Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

This is the Galaxy S22 Ultra its

Samsung's flagship phone for 2022. and if the last few years are anything to go by this should set a new benchmark for what a smartphone can do so here are the really cool things I like about it the sneaky things I don't like about it and then the big question if it's worth it is it worth dropping what you're doing sprinting to your computer and smacking that pre-order button right no okay so the very first development of note is that the s22 ultra has an s pen stylus built into it and it's kind of amazing see Samsung used to have two different sets of flagships they had the s series which focused on having a faster chipset and big camera improvements and then they had the note series which focused on productivity through the use of this pen but the s22 ultra is both of these things plus the s pen has never felt better while their last version had a latency or lag of about nine milliseconds which was already bordering on indistinguishable from a real pen this time round thanks to Ai that cannot just know where the stylus is but also predict where it's going to be they've managed to trim that lag all the way down to just 2.8 milliseconds and then we've got the design and just to give you context here I love the design of the s21 ultra it was comfortable to hold it was clean but at the same time it had character in the form of this camera housing that kind of melts into the top corner and with the s22 ultra I feel like Samsung's taken 

the next logical step forward it's almost identical in terms of dimensions and finish and even the position of each camera lens but they've now upgraded the glass all around for 12.5 percent more strength and they stripped away that bulky camera housing leaving the lenses themselves as the only protruding parts it's very clean and I mean this green color I think it's enchanting I love it and the fact that this housing is gone gives the whole phone just a flatter more uniform overall profile that said having seen it and used it in person I also can't help but feel like it also just looks a bit plain now so utilitarian that it's it's almost lost some of its character the lenses are now a bit more exposed but my biggest gripe with this design is really why do they have to make it so sharp like I get that it has an s pen and that it's meant to resemble the shape of a book that you might want to write in but my hand is not a bookshelf wow it's just unnecessarily pokey and a bit less comfortable than it should be this is a very odd way of visualizing it but just have a look at what the smooth s21 ultra does to this cardboard versus what the new s22 ultra does to it it's still a good design it's just if their last phone was a nine this is an eight and I'm a sweet sweet three now if there's one thing that I could have told you five years ago that Samsung was going to nail here it's the screen Samsung has become the largest display company in the world for a reason and so this is just me confirming to you that yet again it's very beautiful some part of me is disappointed that they haven't tried to like push themselves beyond this cookie cutter display format the fact that from the front this doesn't look much different to the 2019 galaxy note 10 but on the other hand through iteration you could argue that they've perfected the format they do have the s22 ultra screen takes the last already stunning panel and dials the peak brightness up from 1500 nits all the way to 1750 and it does so whilst actually consuming less power, it could dial back its refresh rate from 120 hertz down to 10 hertz but the s22 ultra can dial it all the way back to just one hertz okay we need to talk about Samsung's software wait so yeah Samsung software my uh my opinion on it is changing there was a time where Samsung phones were were so stacked with useless apps that they were more bloated than well me after fish and chips Friday they had a user interface that looked like it was designed for five-year-olds. End of this year through a combination of all of their products put together they could meaning that they might help to recover 50 tons of discarded fishing nets now assuming that all of those ifs come to fruition that is still less than the amount that are dumped in the sea every hour I'm just saying this looks like a fantastic phone but just don't buy it on the basis that it's a positive contribution to the world there are literally a thousand more eco-friendly things they could have done like improved the repair ability made the batteries replaceable or provided a case in the box so that you don't have to order one separately okay all of this leads us to the big question should you pre-order the galaxy s22 ultra right now probably not because it's gone be bad I'm actually pretty confident it's gone be great and I'm strongly considering dumping my phone to switch to it it's just that there's no point in pre-ordering before reviewers have has time for in-depth testing so what I'd recommend is hang on just until I've had time to do my detailed camera test and battery test and then assuming that these two go well because they might not this chip may be an overheating disaster then we're golden all I can say before that is that this has all the ingredients of a potential 10 out of 10

smartphone of the year