so this is the samsung galaxy s22 ultra and no matter how you spin it this is the galaxy note that no users have been waiting for i mean you gotta understand the note lineup in its early days was always the best hardware available combined with an s pen but things changed and the hardware in the s series started to match the hardware in the note series it no longer made a lot of sense to have a separate release for a phone that did the same thing mine is being able to write on it this new s22 ultra or note is now the hardware champion again and fans of the s lineup who just want a big screen and a good phone can just buy the s22 plus i mean the s22 ultra design is an iteration of the note 20. it’s still boxy it’s massive and the s pen is still housed in the exact same location now some will say the new camera layout looks uninspiring and flat but honestly hold the phone and it starts to make a lot more sense in fact i actually prefer it holding last year’s galaxy s21 ultra feels unbalanced due to the top heavy design but this can obviously be fixed by using a case the note on the other hand feels perfectly balanced due to the more flush camera layout remember this is a device that needs to be used to write on and having a device that feels balanced is a lot more comparable to an actual notepad now it is taller than
the iphone 13 pro max but less wide and bigger in every way than the s21 ultra yes this is a curved display and straight up you guys know how i feel about curved displays but thankfully it’s minor and the virtual keyboard ends just before the edge which means no typos or awkward presses it’s lighter and easier to hold than the iphone 13 pro max since it doesn’t have those boxed edges and it feels just as premium the buttons are nice and clicky and the speakers sound amazing in fact there’s not much of a difference in terms of sound quality compared to the s21 ultra maybe one decibel louder at the most the vibration motor when typing feels excellent but one of the stars of the show is the included s pen it works and functions like it did on any previous note you take it out of the same location but if you want the pen’s color to match the phone’s body then you gotta buy the black version the colored models only paint the bottom and then they leave the rest of the body black thankfully it has a rubbery texture so it gives you a nice grip when it’s in the hand but wow did they ever improve the latency of the s pen the latency has been reduced from nine milliseconds to 2.8 i’ve been doodling and writing notes on it and it’s a massive improvement to writing or drawing it’s closer than ever before to physically writing on a piece of paper all the old note s pen features make a return you can use air actions to flip through photos or take a picture remotely without having to interact with the screen at all the s pen is a powerful tool if you take the
time to learn how to use it the display is 6.8 inches it’s qhd plus oled and rocking the same 120 hertz refresh rate like it did before it’s still lcpo which means it can ramp up and ramp down the refresh rate to save battery life but instead of bottoming out at 10 hertz it can drop all the way down to one which should in theory offer slightly better battery life it’s brighter than before with the peak brightness reaching 1 750 nits and samsung continues to have the best displays period and you’re reminded every single time you look at this one now this is the first phone i’ve personally used that comes with the snapdragon 8 gen 1 chip and based on my first impressions i’m getting a cpu performance loss in both single and multi-core speeds compared to last year’s snapdragon 88 this was shown in my geekbench test and by using passmark i checked the temperatures and they were consistent on both devices so it’s not a heat issue but the one area that i did see a big jump is with the gpu the adreno 730 is a major improvement over last year’s 660 but unfortunately both processors still can’t match the iphones honestly though for day-to-day use this all means nothing and these performance benchmarks are really for those 12.5 individuals who are buying these phones to play genshin but i did play 45 minutes of pubg to test out its performance and i didn’t get any drop frames with graphics set to extreme it did get warm though it was a normal amount of heat with temperatures around 40 degrees celsius and not uncomfortable to hold there’s eight gigabytes of ram if you buy the 128 gigabyte version but my model is 256 gigabytes and it comes with 12.
This is a lot of ram and i didn’t experience any issues with aggressive memory management samsung’s one ui 4.1 is installed which is slightly newer than the version i have installed on my z flip 3 which is 4.0 the biggest improvement though is how much virtual ram you’d like to have on your smartphone which i think is kind of cool now the most debated topic about the ultra is the cameras because they’re technically using similar hardware to the s21 ultra they both have 108 megapixel wide lens a 12 megapixel ultra wide lens and two 10 megapixel telephoto lenses the main difference though is the glass lens that the s22 ultra is using this new clear glass reduces the amount of light produced when taking a photo i noticed this right away in one of my night shots and it looks really good but looking back comparing the differences between both phones picture quality comes down to improvements in computational photography i’m finding the s22 ultra does a better job with white balance exposure and has a cleaner crispier image but sometimes it leans towards magenta the s21 also on the other hand is a bit more worm it doesn’t expose for brightness as well and leans towards the greens or yellows regardless of whether you use the ultra wide wide or telephoto lens the s22 ultra has more of a smoothing effect in tough lit areas whereas the s21 tends to use noise and more aggressive sharpening now there’s not much of a difference with the 40 megapixel front facing camera they both take similar pictures but one area i noticed a very nice improvement is with video samsung already takes amazing video but the stabilization on the s22 ultra is much cleaner it jitters less and
doesn’t break up the image as much as it does on the s21 ultra i tried video portrait mode and if this is just one subject it works fine but if you want to rack focus back and forth between two subjects it looks janky my son looks like he’s literally trying to teleport out of this picture to be quite honest i haven’t used cinematic mode since i reviewed the iphone and i doubt i’ll ever use video portrait either at the moment they both need a lot of work you can shoot raw photos if you download the expert raw app from the samsung store for more granular control but the camera with the s22 ultra feels more refined and confident than ever and that’s a good thing because it’s all software there should be literally no reason why the s21 ultra doesn’t get these new features in a software update we finally have much faster wired charging up to 45 watts but if you charge wirelessly the max is 15 it’s a slower charge but personally i find it more convenient battery size is 5 000 milliamp hours and so far the battery is getting me through the entire day with lots of juice left to give i can easily do 1.5 days maybe even two with
light use it’s good battery life but it’s not iphone 13 pro max good also the last thing i want to mention is updates it’s now being extended to four years of software updates which is way overdue only having three was an awful feature on previous samsung phones especially considering people keep their phones for at least three to four years now well the normals do not as enthusiasts we’re cracked and upgrade every two minutes because of a new feature we’re like that dog from the movie up who yells squirrel except we do it when we hear the word megabyte look this is not a major update no phone year over year is a major update anymore that’s the honest truth but if you’re a die-hard note user and need to upgrade you’ll feel right at home with the s22 ultra now for those of you that don’t need an s pen i just want the best i’d see if you can get a deal on the s21 ultra because performance and normal everyday functionality feels no different compared to the s22 ultra unless you want the slightly better camera or gpu to play called mobile all day just save your money plus the camera improvements can be easily pushed out with a software update anyways that wraps up my review there will be a link in the description down below if you want to pick one up like the video if you liked it subscribe if you haven’t already and i’ll see you guys in the next one
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