The Galaxy S22 Ultra is finally here and I've spent the past week
with this phone and I have a lot of things to share with you.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra is literally a Note
series of smartphone, but it's just called and S series of smartphone right now.
So without further ado, let's begin with our in-depth
review today.
So the Galaxy S22
Ultra that we have here in Malaysia comes with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.
And this is the first time that we Malaysians are getting
the Snapdragon version on the Galaxy S series of smartphones.
But I think it's quite disappointing too, since the Exynos 2100
last year on the Galaxy S21 Ultra was much better than
the Snapdragon 888 in terms of efficiency and the Exynos 2200 this year comes
with an AMD GPU which we don't get to try out this year unfortunately.
But enough of that we are reviewing the Galaxy S22
Ultra today and we'll go across our usual six points when it comes to a smartphone
to streamline this review and not to go off on a tangent for a very long time.
We are going to focus mainly on the Galaxy S22 alone.
We will have more future videos where you go in-depth in a few certain
aspects, so subscribe if you don't want to miss out on those videos.
Also, this entire video is scripted, edited,
uploaded, and published by me alone.
It is not paid by anyone or seen by anyone else before this video is published.
Let's start off with the box of the Galaxy S22 Ultra right here.
I know that this box is smaller than last year's Galaxy
S21 Ultra and this is also mentioned by Samsung as well.
However, I didn't expect this box to be so much smaller.
Of course, a box that is this thin means that there is no charger inside,
just like last year as well.
I mean, we are kind of accustomed to this already, right?
Check out our quick unboxing of the Galaxy S22 Ultra at the top right corner there.
And then we got to talk about the design of the brand new Galaxy S22 Ultra.
This design is something they grew on me.
Initially, I prefer the Galaxy S21 Ultra Design.
Instead of hiding the camera bump Samsung
just embrace the camera bump and also made it look pretty at the same time.
But when I look at the brand new Galaxy S22 Ultra with my own
eyes, Samsung made that bump elegant now.
It's just 5 circles and that's it.
Plus, because of how the camera circles are positioned, the phone doesn't
rock as much on the table compared to the Galaxy S21 Ultra
when they are both without a case That's a nice side effect, actually.
Also, the entire back of the phone is covered by a very nice matte
finish material and it is also available in a total of four different colors.
So we have the usual phantom black, phantom white,
and then we also have the new burgundy and also green color.
I saw a lot of polls on Twitter to vote for.
Which color is your favorite and I saw a lot more people
going for either burgundy or the green color.
Personally speaking though, I'll go for green color.
While it does have the name green in the name
Many people just looked at it for the first time and say, Oh, it's actually blue
and I get it because that hue is very similar
to the Galaxy S10 series with the PRISM Green Color.
Again, it's just called green, but it looks very blue
and I love that PRISM Green color too.
And combined with this matte finish, it just looks and feels really good.
Even the sides of the phone is also very elegant.
And in this roundup of various movie,
both the front and the back pieces of glass come into the frame
and I find this kind of craftsmanship to be just insanely good.
Plus, the top and bottom of the phone are also flat as well,
which is again reminiscent of the Galaxy Note series.
Of Smartphones.
And also the entire back in front of the phone are covered by
Corning, Gorilla Glass Victus+, by the way.
And since we're here, let's move on and talk about the screen on this phone.
It has a massive 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X
display with up to 120 Hertz refresh rate and also down to 1 Hertz to save battery
and it also has a resolution of 3088 by 1440 pixels.
On paper, it doesn't sound like much, but in truth this display actually got
a big upgrade in terms of both brightness and also color accuracy.
When we whipped out our colorimeter to test its color accuracy,
I had to adjust its brightness to the maximum to see how much it actually goes.
And I saw 368 nits average when it is at maximum brightness.
And that wasn't really that impressive.
And then I realized
there is another button in the settings menu called Extra Brightness.
I turned that option
on, cranked up the brightness to 100% and I was immediately blinded.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra went beyond 750 nits of brightness.
The Galaxy S21 Ultra doesn't even have this extra brightness option, by the way.
And yet the Galaxy S22 Ultra manages to achieve
every single brightness level with the perfect white point.
That is to say, all the adobe output
values are exactly the same while viewing white color.
Also, Samsung has this feature called Extra Dim, where its brightness can go
really low, which is perfect for viewing the screen in complete darkness.
And then we dialled the brightness back to 100 nits, which is typically
what we use indoors and continue with the color accuracy tests.
We got nearly 100% coverage for both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts,
and the Delta E value is also very low as well.
Oh, I should have mentioned that.
I also did not change any color profiles in the settings menu.
I just got the phone and I immediately did this color test.
Of course you can use the magnificent screen to view magnificent
photos and videos taken on the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
This one comes
with a total of five different cameras, each serving its own purpose.
The camera setup is very similar to the Galaxy S21 Ultra,
but we are leaving the camera comparisons between these two phones
for another video in the future focusing on the Galaxy S22
Ultra itself I took a bunch of photos
and it's one of those phones that I don't have to worry about.
A photo turning out bad if I forgot to tap to focus before taking a shot,
for example, and all of the pictures shown here are taken on a super gloomy day.
And it already started to rain when I was about to take pictures with this phone.
The wind was blowing very strongly to the point that my hands couldn't
stay still, but the OIS and the software in the Galaxy S22
Ultra managed to stabilize all of the shots.
I honestly just use the Galaxy S22 Ultra to take
a bunch of photos both indoors and outdoors,
and I enjoyed every moment of it so much so that I don't even remember
which zoom level was used to take these pictures.
I do remember
some of the pictures of these dogs were taken using portrait mode, though.
And of course, one big highlight this time around is the night shots.
Samsung made a big deal out of it and we tested it out too.
And I was immediately impressed.
The pictures have clearly gone through some algorithm to clean it up,
but it's still looks very authentic and it's clearly a night shot.
And yet we still have a much on Expert RAW app which offers a lot more control
to take pictures, with professional tools to avoid going off on a tangent.
We will leave that for yet another video too and for video side of things.
Samsung also said that the stabilization has improved
so I shot a video in 4K 60 fps of me walking across
a very bumpy path during broad daylight and it looks good.
So no surprises there.
And then when the night fell, I took the same test again.
And yes, it does have some post-processing artifact
when it comes to the stabilization, but it still looks very good.
The noise level is surprisingly little,
but this is not the end of our camera tests of the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
We have shot the same pictures and videos we have the Galaxy S21 Ultra
that we have here, so we have another comparison video coming soon.
So please subscribe now.
Moving on to the performance side, of things, the Galaxy S22
Ultra that we have here in Malaysia and what we've mentioned
comes with the Snapdragon chipset, namely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Like what we've mentioned in our performance tests,
even though it is thermally throttled and games are rendered at a lower resolution,
the frame rate
coming out of it is actually pretty good and it definitely didn't overheat
as the surface temperature is always below 40 degrees Celsius.
I mean, this one isn't even made for gaming.
So the more throttling to maintain a comfortable user
experience is understandable.
I just wish that there is an option for us to tap on it and make it go full blast.
Still, I want to know how the Exynos 2200 with the AMD GPU performs,
but it only seems to be available in Europe right now. Hmm.
Now, moving on to
the battery life of this Galaxy S22 Ultra.
I'm impressed that Samsung managed to fit in a 5000 mAh battery
despite having to sacrifice some space to fit the S Pen inside the phone.
I can provide our usual battery life test results
like what we do here, but that doesn't really make much sense.
So I'm just going to spoil the comparison between this phone and the GalaxyS21
Ultra with the Exynos 2100 when it comes to the battery life tests.
I calibrated the Galaxy S21 Ultra with the Exynos
2100 Galaxy S22 Ultra with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Both of these phones at 100 nits of brightness, adaptive frame
rate, 1440p resolution, and connected both of these phones to WiFi.
Both phones ran the PCMark 10 battery life tests side
by side and I even filmed this time lapse just for you to see.
The result is astonishing yet quite perplexing.
The Galaxy S21 ultra which had gone through
a lot of charge cycles since it was my daily driver for the first
eight months of the year 2021 and it also had a SIM card inside
while having both Facebook Messenger and Telegram running in the background.
Yet somehow with the Galaxy S21 Ultra that I have personally daily driven
for eight months manages to outperform the brand new
Galaxy S22 Ultra in our battery life test.
This could be caused by a few reasons.
Either the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is inefficient
or the optimizations for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 - and subsequently
the Galaxy S22 Ultra is just not that good yet.
Either way, there's a noticeable gap when it comes to the battery life tests,
but that's not really a big deal since they are both having a 5000
mAh battery and it can definitely go through my
one day of intense usage without much of an issue.
As for the charging time, we use our Ugreen 100W GaN charger
to test out the charging times of the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
While Samsung did claim that this phone can support up to 45 watts of wired fast
charging, our wattmeter only report about 28W - which is weird.
We don't know why this happens, so we'll leave this mystery for another time.
Either way I just leave it to charge and it charged up from 15 to 100% in
about an hour's time which is actually quite fast.
And lastly the software
it comes pre-installed with Android 12 with Samsung's One UI 4.1
and it just feels exactly the same like the Galaxy Z Fold3 that
I've got so accustomed to the features available on One UI
and my muscle memory
just make use of all of those features available like Edge Panel
with the screenshot snipping tool, or the Samsung Pay for example.
To me they're not bloatware because I use all of these features on a daily basis.
I've seen other smartphone brands
try to mimic all of these features, but in a very sloppy manner.
So Samsung's One UI is still my go to skin for Android smartphones and let's not
forget, Samsung also bumped up the software update policy too.
So Samsung promised a total of four generations of Android OS updates
and five years of security patches for the entire Galaxy
S21 and Galaxy S22 series of smartphones.
That's actually even better than Google themselves.
And we shouldn't forget about the main star of the show, the S Pen.
Since the Galaxy S22
Ultra is basically a Note, the S Pen is stored inside the phone.
However, whatever color of the Galaxy S22 Ultra that you've bought,
only the tip of the pen will correspond to the phone's color.
The entire shaft of the pen is still going to be black color.
That is not a big deal, but the thinness is a big deal to me.
Yes, it's much more convenient than the Galaxy S21 Ultra,
which needs to use a specific case just to carry the S Pen around
and we don't have to deal with deteriorating cases too.
Yeah, the original Samsung case for the Galaxy S21 Ultra
with the S Pen has just deteriorated for me.
But comparing the size of the s pen of the Galaxy
S21 Ultra and the Galaxy S22 Ultra, you can clearly see
the difference in thickness and also the size in general.
The thicker body is definitely much more comfortable to hold
and the Galaxy S22 Ultra's S Pen is just the same twig-like S Pen
that we've seen in the Galaxy Note 20 series of smartphones.
Still, if you just want to whip out the S Pen
and take a quick note or to sketch something,
then that shouldn't be a problem.
Or else you can get the LAMY Safari Twin Pen
which has a ballpoint pen plus an S Pen for a much more comfortable grip.
Or you can even get the S Pen Pro our review at the top right corner there.
What I'm impressed though, is that the new S Pen really feels responsive
thanks to Samsung's new prediction algorithm that enhances the latency
of the S Pen down to just 2.8 milliseconds.
The numbers don't put anything into perspective,
but I really felt the difference
when I started writing or drawing on the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
As a quick mention, the new Samsung Notes can convert more handwritten language
just into text as well.
I only know how to write
English and Malay, so I can't really test that out for you.
Even though I'm Chinese, I don't actually know how to read or write Chinese.
And so finally, the question is should you buy the Galaxy S22 Ultra?
Well if you're already eyeing a new Galaxy Note smartphone then the Galaxy S22
Ultra is your only option to me.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra is like improving the Galaxy S21 Ultra,
which is really my personal perfect phone for the year 2021.
And then Samsung just took this phone, added an S Pen
inside the phone and voila the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
What I'm concerned though is the starting configuration of the Galaxy S22
Ultra is a bit insufficient.
I suggest you not to get a base version at 128GB of storage at the price of RM5099.
128GB of storage is just insufficient,
especially with the cameras on the Galaxy S22 Ultra
which are so good that I think anyone owning this phone
would just go trigger happy and start snapping pictures everywhere.
I suggest you to get at least the 256GB version at a price of RM5499.
Yes, the price is steeper.
But if you are willing to spend that much for a smartphone, then I can assure you
that price is worth your money.
But this review isn't the last content
that we're going to have for the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
We'll have a lot more coming
soon, particularly the comparison with the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
Again, do subscribe for that.
And before you end this video, there's one more question
that a lot of people have been asking me.
Will I change my daily driver phone from the Galaxy
Z Fold3 to the brand new Galaxy S22 Ultra?
I can't really answer that.
Maybe not now, I guess?
The Galaxy Z Fold3's massive display when it is unfolded
is just something that other phones cannot replicate.
So, yeah, that's that's what's holding me back.
So, yeah, that's our in-depth review of the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
If you have any questions to leave them
in the comments section below, I'll try to answer them whenever I can.
And we see you guys in our future video
regarding the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
Goodbye.