Samsung Galaxy S23 in Review

We’ve seen some big flagship smartphones over the past few years and the big brands are mostly playing the refinement game with their recent launches. That’s 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 color which is a very subtle blend 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 which brings a trio of aluminum rings for the lenses instead of the one-piece camera island on the S22.

The handling of the phone is excellent with its lightweight 168 gram build and aluminum sides. The S23’s cameras may look unchanged on paper with a 50MP main, 12MP ultrawide, and 10MP 3x telephoto, but now you can shoot 8K video at 30fps compared to 8K@24fps on the S22. You also get a sharper 12MP selfie camera on the front.

The S23’s 6.1-inch display is nearly identical to last year’s – a Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with FHD+ resolution and 120Hz variable refresh rate. New bits here are Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and up to 1,750 nits of peak brightness in auto mode which we’ll be sure to test.

Samsung has finally answered the prayers of its international customers by opting for Qualcomm’s latest chip – the 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 3,900mAh battery should lead to improved endurance coupled with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Unfortunately, charging speeds are still capped at 25W. Samsung has also added the latest Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz standard along with Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity to keep up with the times.

That’s it for this quick overview of the Galaxy S23. We are working hard on the detailed review which will be published in due course.