On to the next Galaxy: Samsung's latest flagship releases

Samsung announced the latest iteration of its popular flagship phone on Feb. 9. In the words of Tom’s Guide, the tech company is now focusing on evolution instead of revolution with its newest handsets.

The Galaxy S22 looks almost identical to last year’s S21, with only the dual tone color palette being removed in favor of one color. The chassis’s only majorly visible change is that the screen is now slightly smaller, coming in at 6.1” versus 6.2” on the previous model. Because of this, it is now slimmer than the Apple iPhone 13 and lighter than the S21. The only major exception is that the new S22 Ultra has a built-in S-Pen, similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Note line, which after these releases appears to have been retired.

The plastic back of the S21 has been replaced with a Gorilla Glass Victus backing, likely making this new model more durable.

The display is rather impressive, being able to transition refresh rates from 120 Hz down all the way to 10 Hz if needed. This should dramatically improve battery life. As usual with Samsung, the display leans heavily into the color saturation, but this can be fixed in the device settings.

The camera specs look amazing, and the photos are very decent, but they still lack some ambiences compared to competitors like the iPhone and Google Pixel. The S22 now includes optical zoom and many other cool image features. The device has also improved significantly on portrait mode.

The chip seems to be similar in speed and performance to the S21, though more testing will need to be done before this will be answered definitively. Currently, U.S. models are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

The software is a great new version of One UI, Samsung’s fork of the popular Android OS. Reviewers say that One UI 4.1 is the cleanest version yet. This one runs on Android 12.

The S22 is a powerful device that holds itself up well in the smartphone market, but unfortunately doesn’t have enough changes to warrant an upgrade from the previous model. Also, it’s currently under question whether this new model will pull Samsung up from their current low due to the success of the popular iPhone 13 and the revolutionary Google Pixel 6. Time will tell if these new devices will help the company move forward, but one thing’s clear—this phone is good, but not dramatic.

By Charles Metz