannot). The S23 Ultra struggled to photograph my friend holding a wriggly dog without it blurring considerably. I took several shots, and they all look like this:

Samsung still enjoys saturating colours to make photos pop. Skies are bluer than in real life and grass and plants hum a vibrant green not quite of this world. But when out with friends and family, without fail I would show a photo to someone after taking it and they would complain how much better it looked than their phone’s version.

If you like your colours true to life and muted the iPhone is for you. But if you like shots pulsing with colour and ready to post to social media, the Galaxy is a better bet.

It’s worth it if you also download Samsung’s Expert RAW app to shoot in the RAW format and tinker with manual modes. It’s odd it must be a whole separate app, but at least it exists. It points you to Adobe Lightroom to edit, and you could fall down a camera settings rabbit hole, but that’s what you’d expect on a phone that costs this much – and the cameras are good enough to justify your effort.

Video is also very good with up to 8K at 30fps on the rear camera and UHD at 60fps on the front. A pro video mode with solid stabilisation means the S23 Ultra is a good shout if you are into mobile videography, but the iPhone 14 series still bests it for pure quality and better (miraculous) stabilisation.

Battery & charging

• 45W charging is quite slow
• All-day battery and then some
• Wireless and reverse wireless charging

Samsung, along with Apple, is a curious hold out on truly fast charging in its phones. What do these two know that we don’t?

All I know is the S23 Ultra charges slower than some phones that cost a quarter of its price. The phone comes with a USB-C to C cable in the box but no brick to take advantage of up to 45W charging speeds. With kit of my own, I charged the phone to 43% in 30 minutes, and it was only at 21% after 15 of those.

The OnePlus 11, which costs $699/£729 and comes with a 100W charger in the box, charged to 71% in 15 minutes and was full before half an hour. If charging speeds matter to you, it’s worth noting.

The S23 Ultra can be charged wirelessly (slower) though, a feature the OnePlus doesn’t have. It also means you can charge other Qi wireless devices (phones, watches, earbuds) on the back of the S23 using the phone’s power.

It sort of didn’t matter to me that the phone charges slower than others though because the battery life is so good. A phone this big easily fits a 5,000mAh cell, and it lasted me all day with no issues at all. I got a solid day and a half of use out of a single charge even when using the phone extensively for this review and could hit about 8 hours of screen on time before things started to get dicey.

This is also with the screen set to the maximum WQHD+ resolution and at the adaptive 120Hz rate.

As a UK reviewer who has had to put up with Exynos version of Galaxy S phones for years with worse battery life than their Qualcomm counterparts overseas, I am glad to see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 shipping in every unit.

Software & updates

• One UI 5.1 over Android 13
• Four platform updates
• Five years security updates

Samsung continues to lead the Android pack with a promise of four years of Android platform updates and five of security patches for the S23 Ultra (and many other devices). OnePlus has just caught up but only for one phone, while Google offers the same five years of security but only three Android version updates.

Apple outdoes Samsung here, as does Fairphone. But five years of software cover on a phone is still excellent.

The phone ships with One UI 5.1 over Android 13 and I quite like it. One UI remains quite busy and Samsung certainly changes a lot of the aesthetic compared to a ‘stock’ look or Google’s Pixel Launcher, but there is a lot of customisation you can get into – though other skins like Oppo’s ColorOS let you fiddle more with the look and feel of Android.

It took me three days or so to tweak One UI to my liking but I could happily live with it full time.

It was maddening to see an advert in the notifications for a Samsung laptop and there’s certainly a lot of Google and Samsung apps you could do without, but you can uninstall them. I say this as some of my colleagues think it’s bloated, but it is very performant on the S23 Ultra’s hardware.

Samsung continues to lead the Android pack with a promise of four years of Android platform updates and five of security patches

I really enjoyed having the S Pen stylus on the phone for about two days before I put it away and forgot it was there. It’s a genuinely handy tool but in my case, only when I need to do something like sign a document or edit a photo. I’m sure some people write notes on the thing or use it as an artist’s tool, but with a display too tall and narrow for that sort of thing, most should be looking at an iPad or Surface.

More useful is Samsung DeX – plug the phone into a compatible USB-C monitor and it turns the Android OS into a desktop mode for input with a keyboard and mouse via Bluetooth. It also works with wireless displays and is a legitimate way to use a desktop set up all powered from your phone. This should be the future.

Price & availability

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is a monster phone so it has a monster price tag. It’s on sale now and costs from $1,199/£1,249/€1,419 for the standard model with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage.

With 16GB/512GB it costs $1,379/£1,399/€1,599 and with 16GB/1TB you’re looking at $1,619/£1,599/€1,839.

You can get it directly from Samsung worldwide, or in the US from Best Buy, Target, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, and just about anywhere. It’s a Samsung.

In the UK you can also buy it from Amazon, O2, Vodafone, EE, Three, and John Lewis.

It’s an expensive phone, costing more than the 128GB $1,099/£1,199/€1,479 iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is comparably large and fully featured.

If you want a great Android phone with every possible feature, the S23 Ultra is that phone, and the only one out there with a built in stylus. But if you don’t need one of those, you could get the Google Pixel 7 Pro for $899/£849/€899 and save quite a lot of cash. The regular Pixel 7 costs even less.

Check out our full ranking of the best phones right now for more options.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the most phone you can get for your money, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best phone you can buy.

It is a kitchen sink phone with every possible feature stuffed into it. In a way, having this much in a phone sort of excuses it being such a squared off brick of a thing. An amazing camera set up, great battery life, best in class screen, stylus, full desktop mode, and the zippiest software performance I’ve seen on a Samsung – I’ve used Samsung Galaxy phones since 2015 – and this phone is a winner.

But it costs a lot, which makes it harder to recommend to everyone, just as it does with the most expensive iPhones out there.

You might well find all the luxury you want in the regular S23 or S23 Plus, or another top Android phone. Yet if you want the dictionary definition of the ‘most phone’, the S23 Ultra is it – for now.

Specs

• 6.8in, 120Hz, WQHD+, AMOLED display
• Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy
• 8/12GB RAM
• 256/512GB/1TB storage
• 5000mAh battery
• 45W wired charging
• 15W wireless charging
• Cameras:
  • 200Mp f/1.7 main camera
  • 12Mp f/2.2 ultrawide camera
  • 10Mp f/2.4 3x optical telephoto camera
  • 10Mp f/4.9 10x optical telephoto camera
  • 12Mp f/2.2 front facing camera
• 5G
• Wi-Fi 6E
• Bluetooth 5.3
• IP68
• Gorilla Glass Victus 2
• 78.1 X 163.4 X 8.9mm
• 234g
• Android 13 with One UI 5.1

Best Prices Today: Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra