Galaxy S22 in review: This is why Samsung's new flagship disappoints me.

This is an article from our content partner "Nextpit". Here you can find the original article by Benjamin Lucks.

Pro

• Really nice design
• Great display
• Reasonable performance
• Excellent cameras
• Selfies are spot on
• Long update guarantee

Cons

• Impractical shape
• Heats up quickly
• Battery too small
• Very slow charging
• Few changes compared to the S21

Short conclusion

To make a long story short: We don't see many changes in the Samsung Galaxy S22. And those that we do see are undeniably mediocre. Samsung is going on a savings spree in 2022 and reserves most of the meaningful upgrades for the Galaxy S22+ and Galaxy S22 Ultra models.

For the price of 899 Euros, the S22 is still a solid smartphone, and it will remain so in the coming years. But I am still disappointed: While Samsung takes a break in innovations, there should at least be detail improvements. However, many problems of the predecessor remain with the Samsung Galaxy S22.

If you liked the Samsung Galaxy S21, you will also like this phone - but if you had concerns with the predecessor, you should wait another year - or look elsewhere.

Design: A lot of form, little substance

The Samsung Galaxy S22 has a strikingly similar design to its predecessor. New features include a monochrome color scheme and a glass back.

Likes:

• Really nice to look at
• Elements, materials and colors fit together perfectly
• Compact size and light weight

Dislikes:

• Edges of the frame uncomfortable to hold
• Wobbles on the table

The shape of the display approaches the square, as we have seen from Apple in recent years. Combined with the compact size (6.1 inches), the phone feels good in the hand. Aside from a punch hole notch, there is nothing visually distracting to the eye, and the shorter length also means less eye movement.

Although the device is perfectly balanced and you don't get tired of holding it in your hand (the weight of only 167 g also contributes to this), the edges of the frame are too sharp. In short, the device feels like you are touching the corner of a table. Another drawback is the strong tipping, which you have to live with when you rest the S22 on a table.

You can avoid many of these drawbacks by putting the Galaxy S22 in a case. Since this is already standard for many people anyway, the criticism of the shape is therefore theoretical for many users out there.

Display: eye candy that is hard to resist

The S series has always been known for particularly powerful displays. It's a similar story with the Samsung Galaxy S22, which features a bright Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a refresh rate of 120 Hz and a peak brightness of 1,300 nits.

Likes:

• Easily visible in direct sunlight
• Super smooth at 120 Hz
• Great customization options

Dislikes:

• Compact size not ideal for some mobile games
• Consumes a lot of battery

Whatever lands on the display is simply beautiful to look at! Samsung makes this possible with the solid 1,080×2,340 resolution (~425 ppi), smooth refresh rate, and HDR10+ skills. The direct competitor, the iPhone 13, is clearly left behind. The customization options in the settings, which allow you to fine-tune the colors to your taste, are also positive.

I also like the option to set the display to maximum brightness. This allows for an optimal experience when gaming or watching SDR and HDR content. The brightness is so high that content is easily visible even in direct sunlight.

Software: Super-long software updates

Samsung has done an excellent job on the software side. One UI 4.0 is a comprehensive Android 12 interface that is intuitive even for newcomers. If you want to learn everything about Samsung's software, I strongly recommend our review of One UI 4.0.

Here, I mainly want to talk about the update policy and what you can expect from your Samsung Galaxy S22 in this regard. In terms of software updates, Samsung has promised four years for the Samsung Galaxy S22. This means that it will receive the latest Android versions until around 2025. So, if the release cycle of Android does not change, the S22 will not receive any updates until Android 16!

With this promise, Samsung has given many of its smartphones another unique selling point in the Android market. This is a plus point if you either like to use the phone for a long time, pass it on to your family or want to sell it after use.

Performance: Exynos 2200 gets surprisingly warm

Samsung again relies on its own SoCs in Germany, which are called "Exynos 2200" in 2022. In the run-up to the release, the manufacturer caused a stir with an exciting gaming cooperation with AMD. However, as our review shows, that was probably more of a marketing cooperation.

Likes:

• Solid performance for 2022
• Exynos 2200 SoC on par with the competition in terms of CPU.
• Good thermal throttling so that you don't burn your hands

Dislikes:

• GPU can't keep up in benchmarks
• Very large fluctuations between individual test runs
• Constant heat during certain tasks

In the CPU tests, the Exynos 2200 achieves a respectable score of 1,158 in single-core and 3,414 in multi-core in GeekBench 5. This is slightly better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that we tested in the Oppo Find X5 Pro, which scored 846 / 3,324. But remember that this performance also varies between devices with the same SoC, so the Samsung S22 with the Snapdragon could well be somewhere in between.

In terms of graphics performance, however, the S22 performs quite below average. Despite the great importance of the name RDNA2, the Xclipse-920 GPU simply does not offer enough in terms of graphics performance. We could not achieve satisfactory results in our test, and the performance was very inconsistent.

Before we look at the specific benchmarks, I would still like to emphasize that all games run smoothly with the Exynos 2200. While thermal throttling is quite severe, users should not notice much difference in performance under normal gaming conditions. Playing for a couple of hours in PUBG: New State was a pretty fun experience with no noticeable drops. And this is one of the most graphically intense games currently available.

In the 3DMark Wildlife test, however, the results were very different. Our best score was 7,035, while the lowest score of 3,535 was almost 50 percent below the top score. Looking closer, we see that this is the result of very aggressive performance throttling. Even when the temperatures rise, however, they never exceed the critical threshold of 44°C.

In the Wildlife stress test, we had a peak of 6,508 and a low of 3,939. For comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 of the Oppo Find X5 Pro achieved almost twice as high values with 9,192 / 6,069.

Camera: Real telephoto at last

In terms of cameras, Samsung has only made a few major changes compared to the Samsung Galaxy S21. However, the S22 finally offers a telephoto camera that relies on optical magnification. The Galaxy S22 also impressed me with its color accuracy and details in well-lit environments.

Likes:

• Images from the main camera have high color accuracy and detail.
• Zoom levels up to 10x work great
• Selfies are really good

Dislikes:

• Night mode almost unusable
• Background blur can be problematic

The main camera is a 50MP wide-angle camera with an aperture of f/1.8 and optical image stabilization. In good lighting conditions, I was impressed with how easy it is to take beautiful pictures with those vibrant colors we know from Samsung. The same goes for the 12 MP ultra-wide-angle camera with an aperture of f/2.2.

New to the S-series is the 10 MP telephoto lens with an aperture of f/2.4, because unlike the "hybrid zoom" with true 1.1x zoom and digital magnification, Samsung now uses a triple magnification lens. In addition, there is an optical image stabilizer, which is especially useful for long focal lengths.

Zooming in further produced mixed results. Good pictures can be taken with the digital zoom, but the quality decreases significantly with each magnification. Personally, I would stay within single digits of the zoom.

I was really surprised with portraits and selfies. The selfie camera, a 10 MP wide-angle lens with an f/2.2 aperture, is impressively good. However, the vibrancy of the colors can sometimes bring out the good and sometimes the bad of the skin under the "wrong" conditions. Also, the selfie camera manages 4K videos at a maximum of 60fps.

My only issue was that the auto blur feature had trouble picking me out in open areas. Sometimes the whole thing looked like a bad Photoshop job. In one of the attached examples, half of my ear was cut off, probably confused by the in-ear Bluetooth headphones I was wearing.

And finally, we have the night shots. This is another major annoyance, as Samsung advertised this point quite heavily, only to disappoint. In very dark environments, you basically need a tripod, as any slight movement will ruin a shot, so unfortunately good results are not guaranteed.

Battery: This is where the Galaxy S22 finally falls down

The battery is admittedly Samsung's biggest disappointment this year. With the smaller case, the Galaxy S22 also received a smaller battery with 3,700 mAh. There is also no charger in the box, and the charging speed remains at 2018 levels with 25 W.

Likes:

• Many customization options to adjust the energy efficiency to your own needs.

Disliked:

• No charger in the box
• Only 25 W in 2022 too bad
• 3,700 mAh too little
• Battery life of only one day

It takes two hours to charge the battery from 0 to 100% with a conventional charger, and about one hour and 30 minutes with a fast-charging charger. Unfortunately, I did not have an original Samsung charger at hand, so I could not test the speed with the official charger. This costs an additional 30 Euros.

Under normal conditions, you should expect your phone to last about a full day with some sacrifices. If the charging speeds were better, that would be respectable. But being plugged in for two hours every day is simply not up to date in 2022. Especially when the competition now achieves charging times of less than 20 minutes. Fancy that, best read the review of the Xiaomi 12 Pro!

Final verdict

I can only describe the feelings at the end of this review as ambivalent. After all, the cameras and build quality are top-notch, the display is excellent as usual, and the update warranty is unparalleled in Android. But these are pretty much all the good things I can say about the Galaxy S22. They are important features, however, a premium phone should offer more in my opinion.

That starts with the mixed performance, which is perfectly adequate in 2022, but lags behind the competition. In addition, there is the slow quick-charging and the battery that is simply too small. I also noticed the rather mediocre night mode and the sharp edges on the phone's casing negatively during the test period.