Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra long-term review

GALAXY S23 ULTRA

1. Introduction

Samsung Android

Introduction

Samsung was the first major player to create the Ultra segment. Right from the start in 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra established that Ultra means more than Pro (or Pro Max) – it means ultra-sized display and battery, an ultra-high pixel count main camera, ultra-versatile camera system, and ultra performance.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the embodiment of the Ultra phone and it’s easily Samsung’s most popular phone on the market. While some might think the design is a bit stale at this point, it’s undoubtedly a case of form following function. The rectangular body is ideally suited to carry a big four-camera island, a potent chipset with its accompanying cooling, a large 5,000mAh battery, and a stylus. Not to mention the biggest display you can find on a phone that doesn’t fold.

Now in its fourth generation, the Galaxy Ultra has embraced its S Pen-carrying identity, solidifying another feature that only the Galaxy Ultra has. Samsung made sure the Galaxy S23 Ultra has another ultra-worthy feature added in the form of the new 200MP camera.

But let’s come back to that word, “stale”. Looking at the Galaxy S23 Ultra, very little has changed compared to its predecessor. While the Galaxy S22 Ultra was somewhat of a paradigm shift from the S21 Ultra, the S23 Ultra is a subtle evolution. The S Pen is not news anymore, the rest of the cameras, the display, and the battery are practically the same, as is the design and build, for the most part. The biggest changes are the move to Qualcomm’s silicon and the new 200MP imager – changes that likely didn’t motivate most S22 Ultra users to upgrade.

Ultimately, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is a safe space for Galaxy Ultra (and the old Galaxy Note) loyalists who want a familiar do-it-all big Samsung. It’s an important device for Samsung and the company painstakingly keeps true to its roots. It’s a situation not unlike that of the iPhone Pro Max – people want this package year after year.

So now that the Galaxy S23 Ultra has been dutifully serving as the best smartphone money can buy for about 8 months, it’s time to see how it’s held up and what, if anything, has changed.

2. Design and handling

Samsung Android

A word on design, handling

Samsung has kept the overall look of the Galaxy S22 Ultra but improved on a few things. The display and rear glass panel curves were significantly reduced, and the frame became wider at the sides. These changes transformed a hard-to-pick-up and slippery S22 Ultra into a comfortable-to-handle S23 Ultra. Those alterations were also a godsend for people who use their phones naked.

The matte rear glass repels fingerprints and is lovely to touch, if a bit slippery. In contrast, the glossy Armor Aluminum frame is easy to smudge but has the benefit of being grippier.

The flatter glass makes writing with the S Pen easier. The flatter screen edge is usable if you want to employ the full width of the display – this becomes easier if you disable the back gesture with the S Pen.

There’s no getting away from the hugeness of the Galaxy S23 Ultra. But Samsung has perfected its handling. For one, it’s nicely balanced – it doesn’t tilt or lean when you hold it in your hand.

Then there’s the spot-on button placement – the power button is right where your right thumb (or left index finger) would be. Button placement is a fine art – just ask any iPhone 15 Pro Max user if they find the new Action Button placement comfortable.

The S23 Ultra handles as well as a phone its size can. That’s assuming you have fairly average-sized hands – people with smaller hands may find the Galaxy S23 Ultra too cumbersome.

Samsung uses the full girth of the back panel for the phone’s internals. Because of this, the four camera rings, the LED flash, and the laser autofocus module simply float inside the flat surface. This embedded camera island is unique to Samsung and looks good. It doesn’t mean the phone doesn’t wobble when used on its back on a flat surface.

How has it held up?

We’ve used our Galaxy S23 Ultra mostly in a case since it launched in February. However, there have been a few weeks in the months of use that we’ve purposefully taken the phone out to enjoy its premium feel.

The display is pristine aside from a few micro-scratches that you need an LED (or the Sun) pointed at the glass to see. We’d say that’s a testament to the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front, though we’re not the sort to throw our phones around on the ground.

The back glass panel suffers from the same tiny dot-scratches or blotches as the Galaxy S22 Ultra. We guess some dust particles got in between the phone and the case. On the upside, the dots are hardly visible.

The frame is immaculate. Whether it’s Samsung’s special alloy (which it calls Armor Aluminum) or something else, we haven’t had any issues with it.

Dust likes to gather in the tiny slit that is the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s earpiece. It’s seemingly impossible to remove. We’ve tried going at it with an air blower, water, and a toothbrush but it’s still there. Luckily it doesn’t affect call quality in the slightest.

We complained last year about the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s poor oleophobic coating and it’s sadly the same thing this year. The smudge protective layer simply wears off and the display becomes an oily mess right around summertime – that’s after 5 months of use. You can wipe off the screen with a microfiber cloth but it will just get smudged up again in no time.

This brings us to an issue with curved displays. They’re lovely to look at and feel better to touch around the edges, but they limit your choice of screen protector. There are almost no quality glass screen protectors for the Galaxy S23 Ultra but there are more than a few for the Galaxy S23 and S23+, which don’t interfere with the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. A good glass screen protector has its own oleophobic coating and if and when it wears off, you can just install a new protector and have a silky-smooth display for another six months to a year. That’s a major advantage of glass protectors outside of their obvious protecting qualities. Alternatively, you could go with an awful plastic protector if you prefer the cheap feel of plastic over glass.

We admit to being careful with our smartphones. We’ve only ever dropped the Galaxy S23 Ultra once on some rough concrete stairs but it was in a case and the worst thing was that the S Pen popped out a little. The case carries the bruise of honor, the phone was safe and sound.

Vibration

Vibration on Samsung flagships is very strong out of the box. But you can dial it down and make it specific to your needs.

One UI doesn’t have the kind of subtle haptics the Pixel, Xiaomi smartphones, and the iPhone offer. That underlying soft tap lends a physicality to the virtual interface that One UI lacks. It would be great if Samsung made an effort towards more thoughtful haptics.

Biometrics

The fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy S23 Ultra is excellent. It’s seemingly the same one from the Galaxy S22 Ultra, which was also excellent. It’s as fast today as it was on Day 1 and no amount of smudges interferes with its accuracy and immediacy – that’s the great thing about ultrasonic fingerprint scanners. We’d be ever so lucky to have another one of the same tech on the next Galaxy S Ultra.

Display and speakers

The Galaxy S23 Ultra has one of the best displays on a smartphone. In fact, max brightness aside, it’s the nicest display on a conventional smartphone – it’s bigger than any market rival’s, it’s very color accurate without sacrificing viewing quality, and it can double as a canvas for writing or drawing.

The rectangular shape is ideal for note-taking, though the curved sides, flattened out compared to the S22 Ultra as they may be, aren’t ideal when you need to write along the edge. We’ll share the fix for that in the software section.

Auto brightness is handled up to Samsung’s usual excellent standard. The phone is never too bright or too dim in relation to your environment. It’s just right if you’d pardon the Goldilocks pun. You can push it up or down, and it will stay like that for a while unless you move and the light changes drastically.

The display can also get pretty dim when you need it to – if you’re using the phone to read a book at night, for example.

Speaking of using your phone before bed, the display’s blue light will keep you awake and by extension mess with your sleep quality. Samsung has a sophisticated blue light filtering system in place. You can set a color temperature you’re happy with or leave the phone to adaptively change it, depending on the light around you. You can even have the phone adjust the tones and contrast.

It’s an excellent feature and the detailed way you can set it up makes it very functional. Samsung could make it even better by allowing a black-and-white mode – something that’s already available when your Galaxy Watch is synced and in do-not-disturb mode.

The Always On Display is also excellent on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. It’s set to show up when you get a notification or tap on the screen once and it will stay on for 6 seconds, saving battery. You can have it on all the time, set it to follow a specific schedule, or only show up for notifications. You can choose the design of the clock, the color, or choose a widget.

The speakers on the Galaxy S23 Ultra are excellent. Despite this being a hybrid arrangement with one speaker tucked into the earpiece, it doesn’t sound lesser than the dedicated one on the bottom. Sound comes out full and rich and there’s volume to spare.

During our use of the phone, it’s routinely used as an in-shower speaker for podcasts or music. It can easily outdo the hum of falling water. It could be a little bassier, like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but it’s not far behind either.

3. Performance, battery life and charging, software

Samsung Android

Performance

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is a solid performer thanks to a combination of the best available chipset, one of the most capable cooling solutions, and stable software.

Apps run fast and glitch-free, and the phone easily handles more intensive tasks like editing ExpertRAW (or other RAW formats) photos in Adobe Lightroom Mobile, 4K videos in apps like Adobe Rush or KineMaster, using two apps side by side, etc.

We haven’t had any issues with interruptions, force closes, crashes, or unexpected restarts. The Galaxy S23 Ultra has been as solid as a phone could be during our long-term testing.

The phone can get very warm while streaming high-res videos during the hot summer days, but it didn’t seem to hurt performance, only battery life.

Battery life and charging

This generation of Galaxy S devices made the major shift to only using Qualcomm’s chipsets, which pleased casual fans and those in the know equally. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 improved efficiency over the notorious Exynos 2200 – and our review battery test confirmed what we expected- The S23 Ultra scored 5 and a half hours more in video playback and 4 hours more in browsing than its predecessor. The new Snapdragon chip and its TSMC architecture could manage the 5,000mAh battery better than the old Exynos ever could.

That solid endurance has, for the most part, kept up through our time with the phone. When summer set in and the weather grew hot, so did the Galaxy S23 Ultra, and screen times got diminished. An hour-long navigation session in the car took a few more percent out of the phone than it had just a few months ago.

     
Battery stats

Speaking of screen-on-time, you can expect no less than 6 and a half hours of it on any given day with the Galaxy S23 Ultra with one exception – running Waze or Google Maps for more than two hours at high brightness – then you get around 4 hours.

Some days we’ve used the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s display at full blast for hours, watching videos using the phone’s speakers – it’s a solid performer. You could always squeeze more out of it by using earbuds and lowering the brightness.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra has been set at the full 1440x3088px resolution and with the screen set to Vivid for the entirety of our use.

This reviewer charges his phone during the night on a wireless charger and rarely needs to top up during the day. The Galaxy S23 Ultra has excellent charging control – you can disable fast wired or fast wireless charging independently. We have it set to normal wireless charging for those overnight sessions and fast wired charging for the occasional daily top-up. It’s smart enough to learn when you take it off the charger in the morning and trickle charge to 100% right before, theoretically stressing the battery less.

If you want to further protect the battery, you could limit the maximum charge to 85% – it will reduce the overall cycles you do and won’t stress the cells as much.

Software

One UI is a known quantity at this point. It’s a solid and feature-rich operating system that Samsung owners have loved and relied on for years. But as one of those long-term One UI users, this reviewer thinks the OS could do with a facelift or at least a refresh.

There hasn’t been a major shift in design for ages now – the Galaxy S10 introduced the current One UI look back in 2019. It’s time for some kind of change.

Looks aside, One UI is one of the most capable operating systems in the world. It has a specific skill set that’s hard to match outside of full-on desktop OSes. Samsung’s system apps are one of the best in each category – My Files is a fully-featured file manager that can connect to OneDrive, Google Drive, and Network storage, and has a helpful breakdown of file categories like images, videos, audio files, documents, downloads, and APKs. And it’s one of the few apps that has zero issues reading an external USB storage.

Samsung Health is an excellent health and fitness tracking suite. The app is powerful and gives detailed insight into years of tracked data. However, it’s still only a phone app. We’d love to see a dedicated web app that’s accessible on a bigger screen with more powerful ways of viewing your health data.

Samsung’s Internet browser is superb. It simply has better scaling than Chrome, and it’s very customizable (you can easily put the URL bar at the bottom). Samsung’s Internet also natively supports extensions, so you could install an Ad Blocker and go through poorly-written and ad-ridden websites.

Samsung’s keyboard is one of the best. It has a number row by default, a helpful toolbar with shortcuts for emoji, GIFs, search, etc – and the unique ability to swipe the space bar to change languages.

Samsung’s Calendar (remember S Planner?) is the best around with a layout that better shows all your events (scaling, once again), and it has S Pen integration.

But that brings us into One UI’s duality of apps. Samsung insists on having its own app for just about everything, and it’s not always the case of Samsung’s Calendar vs Google’s Calendar. Samsung’s Gallery is inferior to Google Photos – its Pictures tab insists on showing all the pictures from all the folders on your phone, which means that you get your camera shots side by side with your Viber memes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Samsung’s Galaxy store is another example. First of all, it opens with an unavoidable full-screen ad. Then, it’s mostly full of junk like paid fonts, wallpapers, or themes, but it’s where you update your system apps – something which, for some reason, can’t be done without user input. The silver lining is that the Galaxy store is also where you find Samsung’s must-have Good lock service.

Good Lock is a collection of mini-apps, which enhance the phone’s capabilities. There are a few indispensable apps you should have on your phone. Camera Assistant finetunes the phone’s camera performance and manages its oversharpening, enables the 2x zoom toggle in the camera app, and lets you choose settings like how many photos the phone takes with a timer(1, 3, 5, or 7). Sound Assistant manages your volume panel, how many volume steps the phone takes when you press the volume buttons, etc.

EdgeTouch is a neat app that can adjust (or fully disable) the mistouch prevention at the screen’s edges, and you can choose the active area’s width in pixels. One Hand Operation+ is an app that lets you customize edge gestures for various functions – for example, swiping from the bottom right to go back, bottom left for recent apps, pulling down the notification panel with a downward swipe on the bottom right side of the screen, and more. Nice Catch can show you which apps made your phone vibrate, ring, show a toast notification, or wake up your screen.

Secure Folder uses Samsung’s Knox security framework to safeguard sensitive documents and files from prying apps. But it’s also a separate phone within your phone, where you can install any of your existing apps a second time. That’s handy for managing two accounts in the same app, for instance.

Updates

Samsung has a good track record when it comes to updates – both major OS updates, and minor security patches. The maker has been pushing the next major installment of Android to its flagship Galaxy S series earlier and earlier in the past few years – the Galaxy S20 series received One UI 3 in December 2020, the Galaxy S23 series got One UI 4 in November 2021, and the Galaxy S22 series got One UI 5 in October 2022. Our Galaxy S23 Ultra got its One UI 6 update on October 30 and it brings a significant number of features, improvements, and a design refresh with a new system-wide font, a redesign of the Quick Settings, and much more.

Since the entirety of our long-term testing was done using One UI 5 and Android 13, we won’t focus on the newer Android 14 software in this review.

There was just a single snag in this otherwise great track record. Samsung’s August security patch took two months to arrive to many Galaxy S23 users, including us.

S Pen

The S Pen is an exclusive Samsung strength and has been for years. At this point, it’s a very refined tool that’s deeply integrated with the Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Annotating screenshots, signing the occasional embargo agreement (or any other type of document), drawing car directions on a map, using the Galaxy S23 Ultra as a scoring sheet, or just entertaining a child (or your friends on a long flight) by giving them something to draw on – the S Pen is a great thing to have!

Samsung Notes is excellent for typing up and drawing notes, organizing them, etc. Screen off memo ties into Samsung Notes – just take your S Pen out from a locked phone and jot down a note, put the pen back and the phone saves the note for later.

Here’s a pro tip to take S Pen-written notes to another level. Go into the S Pen settings and disable gestures with the S Pen – now you can write on the edge of the phone’s screen and the phone – 1: will allow you to write at the very edge – 2: not mistake every stroke for a back gesture, cutting off your note taking.

This reviewer has used the S Pen as a remote shutter for group photos since the Galaxy Note 10+. It’s a convenient thing to have when you want to snap a series of photos or videos of you and your friends at a special place and you don’t carry a Bluetooth remote shutter (really, who does?).

4. Camera, conclusion

Samsung Android

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra premiered the new 200MP imager – the biggest on a Samsung phone yet. Samsung says it delivers a clarity never before seen on Galaxy, and we put it side by side with the best (at the time) on the market to see how it fares. We also have a detailed look at the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s cameras in our review – here we’ll be focusing more on specific camera details, not the overall system.

While the 200MP primary camera is good, it’s the versatility of the entire camera system that makes this one of the best phones to have for photos and video. The Galaxy S23 Ultra gives you an ultrawide start at 13mm, moves on to a 23mm main camera that can also deliver a 2x mode (46mm?), then onto a 69mm 3x camera, and all the way to 230mm with the unique 10x camera. It’s an unmatched range of zoom for a smartphone. And as rumors peg the Galaxy S24 Ultra to drop the 10x camera in favor of a 5x makes the Galaxy S23 Ultra potentially the last smartphone with an optical 10x you can get.

Before we move on to quality, a few words on the software. The Galaxy camera app is one of the best, and because it hasn’t drastically changed in the past few years, it’s familiar to people who use a Galaxy phone, which is very convenient. Double-press the power button to launch the camera from anywhere – double-press again to switch to the selfie camera – and double-press again to return to the main camera.

We’d love for Samsung to implement a feature like the iPhone’s Photographic Styles, Fujifilm cameras’ Film Simulations, or any camera model’s picture modes – in essence, a way to tailor the cameras’ output to your specific style. We’d like to be able to preselect how much sharpening is applied, the contrast bias, the vibrance, and saturation, and just wrap it in a unified style and have it work alongside the phone’s HDR and computational features.

Let’s start with the main camera, which has sadly prompted Samsung to revert to an old negative habit. Images from the main camera oftentimes come out excessively sharpened. While the rendering of buildings, objects, or people are moderately oversharpened to the point of making fine detail stand out, the sharpening algorithm really goes overboard with any foliage and grass that happens to be in the frame. Things look fine at fit-to-screen level, but zoom in closer or, better yet, look at the photos on a monitor, and the overdone sharpening becomes obvious.

Worse yet, we can notice a clear difference between our Galaxy S23 Ultra photos from the camera comparison we did back in March and the phone’s photos today. The main camera images were sharper than average back then but are way oversharpened now, to the point that you can see a halo at the edge where the trees meet the sky in the shots below.

There’s a fix of sorts, but it takes a few steps. You need to download the Good Lock module Camera Assistant and enable the ‘Picture softening’ setting to Medium. It takes the edge off the sharpening, resulting in a more pleasing and natural rendition. The downside is that the setting works across all cameras and negatively affects the sharpening level used with the other cameras.

  
  
Default camera settings • Reduced sharpening

It gets worse at night when the main camera tries to compensate for the loss of detail to noise suppression. This results in muddy photos with poor detail rendering.

 
Main camera with Night Mode on

There is another way of avoiding the noisy, oversharpened look. You could switch to the ExperRAW app for your camera needs. It can be set to only shoot JPEG (also RAW or RAW + JPEG), and it will save images with a different processing. You’ll still enjoy the benefits of computational photography, but toned down. Keep in mind that the lack of Samsung’s Scene Optimizer means less saturated skies and no true ‘scene recognition’. You also won’t be able to quickly launch ExpertRAW like you can the Camera app.

 
 
Camera app • ExpertRAW

Samsung needs to address this oversharpening issue with a dedicated system update.

That aspect aside, in good light, the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s main camera captures detailed images with almost no noise. Dynamic range is superb – shadows are well-detailed but remain naturally dark, while the highlights are always well-controlled. We’d call it midtone-heavy. The colors are vibrant, but not overdone, while the skies are consistently true to real life.

  
  
Main camera

  
  
Main camera

It’s zoom images where the Galaxy S23 Ultra shines. Photos taken with the 3x and 10x cameras are superb in good light and good in low light. They have similar fine qualities as the main camera – solid detail levels, a wide dynamic range with good contrast, and lively colors. Noise is noticeable on the 3x and 10x shots, however.
  
3x zoom camera

 
3x zoom camera

 
10x zoom camera

The relatively small sensors show their weaknesses at pixel level – fine detail isn’t as impressive as on the main camera, and it quickly becomes overly noisy in low light.

10x zoom in low light

By bringing the scene closer to you, these cameras are more about showing a different perspective than technical photographic prowess. The 10x, especially, is excellent at this. At 230mm, it’s optically unmatched in the smartphone world and can give you a unique point of view whether you’re on the street in a popular place in the city or way above in an airplane, capturing wind turbines from 11,000 meters. Using a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra long-term teaches a keen-eyed photographer to look beyond what’s accessible with a regular phone’s 5x camera. That said we’re excited about the possibility of a bigger sensor zoom in next year’s Galaxy S Ultra.
10x zoom camera

In low light, the main camera picks noise reduction over detail. This means you’ll get clean images with a slightly artificial rendition. Low-light photos have a fine balance between a realistic nighttime exposure and a striking shot – everything is exposed well but not to the point that it looks unrealistically bright.

The main camera in low light

The ultrawide camera is great for exaggerating perspective or capturing more of the scene. But most ultrawide cameras on recent flagships have been the same old inferior sensor with unimpressive optics – the Galaxy S23 Ultra included. This camera isn’t as good in daylight and is downright poor in low light, and this reviewer has found himself reaching for the wide-enough main camera over the inferior ultrawide. While physically challenging, it’s high time Samsung put a meaningfully better sensor behind the ultrawide – similar to what vivo does with the X90 Pro+.

The selfie camera of the Galaxy S23 Ultra dropped from the 40MP of the Galaxy S22 Ultra to a 12MP, but the focal length and general performance are the same. The new imager shoots slightly more saturated images with less noise and the same high level of detail – a win across the board.

   
Selfie samples

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is a mature shooter, and it remains one of the most versatile in the world. It’ll never miss a shot, misfocus, or crash in the most important moment. It has rock-steady stabilization up to 230mm, and its autofocus seemingly always knows just what you want in focus – whether it’s a person a meter away or an airplane zipping across the sky from you at 10x.

There are no other phones that put an ultrawide, a wide, a midrange zoom, and a super telephoto in your pocket.

Samsung’s overzealous sharpening has put a dent in what has been a stellar experience, but we’re sure it’s fixable, and we urge Samsung to do so.

Still, we wouldn’t expect a laid-back natural-looking processing out of the Galaxy S23 Ultra. That’s not Samsung’s way. The Galaxy S23 Ultra creates striking, popping images that stand out with their contrast and color even at the smartphone screen level.

If you want more authentic photographic results from your phone, go with an iPhone, but you’ll miss out on a super telephoto in your pocket. Managing expectations is one of the most important things in life. It doesn’t make sense to expect the Galaxy S23 Ultra to behave like a Leica camera and then become disappointed that it doesn’t.

Conclusion

Before we move on to the final words in this review, let’s answer the important question – how is the Galaxy S23 Ultra after eight months of use? And the answer is – fresh as the day we set it up for the first time. We look after our devices here at GSMArena, but the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s pristine condition says something about the phone’s solid build quality as well.

We’ve also used the Galaxy S23 Ultra on several carriers in a few countries and can attest to its excellent network handling and reliability.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is a true do-it-all tool. It combines a huge display, an S Pen, 512GB of storage (Samsung launched only 512GB units as a pre-order bonus), 12GB of RAM, the fastest Snapdragon up until a few days ago, and a 5,000mAh battery that can go all day. Not to mention a camera system that’s just as uniquely versatile three years into its tenure. And outside of the sheer impressiveness of the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s specs sheet, it’s competent, and that induces confidence.

The phone runs smoothly and hasn’t scoffed at any task we’ve given it over our time together, and we have no reason to think it would be any different in other hands and with other use cases.

But as improved as the Galaxy S23 Ultra is over its predecessor – it remains fundamentally the same phone. You can’t say the S23 Ultra is an exciting phone. It’s a very specific device that’s unlikely to entice the iPhone lover or the Pixel person to switch phones. But let’s get back to the part about managing expectations. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is probably the most Samsung phone out of Samsung’s entire lineup – over the top, Ultra-specced, pen-enabled, huge. It’s a phone made for a specific user in mind. And that person will be more than happy with the Galaxy S23 Ultra for yet another year.