Samsung Galaxy S23 long-term review

Performance, smoothness

After multiple years of people complaining about its Exynos chipsets used for the S series, Samsung finally read the room in 2023 and let the entire world enjoy the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, no geographical shenanigans whatsoever. It seems like this will be a very short lived victory for Exynos detractors, however, since rumor has it we're going to be back to the pre-2023 situation this year when the S24 launches.

So, if you live in one of the places that used to get the S series with an Exynos, and don't want one of those, you're probably not going to be looking at the S24 when it arrives in a few weeks. And that's perfectly fine, since while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside the S23 may have been superseded by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, we're going to say what we pretty much always do for 8-series Snapdragons.

The old one is perfectly good for any and all day to day activities, save for, perhaps, the most premium games. Oh, and AI stuff using AI specific bits in your phone's chipset, but that's still more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. Of course, there's a chance that Samsung's huge AI push for the S24 family will be more than just marketing fluff, but is it really a very high chance? Time will tell.

Anyway, it goes without saying, but let's say it nevertheless - the S23 is a top performer. The SoC is good, and very efficient too (see the Battery life section after this one to get a better idea what we mean by that), and it is, of course, very fast.

The S23 is also the smoothest Samsung we've ever reviewed long term, but unfortunately it still lags ever so slightly behind some of its competitors in this regard. We know we say this every year, but every year Samsung improves things a little bit on this front, but not quite enough to be on par with some of its Chinese competitors. We're wondering if it ever will.

So while the Xiaomi 13 Pro might still be our king of smoothness of all the phones we've reviewed long-term, and the OnePlus 11 a close second, the S23 is third, and the delta between it and the others is smaller than it's ever been. If you're coming to it from another Samsung, or from any other device that isn't the Xiaomi 13 Pro or the OnePlus 11, you'll be impressed.

We have seen microlag here and there throughout our use of the S23 when it was on One UI 5.1, especially when picking up the phone after a long time not using it (say, when you wake up) and notifications started pouring in. One UI 6 is much better when it comes to lag and stutters, there are way less of those than in the previous version, to the point where for most people this phone now wouldn't feel laggy and stuttery at all. We still notice some from time to time, but we notice because we handle a lot of phones and can instantly draw comparisons to others - if you don't, you won't, and the S23 will feel amazing.

Battery life, charging

Battery life has been great throughout our time with the S23, which may seem surprising at first if you've ever checked its specs. Yes, it's a very small cell for this day and age, but the handset itself is small too. Add in the very efficient chipset and (we assume) very efficient screen, and, with our use case, we got numbers that we definitely didn't expect beforehand. This was easily a phone that got us through each day without an issue, although we couldn't quite stretch it to two full days on anything but the weekends when our usage is lighter than what's described below.

So, overall, we think it delivers great battery life. When you factor in the fact that all of this comes from a mere 3,900 mAh cell, we'd say it's actually outstanding. The way One UI 6 shows screen on time numbers not just for the current day, but for a few days before too, is also the best way for these stats to be displayed that we've ever seen, and we hope Samsung's competitors are taking notes here. It's great to be able to quickly compare numbers for a few days with a few taps, and we like this very much.

Battery life snapshots on different days

As you can see from the screenshots above, 6 hours of screen on time was the absolute minimum we could hope for in a day, but 8 hours was also very much achievable on other days. That's on par with what we've previously seen from phones with ~1,000 mAh more juice in the pack, and there simply isn't anything to complain about regarding this device's longevity.

That being said, we can and will complain about the slower-than-competing-phones charging. The S23 needs an hour and 16 minutes to go from zero to full, which isn't as bad as Sonys or iPhones, but it's way worse than practically all of its Chinese competitors. For context: the OnePlus 11 fully charges in 22 minutes, while the S23 gets to 57% after 30. Such a huge performance delta in what is a very important part of the experience shouldn't be acceptable, and yet Samsung still gets away with this year after year.

Perhaps that means people find the rest of the Samsung experience so enticing that they are willing to overlook this, or maybe most don't actually care about charging speed? With the S23, the great battery life at least ensures you won't be needing any midday top-ups if your use case is anything like ours, and considering how slow that would go, that's definitely a plus - unlike the missing charger in the barebones box.

Wireless charging is present too, but limited to 15W so even slower (and by quite a bit) than the wired type. That's less of an issue in our book, since we'd mainly only use it for overnight charging on our nightstand while we sleep. Others have wireless charging pads on their desks at work, for example, and given the great battery life that should be fine too, but of course your mileage with this will vary depending on what your stance on wireless charging is.

As always, our use case involves the phone being off the charger for about 12-16 hours each day, with primarily Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, about an hour or two of 5G data, location always on with 30 minutes or so of GPS navigation via Waze, Bluetooth always on with about two hours or so of listening to music or podcasts via TWS earbuds, and an hour or so of phone calls via TWS earbuds. The normal caveats apply - if you have a more mobile data-heavy usage scenario, and especially if the signal isn't great, that will negatively impact your screen on times compared to ours.