Galaxy S22+ Review

Update: Samsung has recently launched its latest flagship Galaxy S23 Series consisting of the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23 Plus and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Buy your S23 phone today!

The Samsung Galaxy S22+ may be the goldilocks phone choice for the vast majority of people: not too big, not too small, quality camera and solid battery life. If you’re looking for a new phone, consider the S22+ - I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how well this slid into my life. 

The Samsung Galaxy S22+(with the S22 and S22 Ultra) went on sale in Australia on 4 Mar 2022. 

• At a Glance
• Specs
• Look and Feel
• Battery and Performance
• Camera
• Responsiveness, Hetz & nitz

This is actually a relatively small phone, which for me is a good thing. I’ve had large phones for a while, and this is one that fits in my pockets quite nicely. The design, as well, is a callback to earlier phone designs, with rounded corners and flat glass. The camera housing and colour choices are a subtle modern twist that reminds you the phone is still a cutting-edge phone. 

This is a phone that could easily fit into my life and like all good technology. It wouldn’t make me bat an eye because it quietly does everything it needs to do for me to live my life without noticing what it’s doing or having to think about whether my phone would be able to do the thing, because of course it would.  

Optus is relying on product information supplied by Samsung in making the representations above.

Is there a headphone jack?

No, there isn’t a headphone jack, wired headphones (sold separately) would need to be USB-C.

Is there expandable memory?

No, the Galaxy S22 Ultra doesn’t have expandable memory capacity, you can get the phone in 128, 256 or 512GB internal memory. 

Coming from a larger everyday phone (S20 Ultra) the Galaxy S22+ has been a breath of fresh air. It reminds me more of my older phones, from a look and feel perspective with a slick housing and a flat screen that’s not a stretch (literally) for me to use one-handed. And then with the colour and the design of the camera housings, a bit of a modern twist. 

The slightly matte and yet still metallic and light-reflecting green is a subtlety luxurious colour that makes me understand why so many phone manufactures are doing a variation of green or metallic in their releases of the last few generations. Without a case the phone wasn’t too slippy, either, which was definitely useful for me as I can be quite a klutz. Plus, as a smaller phone, it fit easily into my back pockets. 

With all my samples, I treat them like I treat any new phone I get – which means turning on data saver and managing battery performance. With the way I use it I’ve had this phone last me close to 2 days, which is a little bit longer than I’m used to and expected. That was definitely a pleasant surprise. 

I think the phone needed a little bit more time to learn my brightness preferences with it’s adaptive settings, as there were moments where it would dim a bit too quickly, or go well too bright for what I needed it for. That’s something easily reminded with time though, so it’s not anything that would keep me from using this phone. 

Camera

The main event for most phones these days – the camera. While the specs aren’t too different between this and my day-to-day phone (S20 Ultra), the crispness and focus I get on the Galaxy S22+ feels like lightyears beyond. The processing power and smarts behind the image processing in the phone software (or hardware) makes a definite difference in how these photos look to the eye. 

The portrait style between this and the S22 Ultra are pretty much the same. Good for faces, sometimes misses fine detail around the face, like hair, specifically in portrait mode or when you put a blur on the background. Generally capture detail and texture quite well. 

and with portrait mode on:

I was able to take some photographs of people using nightography mode and have to say they came out looking quite well-lit and didn’t feel overexposed or oversaturated as sometimes this kind of nighttime editing has historically, and the directional light source is still clear. This is definitely a good mode if you’re looking to get low light photography of people and want it to have a more full-light look and level of detail. 

The level of detail on this phone up to 30x zoom is far enough ahead of my S20 Ultra that I genuinely noticed it as I was taking photographs to test this phone. Of the zooms I tried, there wasn’t much noticeable static in the image until I got to the highest zoom, 30x. This makes sense, because I felt much the same way about the camera and zoom on the S22 Ultra, which uses a similar camera spec.  

One thing you can see is the colour difference between the zoom camera and the other lenses, which does tend to happen with Samsung devices.

0.6x zoom (ultrawide)

30x zoom

Like most other things with this phone, beyond the specs, in my day-to-day use I have yet to encounter any situations where I’ve had to think about what the responsiveness is – there weren’t any moments of jitter or lag, even with high quality video or fast scrolling. 

Throughout this review, I’ve basically said that I could see this Samsung Galaxy S22+ being my new day-to-day phone, and that holds true. Nothing in the time that I’ve been testing it has led me to feel otherwise. 

If you’re looking for a new phone and want to have a camera that’s able to shoot detail well in a lot of different types of light, I’d strongly consider the Galaxy S22+. 

Check out the Galaxy S22+ for yourself, and see if it’s the right fit.