February is officially the new phone season and Samsung is kicking off the Galaxy S22. After all the leaks, the main news today are the prices and the release date. The phones are priced the same as last year: $799.99 for the S22, $999.99 for the S22+, and $1,199.99 for the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Pre-orders for the phones start today, with a delivery date of February 25th.
The base and Plus models don’t have many design changes to speak of. However, the Ultra model is undergoing a big change – it actually turns into a Galaxy Note. Samsung ditched the stylus-equipped Note line in 2020, focusing instead on foldable smartphones rather than releasing two near-identical smartphones each year. The Galaxy S22 Ultra isn’t called Note, but it inherits the design and features of the former, with higher angles and a built-in S-Pen. The Ultra model also has a new kind of camera bump that comes with separate lenses instead of last year’s large, angled bump.
Figuring out year-to-year differences is basically a game of millimeters. The base S22 is slightly smaller than last year’s version; it has a 6.1-inch 120Hz, 2340×1080 display and a 146×70.6×7.6mm chassis (up from 6.2 inches and 151.7×71.2×7.9mm on compared to last year). It also has a smaller battery – 3700 mAh versus 4000 mAh for the S21. The phone has 8 GB of RAM and 128 or 256 GB of internal memory. You get three rear cameras in the base and plus models: a 50MP main camera, a 12MP ultra-wide angle camera, and a 10MP 3x optical zoom camera. There is a 10MP front camera.
The Plus model features a 6.6-inch display, 4500mAh battery, 45W fast charging and ultra-wideband tracking technology. Again, this is less than last year’s 4800 mAh 6.7-inch device. The S22 Ultra is the only model that doesn’t have a battery drop (which is impressive since the phone should now have a big plastic handle) and is still a 6.8-inch 5000mAh behemoth. Beyond the base specs of 8GB/128GB, the phone adds 12GB of RAM and 512GB to the 1TB of storage. The Ultra model also gets upgraded cameras, with a 108MP main camera, a 12MP ultra wide-angle camera, and two zoom lenses. The zoom lenses come with either a standard 10MP 3x optical zoom or a 10MP 10x optical zoom.
In the US, the phone will feature the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm’s flagship SoC for 2022. This is ARM Cortex X2 main core with three medium Cortex A710 and four small Cortex A510 processors, they are all built on 4nm process. It is ARM v9 chip and all cores are new and X2 and A510 only support 64-bit applications.
Some countries will instead get the Samsung Exynos 2200 SoC, which has the headline feature of the Samsung Xclipse GPU, which was co-developed with AMD’s graphics center. Normally this would have been a huge win for Samsung, but we can’t overstate how bad the implementation of this chip was. Samsung scheduled a big reveal for January 11th and then took the unprecedented step of not showing their own press conference. As far as rumors can tell, the delay is due to problems with the chip’s development, and even when Samsung unexpectedly announced the chip a few days after skipping its own event, it couldn’t provide any concrete performance numbers.
The phones ship with Android 12 and one big surprise is the new and improved update policy for the S22 lineup. Samsung now offers four years of major OS updates, which is even better than Google’s support cycle.