We have seen some great flagship smartphones in recent years and the big brands are mostly playing the game of sophistication with their recent launches. This is the case with Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series, and we’re ready to take a quick look at the smallest member of the trio – the Galaxy S23 before our detailed review.
Our review unit comes in the new lavender colour, which is a really subtle mix of purple and pink. As expected, the Galaxy S23 doesn’t look all that different from last year’s Galaxy S22. If both phones are face 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 that carries a trio of aluminum rings for the lenses instead of the one-piece camera island on the S22.
Handling of the phone is outstanding with its lightweight 168 gram frame and aluminum sides. The S23’s cameras might look unchanged on paper with a 50MP main module, 12MP ultrawide, and 10MP 3x telephoto, but you can now shoot 8K video at 30fps compared to 8K at 24fps on the S22. You also get a sharper 12MP selfie cam up front.
The S23’s 6.1-inch display is almost identical to last year’s: a 2X Dynamic AMOLED panel with FHD+ resolution and a 120Hz variable refresh rate. The new bits here are Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and a peak brightness of up to 1,750 nits in Auto mode which we’ll be sure to test.
Samsung has finally answered the prayers of its international customers by choosing the latest Qualcomm chip: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for all markets. We’re expecting great performance here, and it will be interesting to see how the small form factor handles heat dissipation and throttling. Sadly, the base model S23 still comes with 128GB of storage, while the S23+ and Ultra both start at 256GB.
Elsewhere, the new 3,900mAh battery should lead to better stamina coupled with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Sadly, charging speeds remain limited to 25W. Samsung has also added the latest 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E standard and the Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity to keep up with the times.
That’s it for this quick look at the Galaxy S23. We are hard at work on the detailed review which will be published in due course.
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