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| Brand-new Galaxy S22 Ultra. |
- Hey, what's up? MKBHD here. And this is the brand-new Galaxy S22 Ultra. I've been using it for about two weeks now, and I promise you, I'm not going to call this the Note 22 Ultra over and over again in this review. I swear I can make it through this video without making that joke. But, really, the bottom line here to understand this phone the best really is like, if you took the name off of this phone, what Samsung is giving you for the money is a Galaxy Note. But the phone that I'm reviewing and using is called the S22 Ultra. Let's get into it. Specs So the word Ultra in Samsung's lineup has basically come to just mean the highest ambitions, the biggest numbers, the best specs, and the most features overall. It's just that now the Ultra name has swallowed up the Note stuff too. So Note used to be that one special edition phone with this squared-off design, the flat top and bottom, and the pen built-in.
Now, that's just all wrapped up into Ultra. And the S22 Ultra does not miss a beat with all the Ultra stuff. They're packing in the highest-end chip they can, that's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 here in the US with a massive new cooling solution alongside it. The RAM is technically down from last year. The base model has 8 gigs and all the rest have 12, and there's no more 16-gig version but I honestly don't miss that. I can't imagine someone really needing 16 gigs of RAM in their phone right now. But you absolutely can go up to 1 terabyte of non-expandable storage though. Display But this display, this display is also excellent. It's a huge 6.8 inch, 1440p AMOLED at 120 hertz with a 240-hertz touch sample rate, and the big new number is a max brightness of 1,750 nits. Now, on the one hand, I don't wanna overreact about 1,750 nits. It's a big number, but brightness works on a logarithmic scale. So this 1,750 is not dramatically brighter than the 1,500 max from last year's S21 Ultra. These phones are all very sunlight readable.
But I do still wanna give Samsung credit for continuing to improve an already best-in-class display and making it even better. It's still got the same great ultrasonic fingerprint reader as last year right under the middle of the screen, and still has a hole punch camera in the top middle. And it's an LTPO 2.0 panel now, which means in addition to being really responsive, it can drop that refresh rate as low as 1 hertz when there's nothing moving on the screen. Really, my only dislike with this display is the curve over the edges. So if you look at this phone next to last year's S21 Ultra, obviously these phones are different shapes, and the displays are actually slightly different resolutions, and this new shape definitely curves more over the sides, which I don't like as much. Other than that, this is an awesome Ultra display.
Battery And we all know it's not an Ultra without a massive battery. So, yeah, 5,000 milliamp hour should do the trick. Now, interestingly, there are some tests online showing that it doesn't last as long as last year's 5,000 milliamp-hour battery. And you can see Arun @mrwhosetheboss did a variety of things in his test and found the S21 Ultra did last a bit longer than this phone. And to me, when I see that, I'm like, "Okay, there's a variety of factors that can contribute to that. One, is the slightly brighter display. Two, a little bit more of a power-hungry chip that runs hotter in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1."
But, generally, my battery experience has been very, very good. I actually never killed it in a day. It never really got anywhere close. Easily end heavy days with 30, 40+% battery left and could extrapolate about seven hours of screen-on time out of a charge, which is great for me. I know screen-on time is different for everyone, but it's been great. Plus, on top of that, it does charge a bit faster than last year, up to 45-watt peak charging if you buy that $50 optional brick. So I'm glad they fit that big 5,000 milliamp-hour cell in here despite also adding the S Pen, which takes up a whole column along the inside of the phone.
But speaking of that S Pen, that's what's new, the Note stuff. Now, I'm personally not the biggest S Pen user. I think I say this every time I review a Note. I think I signed one PDF last week with it, which was really convenient, but I did it once. And I used Samsung's handwriting recognition in the Notes app. It's super cool that it works well and you can search what you've written. And I also... I just enjoy that it still clicks a lot like that. Notes So it is definitely impressive. I still think it's the best stylus in any phone, and it's literally got all the features the last Notes had. Smart Select is nice for screenshots and annotating things. Lock screen Quick Notes are still super convenient if you use Samsung Notes. And it even still has that long-distance Bluetooth connection that lets you use the button on the S Pen to remote control take photos with
