This morning I woke up and noticed that my 22 ultra was dead, which is something
that you don't really want when you need to shoot a video with it.
Well, praise battery Jesus for fast charging the s 22 ultra
it now has 45 watt charging which gets you from 15% to 90 in
roughly 46 and a half minutes, the s22 plus also has this feature,
but the regular S 22 and has S21s all only get up to 25 watt fast charging.
None of them come with these chargers though, so you'll have to buy them
separately.
And Samsung's official 45 watt charger will set you back
69 bucks.
Nice.
Not! While the wattage is a fair bit lower it turns out 25 watt
charging is only slightly slower than 45.
So you could consider a 25 watt charging for half the price and be just as happy.
All right.
Before I get to number two, what's the deal with the S 22 ultra
this phone is Samsung's top
premium absolute specked out flagship device for the year 2022.
But besides its looks and size the S 22 ultra
is actually more similar to its smaller namesakes than you would think.
They all have super powerful processors 5G, very bright 120 hertz screens
and an absolutely stacked camera system. Compared to the others
it just has a few extra little tricks up its I was going to say sleeve
but that's not really... it doesn't really have slaves does it.
Oh up it's
S-Pen hole.
No that's that's not right
Within that whole of course you find the S-Pen
which is a pretty unique inclusion these days.
It unlocks a few cool ways to use the phone including the ability
to draw on the screen without even unlocking the device.
I love this feature because I'm always taking notes on my phone
and doing this just makes it that much quicker.
Look, I write my name.
The pen feels thin but comfortable.
And on apps that actually use drawing inputs, it really does
feel like you're just scribbling with a pencil on your screen.
Doodlers and handwriters will definitely get a kick out of this thing.
Now I'm neither a doodle or a hand writer, so after using this phone
for about a month, I kind of forgot the pen even existed.
Like most apps, these days are optimized for big fat fingers.
But I know there are a lot of people out there who do dig the stylus life
and you will you will thoroughly enjoy this.
And hey, you know what they say you can't spell styl without stylus.
Actually, my favorite thing you can do with
this is use it as a remote shutter button for your camera.
Great for capturing wildlife or faraway selfies.
Speaking of snaps
compared to the other S22s, the ultra has an extra lens,
and that's this lens, the ten times telephoto zoom.
While I didn't think I would use this telephoto lens all that much,
it actually evoked the same feelings that I got when ultra wides
first made their way to phones.
It just kind of unlocks a whole new way of using your phone
as a camera that we haven't really seen before.
Of course, you could take photos of all kinds of faraway things with this,
but I mostly focused on close up photos of birds.
Why not? You can see it's similar to the three times telephoto lens.
The images are nice and would likely get a few love hearts on social media,
but the ten megapixel sensor doesn't leave you with an immense amount of detail.
The stabilization is very impressive though.
With a lens this long, you would kind of expect it
to pick up every little movement that you make, but it doesn't do that.
Looking back at the footage, yeah, it's just really smooth.
You also get 100 times space zoom.
For some reason, you get fine images at around 20 times,
but beyond that, it starts to completely break down.
I should also add the S22 Ultra has many more megapixels
in both its selfie and wide primary lens.
This gives you cleaner, sharper images when you're using those particular lenses.
The ultra wide and telephoto, however, are pretty much exactly the same
across all three devices
Now this phone has 12 gigs of
RAM in it, which is just a lot of RAM for a mobile phone.
Unless you're doing some crazy multitasking with a bunch of heavy apps,
it's highly likely you won't find these 12 gigs of Ram all that necessary.
But it does come in handy when you start using this as a Samsung dex
device. With an HDMI adapter or a screen with mirror cost.
Samsung Dex basically turns your phone into a laptop like device
that runs just like a desktop. Connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
And I've built myself a pretty capable little computer.
I can even start editing videos or photos that I've taken on this very phone.
The Wild thing is you can run all of these apps at the same time
and probably not experience any slowdown whatsoever.
That is incredible to me.
It runs just like a laptop now.
Plenty of other Samsung devices have Dex,
but the reason I like using the ultra for it, is beyond the massive RAM
of course, you can still use the pen on the screen,
so you can draw and sign and stuff like that.
Awesome.
Now I should be clear, I'm definitely not calling this a laptop replacement.
It does only run Android apps still after all.
But if you're kind of strapped for cash and can only afford one device,
this kind of does the trick for you, especially
if you mostly use web based services for your computing stuff.
Now, if you are using this primarily for its camera or perhaps as a pseudo
laptop replacement with Samsung Dex, then it's highly likely
you'll also want a lot of internal storage on this thing.
Sorry, none of the S22s come with expandable storage though,
so you can't just pop a memory card in there like the good old days.
You'll have to pay for one
with a bigger hard drive and they don't come much bigger than the s 22 ultra.
in fact
the ultra is the only one in the lineup with 512 or one terabyte options.
Unfortunately, if you want that one terabyte hard drive, you'll need
to pay ultra amounts of cash.
Actually, that brings me to my one reason why you probably shouldn't get this.
It's bloody expensive and it's huge.
I don't know if you can see that. It's like the size of my face.
OK, that's two reasons.
Let's start with the size problem.
After putting a case on this monster I am not having a repeat of my S22
plus review.
You end up with a very bulky boy.
I like to think I have good sized dexterous gamer hands,
but it's just not something I can operate comfortably with.
one hand. If you've got mini mitts, this is going to be a struggle to operate.
No, I wouldn't buy this.
It's too big. Anyway, that's just the side gripes.
The main problem is just how expensive it is.
The one terabyte model was $2,449 in Australia.
That is just so much money for a single phone.
If we compare an ultra versus the S 22 plus with the same 256 gigs of memory,
you're paying 1999 compared to 1349.
That's a difference of 650 bucks.
You could buy another entire mid range phone for that.
Actually this one is really good.
Subscribe if you want the review.
So due to its price it's really hard to actually recommend the S22 ultra
to many people. If the features I've listed do seem fun
or even useful to you, then perhaps it is the phone for you.
In which case yeah go for it, get this thing.
But if you don't really like the sound of all those extra features that I listed,
you'll probably be just as happy with the s 22 or the S 22+.
They come in far more manageable sizes.
Their processing power is pretty much exactly the same
and they are far cheaper. To learn more about those phones
check out this video here and also find out how I broke my review unit. It's...
it's not pretty.