Samsung Galaxy S23 in for review

04 February 2023

We’ve seen some great flagship smartphones over the last few years and the big-name brands are mostly playing the refinement game with their recent 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 prior to our detailed review.

Our review unit comes in the new Lavender color which is a really subtle mix of purple and pink. As expected, Galaxy S23 doesn’t look that different next to last year’s Galaxy S22. If both phones are face up, it’s hard to tell which one is which.

Turn 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.

Handling the phone is great with its 168-gram light build 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 30 fps compared to 8K@24fps on the S22. You also get a sharper 12MP selfie cam up front.

The 6.1-inch display on S23 is nearly 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 peak brightness in Auto mode which we'll make sure to test.

Samsung finally answered the prayers of its international customers by going with 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 S23 model still comes with 128GB storage while the S23+ and Ultra both start at 256GB.

Elsewhere, the new 3,900 mAh battery should lead to improved endurance coupled with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Sadly charging speeds remain capped at 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’re hard at work on the detailed review which will be published in due time.