Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus
A full review of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus is coming very soon - we just need to test out a final few pieces of it, but you can expect our full report very soon.
This is the middle child of its generation, sitting between the similarly-specced Galaxy S22 and super-powerful Galaxy S22 Ultra, and those flanking siblings might steal your attention from this one a little bit.
Each of the new Android phones has its highlights (especially the Ultra’s 10X optical zoom and fully-integrated S-Pen) but none of them represents a radical departure from the path Samsung laid out last year with the S21 series. Why muck around with a good thing?
TechRadar got an early look at the entire Galaxy S22 line (including the genre-breaking Ultra). It wasn’t enough time to dig into the details and the fun, hidden features, but it was more than enough for a rich preview. We’ll return with a full review soon.
For the purposes of this early hands-on, we’ll focus on the S22 Plus. However, aside from the dimensions and a small set of under-the-hood specs, what applies to the S22 Plus also goes for the smaller Galaxy S22.
- Read our hands on Samsung Galaxy S22 review
- Read our Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review
- Read our hands on Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 and S8 Plus review
- Read our hands on Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra review
Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus price and release date
Starting at $999.99 / £949 / AU$1,549, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus ships with 128GB of storage and 8GB of memory. Color options include Phantom Black, Phantom White, Pink Gold, and, our personal favorite, Green.
There's also a version with 256GB memory that costs $1,049 / £999 / AU$1,649.
Preorders kicked off on February 9 and the devices started shipping on February 25 in the US, though that date is later at March 3 in Australia and March 11 in the UK.
Design
The curves on the back of the glass-and-aluminum chassis that were still there, but only subtly so, on the S21 are now gone. The front and back of the Galaxy S22 Plus (and S22) – made from Gorilla Glass Victus Plus – are essentially flat, and the raised contour that houses the phone's three cameras is virtually unchanged from last year. We’ll admit that it’s growing on us.
Sandwiched in between the front and back is an "Armour aluminum" frame. The shiny metal band wrapping around the body feels almost like a throwback to some of the earliest Galaxy S-series phones, but only in the best way.
The device feels solid in the hand, rigid but not unforgiving, and comfortable to hold. That last bit might be because Samsung shrunk the phone just a bit. While the Galaxy S21 Plus was 161.5 x 75.6 x 7.8mm, the Galaxy S22 Plus is 157.4 x 75.8 x 7.8mm. Yes, that makes the phone thinner, shorter, and just a little wider – and at 196 grams, the phone’s lost six grams, as well.
Nothing else about the design and build jumps out at you. The volume and power buttons are in essentially the same spots as before. There’s a noticeable cutout along one edge in the metal frame for the antenna, and the bottom edge features a speaker grille (it has stereo speakers), the USB-C charging port, and the SIM slot.
Overall, the Galaxy S22 Plus is IP68 rated, which means it can handle an extended stay in a few feet of water and whatever dust you want to throw on it.
Display
At 2340 x 1080, the AMOLED display has slightly fewer pixels than the S21 Plus, but the pixel density isn’t going to be much different.
The Galaxy S22 Plus supports a variable refresh rate from 10Hz to 120Hz. This means the screen will refresh at a higher rate only when necessary (for games, videos, fast scrolling through websites) and can damp it way down when, say, you’re just reading text on a static screen. The obvious benefit here is better battery life.
We didn’t get enough time to fully test what the variable rate means for your daily use experience, but we can report that the screen is bright, colorful and sharp, and smooth as butter when you flip through various Samsung OneUI 4.1 screens.
Under the display is an able fingerprint reader that we took for a quick test drive. The reader is larger here than it was on previous Galaxy phones, which makes the initial fingerprint registration and subsequent reading easier than ever. We registered one thumb in under 30 seconds, and used it to unlock the phone instantly and repeatedly. We could’ve registered more digits if we wanted to.
Cameras
That edge-to edge display has one small drill-through hole for the 10MP front-facing camera. Both offer the same 80-degree field of view and f/2.2 aperture. The camera does not include any form of binning to combine those pixels for a potentially higher-quality image. We took a few selfies with it, including using the upgraded Portrait mode, and the results were impressive (it managed to separate the tiny hairs on my ear from the bokeh background).
On the back of the S22 Plus are three cameras: a 12MP ultrawide with 120-degree field of view and f/2.2 aperture, an f/1.8, 50MP wide-angle (85-degree), and an f/2.4, 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom.
The telephoto’s 3x optical zoom is as effective as it was on the S21 Plus. It still has the same 30X space zoom, which uses a combination of digital zoom and image processing to get you much, much closer to your subject. Of course, these specs pale in comparison to the new Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra’s 10x optical zoom and 100X space zoom, which really blew our minds.
All told, the camera array is an upgrade over the Galaxy S21 Plus, which has 12MP wide and ultra-wide lenses and a 64MP, 3x optical telephoto. We’ll have to wait for our full tests to see just how well the S22 Plus cameras perform compared to their predecessors.
The 50MP camera uses Samsung’s new tetra-binning technology to not only combine the information of four pixels at a time into a better whole, but it also combines that image information with the original high-resolution image for even better visual results.
Our brief hands-on time didn’t afford us enough time to take a wide variety of shots, but the handful we did take looked decent.
Samsung’s new imaging technology also promises something it calls ‘Nightography.’ Yes, it’s a totally made-up word, but in practice, the tech could be transformative for low-light, nighttime, and astrophotography, with Samsung promising you won’t need a tripod for your shots. We couldn’t try this out during our hands-on test, but we look forward to taking our review unit up into the high, dark hills.
On the video side, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus is ready to shoot up to 8K video at 24fps with the rear cameras, and 4K, 60fps video with the front-facing camera. The cameras also support portrait mode for video. We look forward to comparing it with Apple’s impressive new iPhone 13 Cinematic mode video.
Performance and battery life
In the US, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 4nm Octa Core processor as the rest of the S22 Plus line, which Samsung claims will deliver a noticeable performance and graphics boost over the S21 line’s CPUs. We couldn’t install any benchmarking software and therefore couldn’t test those claims.
Outside the US, Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus customers will get the company’s own Exynos CPU, which offers, the company promises, the same 4nm performance. Both chips are paired with 8GB of RAM, and 128 or 256GB of storage. These specs are unchanged from the S21 Plus, and we’re left wondering why we still can’t have either an upgradeable microSD card slot or the option of buying at least a 512GB model.
If you’re wondering why you might want to buy the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus over the S22, it comes down to a few key specs. Screen size is one, but the others are access to faster networks, such as WiFi 6E and the hot new 5G Ultra-Wideband (UWB) networks Verizon and AT&T recently rolled out in the US. The S22 has WiFi 6 and no UWB.
There’s also the battery. At 4,500mAh, the S22 Plus has a slightly smaller battery than the S21 Plus (4,800mAh), but it’s larger than the S22’s 3,700mAh cell.
Early verdict
It’s early days for the S22 line, but we like what we see in the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus. The design looks great and feels good in the hand, the screen is expansive, colorful, and responsive, and, front and back, the mix of cameras and capabilities seems right. This is a phone that isn’t skimping, but also one that’s not necessarily pushing any barriers – for that, look to the S22 Ultra. Check back soon for TechRadar’s full review and final verdict.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said the front-facing camera was 40MP. This was based on information provided to TechRadar by Samsung. We later confirmed that the front-facing camera is 10MP.
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