Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra review: A supremely powerful Android phone with a mighty price tag to match

If you’ve ever struggled to decide between the standard and pro versions of new smartphones, Samsung has made it a little easier this year. The Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra isn’t just a bigger, faster version of the S22 and S22 plus, it’s in a category of its own. An S22 in name only, the S22 ultra marries the retired Galaxy note range and the flagship Galaxy S range to bring full S-Pen stylus functionality to the brand’s leading device.

Absorbing the features and design of the super-premium note series, the Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra (£1,149, Samsung.com) looks nothing like its smaller S22 and S22 plus siblings. It’s descended from a class of extra-large phones once labelled phablets – until the average size of phones crept upwards to the point that the distinction stopped being useful – and it represents the absolute best of what Samsung can build.

So, it has Samsung’s best-in-class AMOLED edge display with a dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. The camera array is made up of no fewer than four lenses, two of them telephoto and offering up to 10x optical zoom. The return of the Galaxy S21 ultra’s 100x digital Space Zoom also continues to impress, allowing you to capture details as fine as individual craters on the moon’s surface, without a tripod (and with a little AI magic).

The slim and lightweight S-Pen is also a big draw for stylus fans, as it now slides into the bottom left corner of the device (the S21 ultra was technically compatible, but had no slot) and there’s still room for a 5,000mAh battery to fuel the whole thing.

The phone runs on Samsung and AMD’s latest Exonys 2200 processor (in the UK at least), which is behind many of the Galaxy S22 ultra’s headline features. The new chip represents a huge step up in data and network speeds, and enables things like better night photography, more intelligent battery management and performance boosts to everything from web browsing to streaming and gaming.

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We’ve been testing the Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra since it was announced at the beginning of February, using the phone in a range of conditions including at home, outdoors and in the workplace.

We tested the display and photography features in broad daylight as well as in dark and indoor scenes, and stress-tested the 5,000mAh battery life with high-resolution video streaming and processor-intensive gaming apps. S-Pen testing was carried out with Samsung’s own suite of creative and note-taking apps.

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The S22 ultra is an intimidating-looking device, and stands miles apart from the more lightweight and approachable S22 and S22 plus. Despite measuring just 3mm taller than the iPhone 13 pro max, it feels enormous in person. This is a phone with real stage presence – a device that will not suffer the indignity of being held by anything less than both of your hands.

Reassuringly heavy compared to the more diminutive phones in the S series, the S22 ultra now sports the familiar rounded metal-and-glass design of the retired Note range, giving it a streamlined and elegant aesthetic belying its true heft.

While the sides of the chassis curve gently from front to back, the top and bottom sides of the phone are flat metal. Along the bottom is a USB-C charging port, speaker grill, SIM slot and radio antennae bands. This is also where the S-Pen hides away when not in use, sitting flush with the edge of the phone.

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The S22 ultra comes in four muted and uncontroversial colourways: black, white, green and burgundy. Each has a faintly pearlescent-metallic finish, similar to that seen in the S21 range of devices.

In-person, and especially when compared to the more recently updated design language of the S22 and S22 plus, the plain shape and familiar appearance of the S22 ultra is hard to get too excited about. Besides the new camera placement, it looks very much like the note 20 ultra, a two-year-old phone, and not much like a cutting-edge S series device at all.

Samsung is the undisputed market leader when it comes to screen technology, so it’s hardly a surprise that the S22 ultra has the best display you can find on a smartphone.

The 6.8in QHD+ screen uses the latest AMOLED tech and employs a dynamic refresh rate, which seamlessly dials the frame rate of the display up and down, from a silky smooth 120Hz when scrolling and browsing to as little as 1Hz – that is, refreshing the display just once per second – when nothing is moving on it.

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Dynamic refresh rates are a relatively new feature, and help extend battery life by only using the highest refresh rate when it’s needed. Evidently the S22 ultra needs all the help it can get, as even with this battery conservation feature the phone typically lasts just one full day between charges.

The screen also reportedly has improved performance in bright and direct sunlight, though we struggled to properly test this feature under real-world conditions, considering it’s February and we’re in England.

In a first for the S series, the Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra comes with its very own stylus, called the S-Pen. It lives in a discreet hole on the bottom corner of the phone, and sliding it out activates an on-screen shortcut for note-taking and doodling, even when the phone is locked. Your scribbled notes can be instantly converted to regular text to make them useful, and new quick-note functions let you easily drag in attachments like links, app screenshots and photos.

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If you’ve never used a stylus with a phone you might struggle to see the point of the S-Pen, but on a phone of this size it serves not just as a way to sketch notes but a way to more easily navigate menu screens, apps and sites. In meetings, it’s a more natural way to jot down your thoughts than the keyboard.

It can also be used as a remote camera trigger for group selfies, for controlling some apps with gestures drawn in mid-air, or a clicker for slide presentations.

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For the Galaxy S22 ultra, the pen’s latency has been reduced for a smoother writing experience – down to 2.8ms from 9ms – while AI-based coordinate prediction essentially guesses where you’re about to drag the pen a fraction of a second before you actually do. The result is a writing experience that feels very close to the feeling of actually writing on paper.

The thinner stylus of the S22 ultra does lack the haptic feedback of the larger S-Pen found on Galaxy tablets – which uses subtle vibration to create the sensation of dragging the pen over paper rather than glass. But the mobile stylus has similar pressure sensitivity and feels responsive.

On paper, the camera array of the Galaxy S22 ultra has barely changed since the S21 ultra, which most would agree still has the best camera available in a smartphone.

It rocks a 108MP main camera with a slightly larger sensor than the previous model, a 12MP ultra-wide and a pair of 10MP telephoto lenses with a remarkable 10x optical zoom. That’s zoomy enough to take photographs of the moon. Around the front, the punch-hole selfie camera is still 40MP.

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This year the improvements come in the form of software rather than hardware, with Samsung placing a pronounced focus on low light and night time photography. The step up in processing power is brought to bear on the camera’s post-processing effects, pulling detail and dynamic range out of dark scenes in both stills and video.

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In the real world, the S22 ultra camera performs exceptionally well. The quality of low-light video recording and photography is noticeably improved over the S21, especially when using the 30x and 100x zoom modes. At extreme levels of zoom pictures begin to look a little woozy, as the image-processing algorithms attempt to fill in detail using guesswork, but pull back slightly and you’ll find the S22 can shoot remarkably clear telephoto shots even in grey and overcast conditions.

Meanwhile, features like super steady image stabilisation and automatic framing take advantage of the phone’s giant camera sensor to zoom into and pan around the shot to keep your subject in frame. Improved depth mapping is used to more accurately identify the edges of hair and faces when shooting in portrait mode, resulting in noticeably fewer visual artefacts and halos. Changes to the underlying sensor also enable the S22 ultra to soak up more light with each shot, producing daylight-quality photography in the dark.

The S22 ultra camera also gets a “Pro Mode” this year, giving expert users the option to shoot and edit in 16bit RAW format, and to manually process their own photographs by fiddling around with multiple exposures. Portrait photography has also been improved. You can now add a simulated light source when editing, similar to the Google Pixel’s portrait light feature, and pets finally get their very own portrait mode too.

The Galaxy S22 ultra runs on Samsung’s latest One UI 4.1 operating system, which is itself based on the Android platform. That means it runs Android apps and comes pre-installed with a full suite of Samsung’s own software too. This can be initially confusing for new users as you get duplicate versions of base apps like Messages and the web browser – one each from Google and Samsung. The S22 ultra also has its own virtual assistant too, called Bixby, who’s been bravely soldiering on for generations now.

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Other software additions help get the most out of the S22 ultra’s hardware, in particular the camera. Samsung’s photo- and video-editing tools work well with the stylus and run rings around the standard apps offered by Google’s operating system. Dex mode effectively transforms the phone into a portable PC, giving a complete desktop-style interface when the S22 ultra is plugged into a monitor.

The integration with Google Duo for video calling works seamlessly, and the option to easily share your screen with friends opens up some interesting options for remotely fixing family members’ phones.

Samsung walks a tightrope with its battery improvements, increasing the size of the tank at the same time as it increases power consumption with faster processors and brighter displays. The promised efficiencies of the Exonys 2200 chip might be in there somewhere, but they’ve only helped to keep the S22 ultra’s average battery life roughly on par with previous, power-hungry Galaxy phones.

With higher-than-average usage we would reach the end of a workday with the Galaxy S22 ultra hovering around 30 to 40 per cent charge. That’s plenty of battery life for most, but if you’re a power user running high-drain apps more often, it might fall short.

The Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra is essentially a Galaxy note dressed up as the new S series flagship. A premium Android smartphone for power users, it blends the best features of both ranges: introducing full S-Pen stylus functionality, impressive software improvements and Samsung’s industry-leading camera technology.

So should you choose the S22 ultra over the S22 plus? Not if you’re not interested in having an enormous screen or regularly using the S-Pen stylus. The S22 ultra is a productivity-focused mobile designed to handle anything you could conceivably need a smartphone to do, and to do it fast. That’s too much phone for most shoppers, who’ll find that the cheaper S22 and S22 plus phones tick all of the boxes for less.