As the owner of an S21U, I'm bemused...
> As well it should – the RRP of the base S22 Ultra is £1,149 (and it will sell for $1,210 in the US; this is not a currency conversion). For over a grand, you only get 128GB of non-upgradeable storage and a disappointing 8GB of RAM.
Does any phone really need more than 8GB?
Looking on my handset atm, it's using 7.8gb (of 12), of which 6.6GB is marked as cleanable. 1.9GB of that is classed as "Apps not used recently".
I very strongly suspect that few - if any - people will see any tangible benefits from having 12GB of ram.
> It smacks a little of cost-cutting to us, which is a shame in such a premium device.
Probably. Though with the supply chain woes everyone's having, it may simply be that there's not enough chips to go around, and as per above, few if any people will actually notice the difference. If anything, it's kinda nice seeing a company backing off the need to keep upping things simply to make the tickybox list of features look better than the competition.
> Other than memory and storage, the processor (including a Neural Processing Unit that runs twice as fast the preceding S21) keeps things ticking along at an impressive pace atop Android 12.
What does the NPU actually do in day-to-day processing? AI processing on phones has generally been a gimmick so far
(To be fair, I'm mildly impressed with the features being added to the S21U's camera. E.g. auto-QR code processing, the ability to airbrush out unwanted items in photos, and even to identify "rectangles" which it can then straighten for you. But these have mostly come over from the Pixel as part of Android's standard feature build, so I'm curious as to whether they actually involve any use of said NPU...)
> However, the cameras covering the back corner of the phone are the stars of the show.
> The four snappers are a 12MP ultra-wide, a 108MP wide, a 10MP 3x optical zoom, and a 10x optical zoom camera. Selfie fans also get a 40MP front camera.
... which is exactly the same spec as per the S21U. Which makes me wonder if there's actually been any hardware improvements, or if they're just trying to throw some more software at improving the photo quality. Fire up that NPU!
I've been vaguely debating buying the S22U, since between the pre-order freebies and the trade-in value of my current handset, I can potentially get a brand new phone and a small lump of extra cash, while maintaining the same monthly contract cost.
But so far, I've seen nothing which indicates the S22U is anything other than a cosmetic refresh of the S21U, with some gimmicks and snake-oil thrown atop.
(Yeah, I know it's now got a slot to put an S-pen in. But the S21U already supports the S pen and I never cared/bothered to try and use this, so from my perspective, this new feature is actually a negative point, since it's taking up room which could be used for a larger battery...)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
