Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Review

Two decisions made the S23 Ultra. The first was inherited: in 2022 the S22 Ultra had absorbed the Galaxy Note, taking its squared body and its silo for the S Pen, so the Ultra became the Note in everything but name. The second was new: for the first time since the line began, every S23 Ultra in every market got the same chip, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked higher 'for Galaxy', and the Exynos complaints that had shadowed the S20 and S22 simply stopped.

The gain was not only speed. The 5000 mAh battery, unchanged on paper from the S22 Ultra, lasted hours longer because the 4 nanometre TSMC part sipped where the Exynos 2200 had gulped, and the phone stayed cool under sustained load. The camera moved to a 200 megapixel ISOCELL HP2, binning to 12 megapixels by default with a proper 50 megapixel mode, and with the 3x and 10x telephotos it had the best zoom range on any phone that year and the best night video Samsung had shot.

Its weakness was consistency, with skin tones and sharpening still tuned brighter and crisper than real. The 6.8-inch LTPO panel at 1750 nits, Gorilla Glass Victus 2 front and back, a slight flattening of the curved edges and the S Pen all carried over. Four OS updates and five years of patches were promised and are being delivered. At $1,199.99 it undercut the S20 Ultra by $200 and did everything better. If the Ultra formula has a definitive version, this is it.