Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review: notably unique

If you buy something from a link, it may earn you a commission. Our ethics statement can be found here.

P hones phones in a flagship lineup that feels similar to a theme. The base model, the bigger base model, and the biggest model have some minor hardware upgrades. As you go up the chain, features, screen size, and cost all increase, but you're more or less getting the same phone in three different flavors.

That has been the case for the past few years, but it is not the case anymore, as evidenced by the fact that the top of this year's lineup is the $1,199 Galaxy S22 Ultra. It's the first S series phone to include a built-in stylus, a feature it's inheriting from the now-retired Note series. It still offers a good 10x optical zoom, as well as some appealing updates to its photography features. Despite its place in the mainstream S series, it still feels like the enthusiast device that the Note series represented.

It's easy to decide which of the three phones is right for you. You can get the S22 Ultra if you miss the Note. It's the only thing like it in the lineup of the company. If you're curious about the stylus, 10x zoom, or just want a really nice big-screened phone without a lot of fuss, then the S22 Plus is probably better for you. For a few, the S22 Ultra is a truly great device.

Samsung S22 Ultra design and hardware

There is still a lot of common ground between the Ultra and its S22 and S22 Plus siblings. The three models include the latest from the company, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, as well as IP68 weather seal, and Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on the front and back. The Ultra and S22 Plus have screens with higher peak brightness, but all three have a top refresh rate of 120Hz. The Ultra uses a display that allows the screen to change its refresh rate more than the other models, which in theory helps save battery life. Every bit of power saving can make a big difference.

The display is excellent. I only noticed this when I looked at it side by side with the Pixel 6. The colors are vivid but not to the point of oversaturation. There is a slightly cool color shift when viewed from extreme angles, but nothing that bothered me in day-to-day use. I live in Seattle so I didn't push it to the limit.

The Ultra has a boxier design and a built-in S Pen silo. The S22 and S22 Plus follow last year's design with rounded corners and a camerabump that blends into the side rail of the phone, but the S22 Ultra skips the camerabump altogether. The back plate of the device has four camera lens and a laser sensor. One person told me it looks like a spider. It is weird at first, but I have grown to like it. Maybe more phone makers will do the same. Who knows? I'm here for it.

I was a little worried that the protruding lens would catch on pockets, but that hasn't been a problem. There are serious dust and lint traps in the spaces between the lenses. If you are careful about keeping your phone dust-free, you should use the IP68 seal. If you can live your life at these speeds, you can buy a case that will eliminate the valleys.

One way to differentiate the Ultra from the S22 and S22 Plus is through the rear camera array, but it also has a curved edge on the long side of the screen, which makes it different from the others. I ran my stylus off the edge of the screen too many times, expecting a flat surface where there wasn't one, because it looks nice and makes the tiny bezels on the sides disappear. I could live with a small amount of bezel to avoid the whole situation.

The S22 Ultra supports 45W fast wired charging, but you have to buy the power brick separately. Spending $1,200 on a phone and having to spend another $50 on a charger is not as annoying as paying $12 for wi-fi on a $500 flight. I hope you put some of your store credit toward the Ultra. There is also 15W wireless charging. It usually charged the half-depleted battery back up to 100 percent in under two hours, which is fine for me.

Samsung S Pen

The S21 Ultra didn't include a built-in silo for storage, which is half the support for the S Pen. The S22 Ultra has full support and stylus storage. There is not much new to the S Pen or stylus features this time around. It's hard to say if it's accurate since it's a matter of milliseconds, but writing with the S Pen feels fluid, and recognition is swift.

The S Pen can be used to screen, write a note, and call it a day. A lot of Note power users use the stylus features, which is why you can go really deep with it. It took me a while to figure out how to use the stylus in the Notes app. I found at least three different ways to convert handwriting to text in the app, not counting the option to use the keyboard in handwriting mode and go about it that way. It is a little overwhelming.

There are other ways to use the S Pen besides writing notes. It is very useful for photo editing or grabbing a screenshot. You can use it to trace a shape and clip something out of an image, like a picture you took of your dishwasher model number. Air Actions, in which you use the S Pen as a kind of remote control in certain apps without touching the screen, which work okay but don't feel like they solve a real problem, are also included.

If you think you're the kind of person who would use the stylus a few times and then forget about it, then the S22 Ultra probably isn't for you. I think it's for someone who likes to use a pen instead of a keyboard to make a to-do list or write a quick note. I think digital artists would use the S Pen and its many brush stroke options. It is more flexible for sketching than a passive stylus. Note fans will feel right at home, but unless you can embrace the stylus life, you're likely better off with a regular old phone.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Samsung S22 Ultra performance

The S22 Ultra performs like a $1,200 flagship in everyday use. Everything looks smooth on the 120Hz display when you jump from app to app. In my testing, it was a very rare occurrence to see the screen stutter as I scrolled, and I don't think it was the phone's fault.

The phone gets warm when it is used for intensive tasks like gaming. While playing Genshin Impact for half an hour, I didn't see any slowdowns because the app takes a long time to process large files if you just keep pressing the shutter. There's nothing to do except wait, because you can't take another photo until the last one is done.

The Ultra's 5,000mAh battery doesn't perform as well as it could. I got through with about 50 percent of my battery left by the evening, on days of lighter use with a lot of time on wi-fi. It doesn't take a lot of effort to drain the battery in a single day.

I was down below the 20 percent mark by the end of the day, because the always-on display and about an hour of video play and gaming were not always on. The Ultra's target audience will probably have to keep an eye on battery life more than they would like, since it's not a torture test. That is disappointing from a flagship phone.

Samsung S22 Ultra camera

There are a few differences in the S22 Ultra's camera hardware compared to last year, but it's mostly the same. This is what you get.

• 108-megapixel f/1.8 standard wide with OIS
• 10-megapixel f/2.4 3x telephoto with OIS
• 10-megapixel f/4.9 10x telephoto with OIS
• 12-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide
• 40-megapixel f/2.2 selfie

This year's model is a great camera system with a couple of quirks, but the hardware is mostly unchanged from last year. The 10x optical zoom continues to be really impressive, as well as the saturation to 11 and the 100x zoom.

• 
• 3x zoom portrait
• 
• 
• 
• Ultrawide camera
• 3x zoom
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• Ultrawide camera
• 10x zoom
• 30x zoom
• 100x zoom
• 
• 
• 3x zoom portrait
• 
• 
• 
• 

Video capabilities are the same. There is a new autoframing feature, which will track up to 10 people and adjust automatically as people move in and out of frame. There is an auto frame rate feature that adjusts frame rate on the fly to account for brighter or darker conditions. The main camera has a recording resolution of 8K/24p and the selfie cam has a recording resolution of 4K/60p.

This year's photo improvements are mostly software-based, which makes them sound boring, but they are not. Portrait mode photos have been improved with more detailed depth mapping and official support for pet portraits. The phone is able to identify small details on a subject, like hairs, and keep them sharp, rather than putting them in the background.

Some of the most impressive portrait mode photos I have seen from a phone have been caused by this change. Even if the depth mapping is better, the portraits from the wide lens are still not convincing. Pets and humans alike look great in photos from the 3x zoom. It gets a lot right even if it gets tripped up on some details.

The night photography improvements are not as impressive as I would have liked. You can now use night mode and shoot a full-res image at the same time as you can do one in daytime. In very dark conditions, a little moon icon will appear on-screen to enable night mode. Without night mode, a high-res image in these conditions looks bad, so the bar is low to start with. You get a better image than a noisy one.

It is possible to apply night mode to the selfie camera, but it has to be really dark for the option to appear. I'm impressed that the camera can find enough light to make a usable photo of me sitting in near-total darkness, but the results are so unflattering that I'd rather just have no photo at all.

The S22 Ultra is a multi-frame RAW capture app that is similar to Apple's ProRAW. Combining the benefits of computational photography with the post-processing flexibility of a RAW file is what expertRAW captures multiple frames and merges them into a single DNG file. To use the feature, you need to download the app from the app store, which is an entirely separate camera app. You can use it with any of the rear cameras if you have access to manual exposure controls.

The resulting RAW files are huge, but they are more flexible than a traditional, single-frame RAW file from the standard camera app. Some unpleasant banding can be seen when you push shadows all the way up. The multi-frame RAW is more tolerant of the edit because it has more information to work with. Is this a difference you will see on an image? Probably not. If you are a photo nerd who likes to tinker with post-processing, it is a great tool to have on hand.

There is a way to take a photo in the Expert RAW app and have it edited in Lightroom. You need to download the version of Lightroom Mobile from the app store. After a two-month free trial of the app, you'll need an Adobe license, which will cost you at least $120 a year. You can get a standard DNG file from Expert RAW if you download snapseed for free.

Samsung S22 Ultra software

The S22 Ultra ships with OneUI 4.1. For the most part, I like it. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it, but it's nice. This is a major new feature of Android 12 and though it doesn't go as far as the version for the Pixel phones, it is enough to make the phone feel a little more personal to me.

The ads that used to sit at the top of the page on the weather app have been removed. I get a push notification if I buy an S22 if the company scales back its often in-your-face pre-downloads and ads. This is the S22 Ultra. There is a cash back offer on my screen. I don't care for this on a $1,200 phone.

The company comes through where it counts with a good support policy, even though I don't like some of its choices. The S22 series will get up to four generations of Android OS updates, which is one more year than the company promises for its own devices, and just about the best policy you'll find for anANDROID phone. I'm not a climate scientist, but I'm willing to bet that not making people buy a new phone every two years has a bigger environmental impact than recycling fishing nets into the phone.

It's difficult to come up with things that the S22 Ultra can do. I want to make a Gif from a video I took and paste it into a note. Yes. Can I take a clear photo of the top of Smith Tower while standing several blocks away from the street? Yes. Can I take a picture of my dishwasher's model number, convert it to text, and then paste it into the search engine to find a missing part? Also, yes.

You can expect a slab-style phone in 2022, but it can do just about anything. The S22 Ultra is a phone for more than one person. Do you really want to use the stylus? Will you use that 10x lens again and again, or will you just take a few photos with it and forget? Do you plan to take 40-plus-MB RAW files on your phone more than once or twice? If you want to spend $1,200 on a phone, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself if it's worth it.

The work of judging whether this phone is for you has already been done by the company. If you are a person who would get the most out of the Ultra, you already know it. If you're questioning whether it would be worth it, you'd be fine with the S22 Plus.

The S22 Ultra will be a phone like no other on the market for someone who plans to use it frequently. The battery life is disappointing. If you can navigate the sometimes steep learning curve of the S Pen life, you will be rewarded with a device that is truly one of a kind.

Allison Johnson is a photographer.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it. It is impossible for us to read and analyze all of these agreements. We started counting how many times you have to agree to use devices when we review them.

You have to agree to use the S22 Ultra.

• Samsung’s Terms and conditions
• Samsung’s Privacy Policy
• Google Terms of Service (including Privacy Policy)
• Google Play Terms of Service
• Automatic installs (including from Google, Samsung, and your carrier)

There are a lot of optional agreements. There will be more of them if you use a carrier-specific version. Here are a few.

• Samsung “Information Linking” and sending diagnostic data
• Samsung “Customization Service” for personalized ads
• Samsung news and special offers
• Turn on Offline Finding
• Google Drive backup, Location services, Wi-Fi scanning, diagnostic data
• Bixby privacy policy (required to use Bixby), plus optional for Bixby options like personalized content, data access, and audio recording review

There may be more. For example, the Weather app fromSamsung has its own privacy policy that may include sharing information with weather.com.

There are at least nine optional agreements.