The Galaxy S23 Ultra will be the successor to this year’s top-end flab-style Samsung flagship. The Galaxy S22 Ultra was an iterative upgrade over the S21 Ultra, bringing Samsung’s famous ‘Note’ lineup back. Instead of launching an ‘S’ series and a ‘Note’ series, Samsung decided to replace the top-tier flagship model with what would have usually been a Note. The phone was well received by enthusiasts, the public and the media, with many calling it the phone of the year.
The S22 Ultra has stellar zoom capabilities, excellent portrait photos with a dedicated 70mm lens, tremendous dynamic range, a bright and vivid panel with HDR10+, a standout design, unique productivity features with the S Pen, and many more great OneUI features. However, this phone was not without flaws since the chipsets used (Exynos 2200 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 ) were both fabbed on Samsung’s 4nm node.
As a result, the S22 Ultra did not have excellent thermal management, which led to heating even in daily use for many people, a sub-par gaming experience, and inadequate battery life for power users because the chip was inefficient. All that aside, let’s look at the latest leaks and predictions about the upcoming Galaxy S23 Ultra through 7 categories that explain everything in detail.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Specifications
Performance
Here’s some good news for those expectantly waiting for the S23 Ultra. According to several reports, the S23 lineup in many regions will be launched with the TSMC Fabbed Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SOC. It also will have Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 7, UFS 4, LPDDR 5X RAM, Ray Tracing, and significant performance and efficiency gains versus the previous generation S22 Ultra. According to leaked benchmark scores, the 8 Gen 2 outperforms the Apple A16 Bionic in terms of GPU performance, which will theoretically make it the better chipset for gaming. According to this report from GSM Arena, the S23 Ultra scores over 4600 points on Geekbench’s multi-core performance test. That is over 1000 points more than the S22 Ultra scores, which is quite impressive.
However, what remains to be seen is whether the entire lineup will use Snapdragon chips or if Samsung will still give Exynos a shot. Older rumours seem to convey that the whole lineup will use the 8 Gen 2, but other leakers disagree, so it is impossible to say anything conclusive about that.
The improvements in performance with the S23 Ultra are not something to scoff at because even if you do not care about gaming performance or exporting heavy and long videos, this chip will still give the phone tremendous gains in battery life and improved thermal performance across the board. People are more than likely to notice this in real-life use, as many did when Samsung foldable this year dropped with the 8 Plus Gen 1. Most reviewers reported a massive bump in performance, efficiency and thermals thanks to TSMC fabrication, sometimes surpassing the A16 in gaming performance.
Display
According to these reports, the S23 Ultra is said to have pretty thin bezels with an excellent screen-to-body ratio, and the panel seems to have gotten entirely flat- similar to the one used on the S21 Ultra. This is good news for flat display lovers. It makes little difference objectively; the looks come down to a subjective preference. While curved screens make gesture swiping easier, they also invite accidental touches, durability issues, higher repair costs and incompatibility with screen protectors. We might see minor improvements to colour accuracy, reflectivity at least brightness, better sustained high brightness, and display HDR performance.
Remember: don't guess the size of the real phone's bezel by the bezel of the tempered film, it is often inaccurate. pic.twitter.com/yfhw4Nlhqp
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 29, 2022
Sources expect a 3080 x 1440 AMOLED panel that refreshes between 1 and 120Hz, depending on the content on the screen. The screen will probably be made brighter, though this is not confirmed. The current brightness on the Ultra is sufficient, and phones rarely ever hit the maximum advertised brightness nits, so this is not much of a concern. Still, the display will hopefully be made more efficient.
Cameras
The cameras are also probably going to be another colossal headline feature of the Galaxy S23 Ultra because it is said to come with an exciting new 200MP, 1.7 Aperture (not confirmed, but probably the ISOCELL HP2) sensor that is a larger sensor than the one used on the 14 Pro, though not as big as the 1″ IMX989. Unfortunately, there are no reports of 50MP organic sensor crop in mechanisms, and the sensor will probably only be able to take binned 12.5MP shots or 200MP full-res shots. It isn’t confirmed whether the 3X lens will stay the same since sources seem to conflict on that, but we can expect improvements to the performance of the 70mm lens. The 10X lens will also most likely stay the same. Not much has been said about the ultra-wide angle lens. Still, Samsung could bring improvements to their software processing throughout, also with improvements in scene detection and Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
So
200MP + 10MP (10X, Periscope Tele) + 10MP (3x Tele) + 12MP (UW)
On the S23 Ultra should be fun?
— Yogesh Brar (@heyitsyogesh) November 3, 2022
Hopefully, something is done to address the shutter lag since that seems to be a major concern when shooting moving subjects on the current S22 Ultra model. The new larger sensor paired with better software and the 8 Gen 2 might improve the video quality from this phone too, and Samsung usually has a software trick or two up their sleeve, which there isn’t much idea of at the moment. The larger sensor will also mainly improve photography capabilities in low light.
Miscellaneous
There have so far been no reports of faster wired or wireless charging on the S23 Ultra, so it might mostly stick to the charging speeds of its predecessor at 45W, paired with a 5000MAH battery. The phone is confirmed to ship with Android 13 out of the box, with OneUI 5, and it will mostly retain the four years of major updates and five years of security patches. This new report claims a new software feature will be a low-power mode that does not lower the refresh rate, though how effective it practically remains to be seen.
Design
The design of the S23 Ultra remains very similar to the S22 Ultra, with pretty much identical placements of the camera module. Some renders report that two sensors are flush with the back panel, but others disagree. The metal frame appears to be slightly larger, and the phone’s weight seems to be overall heavier than the S22 Ultra by about 6 or 7 grams. There also appears to be a slight bezel thickness bump but renders usually differ from the actual product.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Release Date
- As per speculation (based on the previous S lineup launch timeline), Samsung will likely release the Galaxy S23 Ultra on February 24, 2023, alongside the Galaxy S23 and S23+.
The brand is currently undertaking necessary certifications. Many analysts expect a launch early next year, so the launch has moved around a month since the S22 Ultra usually launched in February. Batteries have been certified too. Others have called this rumour sketchy and say that the early January launch date must be taken with a pinch of salt, but it’s safe to assume that the lineup will be released before March 2023.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Price in the US
- The Galaxy S23 Ultra is expected to be priced at $1199 in the US.
So the pricing could be the same as what the S22 Ultra started at, and it will probably come with 8GB RAM on the base model, with 128GB of storage, though Samsung hopefully might push the base storage variant to 256GB this time. This is all pure speculation, though, and there is no official information about the pricing of this phone yet. 1199 British Pounds is the expected price in the UK and 1699 Canadian Dollars for the Canadian market.
Conclusion
In detail, this is everything we know about the S23 Ultra. To summarise, we might see a remarkably similar design and substantial performance gains thanks to a new chip, a slightly improved screen, a new 200MP primary sensor and quality-of-life upgrades.
