Samsung Unpacked: everything you need to know

As has been the case for the past three years, the lineup from Samsung SA's first Unpacked event of the year consisted of three devices - the S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra. Positioning them as the “most innovative Galaxy S series yet” is a little misleading as this year’s trio of handsets are more iterative than innovative

The only obvious physical changes are the removal of the “Contour Cut” camera, first introduced with the S21 series, in favour of individual camera lens protrusions.

Other than that, all three handsets look to be near identical clones of their predecessors, with the exception of the flatter sides of the S23 Ultra. While this isn’t a bad thing, it’s hardly what one would call “innovative”.

Unlike previous years where Samsung would spend inordinate amounts of time discussing a specific shade or highlighting certain design elements, this year’s Unpacked was focused on camera performance, sustainability and the Samsung ecosystem.

A focus on camera advancements is nothing new for Samsung, or any other smartphone brand, but this year the brand showcased how the Galaxy S23 Ultra had been used by master filmmaker Ridley Scott as well as emphasising the fact that Unpacked was filmed using the device. While this is not the first time the brand has used its own smartphone to film at least part of the event, this is the first time they’ve been this vocal about their camera capabilities.

Having spent some time with the S23 Ultra, Samsung has every right to be proud of the cameras on their new flagship handsets. While most people will be talking about the 200MP main sensor on the S23 Ultra - which I find to be a nice-to-have but not a necessity - it’s the way they’re smartly utlising the improved light gathering capabilities of the sensor to provide improved night mode shots and more detailed images when taking 12MP pictures.

Another thing that impressed me was the restraint the company shows with its colour reproduction in the images it captures. Long known for over saturated images, Samsung is now producing images that have a more true-to-life colour palette when compared to other devices including the vivo X90 Pro and the iPhone 14 Pro with the Rich Contrast colour profile enabled.

Video stability has also improved and is now capable of rivalling the iPhone, however, handheld nightmode continues to produce images that are shakier than those from the iPhone 14 Pro although this could be a result of the S23 Ultra I have running on pre-release software.

Peeking under the hood, all three S23 devices are powered by a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 “for Galaxy” chipset unlike previous years which saw the brand allocate Snapdragon chipsets to specific regions while the rest of us got Exynos powered devices.

The difference between the standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset versus the “for Galaxy” variant is that the latter has an increased primary clock speed of 3.36GHz and an increased GPU clock speed of 719MHz compared to the 3.2GHz and 680MHz of the standard variant. These incremental changes are what we’d normally see in the plus variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset which normally appears in the second half of the year.

Unlike the S22 Ultra which had subpar battery life, the S23 Ultra appears to have far better optimised performance - likely as a result of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset - and comfortably makes it through the day, or extended bouts of rolling blackouts, without needing to top up before nightfall.

The beloved S-Pen can still be found housed in the bottom left-hand side of the device but unlike previous years, there aren’t any huge jumps in latency reduction or any new tricks for the stylus.

These minor upgrades, which exist across the S23 lineup, might make the flagship trio seem disappointing or boring, but I view it as maturation.

Previous handsets have seen the brand release features marketed as “innovative” and “game changers” but ended up as nothing more than gimmicks. This year Samsung is taking a focused approach and improving on its best areas while delivering a trio of devices that give you the most refined version of what you truly need.

Innovation doesn’t need to be flashy and with the S23 series, it appears that Samsung has finally realised that.