We’ve seen some great flagship smartphones over the past few years, with the big brands mostly playing up the sophistication with their latest launches. Such is the case with the Galaxy S23 series from Samsung, and we’re ready to take a quick look at the smallest member of the trio – the Galaxy S23 ahead of our detailed review.
Our review unit comes in the new lavender color, which is a really subtle mix of purple and pink. As expected, the Galaxy S23 doesn’t look that different next to last year’s Galaxy S22. If both phones are facing up, it’s hard to tell which is which.
Galaxy S22 and S23 side by side
Flip them over and you can see the new camera design, which brings a trio of aluminum rings to the lenses instead of the one-piece camera island on the S22.
Handling of the phone is fantastic with its 168-gram lightweight construction and aluminum sides. The cameras on the S23 may look unchanged on paper with a 50MP main, 12MP ultrawide and 10MP 3x telephoto modules, but you can now shoot 8K video at 30fps compared to [email protected] on the S22. You also get a sharper 12MP front selfie camera.
The 6.1-inch screen on the S23 is almost identical to last year – a dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with FHD+ resolution and variable 120Hz refresh rate. The new bits here are Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and up to 1,750 nits maximum brightness in Auto mode, which we’ll be sure to test.
Samsung finally answered the pleas of its international customers by going with the latest Qualcomm chip – Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for all markets. We expect great performance here, and it will be interesting to see how the small form factor handles heat dissipation and throttling. Unfortunately, the base S23 model still comes with 128GB of storage, while the S23+ and Ultra both start at 256GB.
Elsewhere, the new 3,900 mAh battery should lead to improved endurance combined with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Unfortunately, the charging speed remains limited to 25W. Samsung also added the very latest 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E standard as well as Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity to keep up with the times.
That’s all for this quick look at the Galaxy S23. We are working hard on the detailed review, which will be published in due course.
