Design, build quality, handling

S23 Ultra A phone designed to make a positive impact on the planet. For all the talk about how the Galaxy S23 Ultra isn’t all that different from the outgoing model, it’s in the design that you can, in fact, notice some tangible and visible changes. It’s not a night and day type of differences and you won’t be mistaking the S23 Ultra for any other maker’s product, nor is it a dramatic departure from the whole Note aesthetic, but there are subtle developments here and there. Perhaps the most significant of those is the further flattening of the display. The pioneer in curved panels from before the whole foldable movement, Samsung’s been continually shifting away from the curved edges in the past few years. So much so that in the last two generations, it’s been only the Ultra that had any sort of bend to its screen, and the 2023 model all but does away with it completely.

A similarly painless and trouble-free experience can be reported on the fingerprint reader, which is fast and reliable. Plus, it does its magic without blasting 1000nits of brightness at you in the middle of the night since it’s ultrasonic as opposed to optical. That said, there are users who’ve been reporting less than stellar experience with even the latest Samsung ultrasonic sensor implementations, so maybe there’s a bit of that ‘your mileage may vary’ at play. In our office, fans vastly outnumber naysayers, so let’s go with that. With the straightening of the screen, Samsung has also redesigned the back panel to match the front’s shape, maintaining symmetry. A byproduct of that is the almost flat sides you get this time around – another trend in the recent Galaxy flagship design.