If last year’s Galaxy S22 Ultra was a giant leap forwards for Samsung, then the S23 Ultra is a baby step. This is strikingly similar to the phone we reviewed in 2022. Samsung’s own mother would struggle to tell them apart.

Launching 17 February alongside the smaller S23 and S23 Plus, the S23 Ultra introduces a few noteworthy upgrades to the previous model, tinkering around the edges of what was already an unbeatably powerful, fast and well-designed Android phone.

Headline features are the improved 200MP camera sensor and – in the UK and Europe – a switch from the Exynos processor to the faster Snapdragon processor, which until now had only been available in Galaxy phones bought in the US.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra stands apart from the S23 and S23 Plus in terms of performance, price and size, but also functionality. The included S-Pen stylus elevates the S23 Ultra from a traditional phone to a versatile productivity tool, allowing you to take notes, interact with and navigate the 6.8in device with ease.

The S23 Ultra is also £100 more expensive than last year’s phone. It starts at £1,249 and can be customised up to an enormous 1TB of storage. In fact, we’ve got a whole page dedicated to tracking the best Galaxy S23 Ultra deals.

How we tested

We’ve been testing the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra since it was announced, using the phone in a variety of conditions including at home, outdoors and in the workplace.

We tested the display and photography features in broad daylight as well as in dark and indoor scenes, and stress-tested the 5,000mAh battery life with high-resolution video streaming and processor-intensive gaming apps. While S-Pen testing was carried out with Samsung’s own suite of creative and note-taking apps. Here’s our official verdict on the tech giant’s latest device...

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Best: Photography

Display: 6.8in QHD+ AMOLED,

Refresh rate: 120Hz

Dimensions: 78.1mm x 163.4mm x 8.9mm

Weight: 234g

Selfie camera: 12MP

Ultra-wide camera: 12MP

Wide camera: 200MP

Telephoto camera: 2x 10MP

Zoom: 30x hybrid-zoom, 100x super zoom

Processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

Memory: 8GB / 12GB

Storage: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB

5G: Yes

S-Pen: Included

Water resistance: IP68

Why we love it

Stunning display

Great low-light photography

Long battery life

Incredible performance

Take note

Expensive

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the best phone Samsung has ever made, but it’s such a gradual update to the S22 Ultra that it’s hard to recommend it to anyone who already owns last year’s model.

So, here are the most familiar features again. The S23 Ultra still uses Samsung’s excellent 6.8in AMOLED display with a dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. This year the screen is slightly less curved, giving it a boxier look and freeing up a bit more real estate for stylus users.

That stylus is the slim and lightweight S-Pen, which slides into an enclosure at the bottom of the device, sitting flush with the frame when stowed away. It lets you quickly take notes on the lock screen, unsurprisingly, and its accurate and speedy handwriting recogition means you can convert your chicken scratching into regular text. It’s also able to clip and share sections of the screen, annotate documents and sign PDFs. You can even use it as a slide presentation clicker, or to remotely activate the camera shutter.

On top of all that, this year’s phone is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which is new for the UK version of the device. On paper that means improved performance, things like loading speeds, camera performance, gaming, desktop modes and app switching, though it’s so incremental that anyone upgrading from an S22 Ultra isn’t going to notice a drastic increase in speeds.

The design

There’s really no other Android phone that looks and feels as premium as the S23 Ultra. It’s a big old boy, measuring 6.8in from corner to corner (bigger even than the mighty iPhone 14 Pro Max) and it feels reassuringly weighty in the hand. All £1,249 of it makes itself known.

The sides have been flattened every so slightly, which makes the phone a bit more pleasing to grip with one hand while you use the S-Pen. It’s also easier for your fingers to find the volume rocker and power button.

One minor annoyance for S-Pen fans is the positioning of the camera lenses on the back of the device. Because they’re in a corner, the phone jiggles back and forth slightly if you’re writing with the stylus while the S23 Ultra is flat on the desk. Otherwise though, the shape and size hasn’t changed much since 2022, but there are new colours available – green, black, cream, lavender – just in case you really need everyone to know you’ve got the latest model.

The display

The S23 Ultra continues to have the best display of any smartphone on the market. The 6.8in QHD+ screen uses the latest AMOLED tech and employs a dynamic refresh rate, which seamlessly dials the frame rate of the display up and down, from a silky smooth 120Hz when scrolling and browsing to as little as 1Hz when nothing is moving on it.

Movies and TV shows look vivid and rich. There’s plenty of colour detail in low-contrast and dark scenes. The display is incredibly bright too, meaning excellent clarity even in direct sunlight. At full intensity you could illuminate a football match with a couple of these things.

The camera

The camera is where Samsung has made the biggest changes since last year. The S23 Ultra uses a new 200MP sensor, which lets the device do some impressive things with photography.

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Firstly, the S23 Ultra uses improved pixel-binning to boost detail and brightness in dark scenes. This technique combines a bunch of physical sensor pixels – the tiny dots measuring the light entering the phone – to produce images that are brighter, more detailed, and less noisy. The result is exceptionally good nighttime photography and impressive portrait photography indoors and out.

Samsung’s image processing is still excellent at snapping faces too: depth mapping and object recognition produce selfies and portraits with convincing, DSLR-style bokeh effects. There’s also significantly more detail when zoomed in as far as 30x, which uses a hybrid of pixel-binning and optical lensing to produce crisp telephoto pictures, even on dull February days.

The S23 Ultra easily takes the best telephoto pictures of any phone we’ve tested, and matches or exceeds the cameras of the iPhone 14 Pro Max and Pixel 7 Pro when it comes to most types of night time photography.

Enthusiasts can make full use of the 200MP sensor thanks to the return of RAW shooting mode, which dispenses with all the software trickery to give you the pure image ready for editing.

Battery life

The switch to the Snapdragon processor not only means improved performance, but better power efficiency too. In our tests the S23 Ultra offered noticeably better battery performance than the S22 Ultra, which already packed a decent amount of juice.

With high-usage we would reach the end of a workday with the Galaxy S23 Ultra hovering around the 40 per cent mark. That’s plenty of battery life for anyone planning on editing large photos and watching media on the go.

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The verdict: Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

What seemed like a routine update to the S22 Ultra turns out to be Samsung’s biggest camera upgrade in years. Doubling the resolution of the S23 Ultra’s image sensor takes full advantage of the phone’s enormously powerful new Snapdragon processor, and produces impressive photography and videography in dim and dark environments, and exceptional portrait pictures in moodily lit bars.

Whether that leap in camera technology is worth the asking price depends on how much you care about the pictures you take on your phone. The S23 Ultra is an expensive device and offers more performance than most shoppers need, but delivers the most premium Android experience you can get.

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