- What's up, guys?
We're here at the Samsung Galaxy Experience
here in San Francisco.
And just to let you know,
Samsung did provide flights and accommodation,
but they're not getting any sort of review
and this is not sponsored by them.
So if it's trash, I'll let you know.
They're showing off the brand new S23, S23 Plus,
and S23 Ultra and we're excited to show it off
so let's get right into it.
Right off the bat, here we have the S23 and S23 Ultra.
There is the S23 Plus as well,
but we're not gonna take a look at it,
as it's very similar to the S23, just with a larger screen,
larger battery, and slightly faster charging,
so if you like this phone and wanted it a bit bigger,
you should be safe to go for the Plus size.
Starting with design, and this is definitely a phone.
It's like Samsung said, "Let's take the essence of a phone
and boil it down into the most basic thing you can get."
And that's not a bad thing.
It's a flat design.
It still has that kind of rounded corner
so it fits nice in your hand.
It's not quite that complete flat rails like the iPhone.
And on the back there's no set of camera housing,
it's just the raw lenses, which I think looks nice,
but it's definitely gonna be something
you wanna put a case on 'cause these are pretty exposed.
Looking around the phone,
on the right side we have our power button
and volume rocker.
On the bottom we have a speaker, USB-C, and SIM card tray.
We're not allowed to open it up,
but I feel like it's safe to assume it's a single nano SIM
with an eSIM possibility.
On the left side, nothing.
And on the top, nothing but a microphone.
Very plain.
You know, you're not gonna get those things
that, you know, budget phones somehow have
like the IR blasters,
expandable storage or anything like that.
But we haven't had those for years
on these flagship devices, so it's nothing too surprising.
And of course,
on the front we have the 6.1 inch full HD+ AMOLED screen.
We're gonna take a look at the screen closer later though.
So let's move on to the Ultra.
Here we have the Ultra, the phone for gamers.
Let's take a look at-
This one here, it's big.
It's a big phone.
If you like big phones, if you had the S22 Ultra,
you kind of know what you're getting into.
But for someone who prefers smaller and flatter phones,
this is very round and very big.
The screen is quite flat, but the glass itself falls off
so you're still getting a pretty flat writing area
for the pen
and you're not gonna get as many accidental touches.
On the side here,
we have the power button and volume rocker.
On the bottom, we have our probably single sim slot,
our USB-C, as well as the speaker grill and S Pen.
I actually was a Note user
back with the Note 5 I think it was, and I loved it.
I think it was great for playing like "Jackbox"
or any of those kind of drawing games, or signing PDFs.
I worked at a bank at the time
and it was great to be able to sign something off
and send it off just on my phone.
Plus, it's a great fidget toy.
(pen clicking)
You'll be hearing that frequently when I'm around.
Frequently.
On the back, it looks very similar to the S23.
We have our four main shooters here compared to the three.
And then we have our laser auto focus module,
so again, you'll be getting some really quick focus.
And on the front we have the 6.7 inch dynamic AMOLED2X
120 Hertz QHD+.
Oh, and it's Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 as well.
So you know I'm a big fan of just not dropping your phone,
but if you do, this should be okay
and it's Gorilla Glass on the back as well.
Speaking of, we have a lot of different colors.
Phones are a major fashion accessory,
whether we like it or not,
so Samsung's got a few different colors here
that might tickle your fancy.
We have the lavender, cream, green, and phantom black,
and I'm a big fan of the green.
My favorite color phone was a green iPhone 11.
And this one might take the bill.
It's a nice almost flat matte,
that even though it's a Gorilla Glass,
it feels great in the hand
and the color reflects really well.
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Thanks to dbrand for sponsoring today's video.
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I'll wait.
I'll just be here.
All right, come on back.
Wait, wait-
I gotta say, I was just taking off the case
in the dbrand spot and the size of the regular S23 is nice.
I've been using the OnePlus 11 5G
for the last little while here,
stay tuned for that video, and it's big,
versus this fits so nicely in the hand and pocket.
So if the performance can keep up,
this might be a really good option.
First, let's go check out the display and speakers.
All right, we've got the regular S23 here.
So obviously we gotta do a display and speaker test
by bumping "Crab Rave" in his quiet Samsung cafe.
Cringe, they don't have YouTube Premium.
("Crab Rave")
All right, so the screen looks great.
Of course, it's a Samsung phone,
they make some of the best screens in the game.
The speakers are loud and not bad,
but I did notice a little bit of peaking
in the earpiece speaker.
So it doesn't have complete dedicated dual speakers
outside of the earpiece,
and I think it's suffering a little bit because of it,
but it's not awful.
It's definitely better
than a lot of the other phones we've tried.
And, you know, you're gonna be fine playing "Crab Rave"
on the bus like you usually do.
As for colors, it's that patented Samsung vivid.
So if you like your colors really punchy,
this is gonna look great.
And I'm sure there's ways to turn it down
to a more neutral look.
But as a normie, I kind of just like it
looking pleasing to the eye.
I'm not gonna watch "Oppenheimer" on this,
so I don't really care
if it's not that gritty, realistic look.
Sometimes I just wanna to have something that looks nice
and this definitely does it.
All right, now let's check out the Ultra
and see if their speakers are better.
("Crab Rave")
All right, same as S23, this sounds great.
I didn't notice that little bit of crackling,
so maybe it's just this device that's been sitting out
and being used last little bit.
But sounds phenomenal.
Again, you're not getting the stereo separation
as if there were two dedicated speakers,
but you're not gonna complain.
In a pinch, you put this down on a table,
you're gonna be bumping a whole freakin' party.
- [David] Show me what party looks like.
- I've never been to one.
I didn't want you to find out like this.
As for the display, again, amazing colors, very punchy
in this vivid mode, very sharp.
And it takes a little bit to get used to
the fact the screen doesn't fall over the edge
like past devices.
But again, I think that's nothing but a good thing.
The accidental touches really aren't worth
that little bit of a waterfall effect
that you get with that curved edge
and it still looks really good.
One thing we noticed while getting this ready
is that the pen was low on battery.
So something to be aware of is this is an active pen
and it's probably 'cause the Bluetooth you use as a remote
or whatever when you push the button.
But it's a trade off.
It's something to be aware of at the very least.
Obviously, "Crab Rave" looks great.
But we're gamers,
which means we need to go to the gamer zone
to see if everything really looks good.
I'm in my zone, the gaming zone that is.
We're here with the S23 Ultra,
which Samsung is toting as being a gaming beast.
So let's talk some raw specs.
The S23 Ultra has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
but it has a special overclocked version
so you should get a performance bump over the S23,
as well as just other phones coming out
in the next little bit here, which is pretty exciting.
Also inside you can do eight gigs of RAM
or gigs (bell ding) of ram.
And for the (bell ding) gigs of Ram version,
you can go from 256 gigs all the way up to one terabyte.
Now, that one terabyte one's only available through Samsung.
So if you're someone who gets through a carrier,
you're a little bit outta luck,
but that's a lot of storage for a phone.
If you use that much, sus.
San Fran, baby.
I love New York.
Overall, gaming's not too bad.
I mean, it's a mobile game,
it's one they have preloaded on this
so I'm sure it's kind of optimized for this new device.
But it loaded up really quick.
I tried closing it, reopening it.
We've switched devices to see if there's any a difference
and everything runs pretty smoothly.
David was even saying earlier
that this looks better than like a Nintendo Switch game,
that if you saw it you'd be like,
"Good job, Nintendo, this looks pretty good."
And it's on this.
It's a little warm, it's not too bad.
It is plugged in, which is gonna add to that.
So something to be aware of,
you might get some sweaty hands.
I don't think it's gonna be anything too bad,
especially with how large the device is.
It should be able to passively cool
just from the amount of glass that's being exposed
to fresh air.
One thing to note is that there are no S23s here
in the gaming center
and it just has the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
so it's gonna perform a little worse.
But with the latest flagship SOCs,
I don't think there's gonna be any trouble
running any games that really exist.
But let us know if you want labs to check it out.
Hey, I won.
All right, we're on set
for where they filmed the moon landing in 1969.
We're ready to talk about cameras to see
if they're really as good as paper says.
So we got the S23 Ultra here and there's a lot going on.
So we got two telephoto lenses,
one at 3X and one at 10X.
Both are 10 megapixel.
Then we have a 12 megapixel ultra wide.
And luckily enough,
all the cameras this year have optical image stabilization
so you're not gonna get any shaky ultra wides
like you might have gotten last year.
What's really special
is the 200 megapixel adaptive pixel main camera.
What adaptive pixel means
is it takes that 200 megapixel photo,
which is way too big to do anything with
if you're the average person,
and it turns every 16 pixels into one pixel.
So what that means is that you're gonna get more brightness
in each photo so that when you're taking photos at night,
you can still get details in all of the dark little crevices
and corners you're taking pictures in.
Now, I'm gonna go to a shady back alley
and see just how this does.
Come on.
Now, as you can see, it's really dark in here
so we're gonna change the settings
so that you can see what's going on.
Whoa.
Daytime.
The night performance on these is crazy.
We're not allowed to actually share these photos with you,
even though by the time you're seeing this,
it's after the embargo
because they don't want anything being transferred
during this embargo in case something happens.
So we're just gonna have to film the screen to show you.
But right off the bat, the night performance is amazing.
The selfies are really well-lit, and the color of my skin,
especially being a person of color
still looks really natural.
And then on the main camera itself,
it's like I'm taking a picture with an actual DSLR
and tripod.
And yeah, these are all handhelds.
Into the bright scenes, of course, everything looks great.
The 10X zoom, surprisingly sharp,
even though it did miss a focus a little bit.
I feel like if I had taken more time or put it on a tripod
just to give the OIS a little bit of help,
maybe it would've been a little bit sharper.
But I'm still blown away.
They look really, really nice.
And again,
I wish I could show you the full resolution photos,
but I can't.
For video, I was, again, really impressed.
No struggles at all.
And now, we have the S23.
So it has a 50 megapixel main shooter,
12 megapixel ultra wide,
and a 10 megapixel telephoto, which is three times.
We're gonna go into the dark room again
and take some pictures to see what we think.
It looks good still.
It doesn't seem to be as good as the S23 Ultra though.
And I did have to manually adjust exposure a couple times
and that just might be the difference of grabbing that focus
with the S23 Ultra's laser auto focus.
But everything still looked really good.
Although, things were a little bit more grainy in the dark,
I think that you'll be really happy
with any photos that it takes.
My quality was also great on both of them,
which is fantastic.
Overall, the S23 and S23 Ultra look like amazing phones.
This is coming from a guy
who's been on iPhone for a long time,
and when I was on Android,
didn't really want to use Samsung
'cause I thought it was just kind of extra.
But trying out these things, the amazing cameras,
the beautiful screens, great speakers,
on top of all these other just miscellaneous little features
like night modes and AK filming,
it doesn't matter if there's a ton of great features
and it performs really well if it's too expensive.
Now, I only have Canadian pricing
so we're gonna put the kind of today's equivalent of USD
on the screen here.
For the S23, it starts at $1099 Canadian.
For the Plus, it starts at $1399 Canadian.
And for the Ultra, it starts at $1649.99 Canadian.
It seems like these are really competitive.
The new Snapdragon 8 gen 2 performed really well.
The cameras, again, are amazing.
And the software, it's a Samsung.
I think this year's Samsung is probably we're checking out.
But of course, wait for it to come out
and see full reviews and unboxings.
So this is just a quick look
and it was in Samsung's own setup areas
where everything's gonna work perfectly.
So keep an eye out, let us know
if you want labs to check it out when it fully releases.
And if you like this video, maybe check out my POCO video,
something on the opposite side of the spectrum.
It's only 160 bucks.