Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Review: Flat Phone Retirement Plan

Is there anything left to do in the tablet phone market?

The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S22 looks like a plan to retire the company’s range of cookers. By dropping the Galaxy Note line and skipping the 2021 release, Samsung is merging the Note line with the S-Pen and the Galaxy S line, reducing flagship phones to a single annual release.

Take a look at the 2019 Galaxy Note 10 and you’ll see that Samsung has essentially been redesigning it for three years now. It feels like Samsung is standing still, as if the plan is for flat phones to slowly fade into the sunset as the company directs resources towards the future of foldable devices.

We’re reviewing the S22 Ultra, but first let’s talk about the line as a whole. The Ultra is a Galaxy Note with a Note-style design, while the S22 and S22+ have a similar design to last year’s S21. The biggest change is the SoC performance jump in both Exynos (international) and Snapdragon (US). Beyond that, it’s hard to credit Samsung with the year-over-year increase in specs. The top-end configuration of the S22 Ultra has less RAM this year, up to 12GB from 16GB. The S22 and S22+ are thinner and lose 300 mAh of battery capacity. The S22+ and S22 Ultra are advertised as 45W fast charging devices, but they don’t actually charge faster than last year’s models.

Prices are still the same as last year: $800, $1,000, and $1,200, depending on where you are in the size range. All of these prices seem too high in the face of Google’s excellent Pixel 6. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single thing that the $1,200 S22 Ultra does better than the $900 Pixel 6 Pro. There’s certainly no $300 difference between the two devices, and if you’re looking for an Android flagship and have the option of buying the Pixel 6 Pro instead of the S22, you should. Of course, Samsung’s big advantage is that most people don’t have the option to buy a Google phone because Google’s small, underfunded hardware division only sells phones in about 13 countries, while Samsung sells them in over 100 countries.

The S22 line has been controversial since its launch. Samsung announced the S21 and S21+ displays with dynamic refresh rates from 10Hz to 120Hz, and then a week later (after accepting pre-orders), Samsung quietly changed the specs to “48Hz to 120Hz”. Samsung touts the S22+ and S22 Ultra as “45W”fast charging devices, but the devices don’t actually charge faster than last year’s 25W models.

We’re still not sure what’s going on with Samsung’s decision to restrict thousands of games and apps through its Game Optimization Service. Samsung’s throttling app has a list of 10,000 apps and games whose CPU performance can be slowed down by as much as 46 percent, and Samsung controls it all remotely via the cloud. Unsurprisingly, Samsung has managed to exclude all major test apps from its throttling scheme, which, according to Geekbench, makes this a scam worthy of being excluded from its test charts.

Samsung promised at some point to release an off button for this throttling app, but it has yet to show up on our test unit. Reports out of Korea say that Samsung is already facing a preliminary investigation by the country’s Fair Trade Commission over the feature, with S22 owners preparing to file a class action lawsuit.