Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review

I have been using the Galaxy s23 ultra for 2 weeks now. I’m usually not the type to sugarcoat anything, but I really do love this phone. I have very little complaints about it. It’s probably the best Android phone I’ve ever used. There is nothing groundbreaking or mind-blowing about it when it comes to the hardware and software. It is just an iterative update at best, but we are getting to the point where all these little iterative updates start to matter. It’s really a great experience using this phone.

Hardware

I’ll start first with the hardware, the battery life on this phone is great. I can honestly get 8 hours of screen on time with the brightness maxed out, and that’s something I’ve never been able to say about any phone before. And the screen on this is very bright. If you are a low vision user, I know this matters so I wanted to mention it. The screen is not any brighter than last years Galaxy s22 ultra, but the technology that powers it is more efficient. This means you won’t take a hit on your battery life because you want to have your screen at full brightness.

The processor in this year’s phone is also much more efficient when it needs to be, while still giving you a faster processor when required. This is the smoothest, fastest experience I’ve had on a phone.

The speakers and microphones are very good. The speakers can get very loud and they are very clear. And it comes as no surprise that the microphones are great. This has been a staple of Samsung phones for a while now.

The fingerprint sensor is good. I still prefer a fingerprint sensor in the power button, but for an under display sensor, this performs well. It is Miles ahead of what the pixel 6 and pixel 7 series provide. It’s not the best out there, but it’s more than adequate.

This is a large phone. If you are not a fan of large phones, you won’t like this phone. It’s also pretty heavy for its size. I know this is just a preference and some people prefer a heavier well-built phone, but I would have preferred it to be a little lighter.

The hardware features that set this phone apart from the Galaxy s23 and Galaxy s23 Plus are the cameras and the s pen. And to be completely honest with you, I don’t use either of them much at all. So I’m not going to cover this. I think most blind and low vision users won’t mind this exclusion.

Software

This phone runs Samsung’s version of Android 13, OneUI 5.1. I really love the software on this phone and I think Samsung’s version of Android has come along way in recent years. There are so many more features and customizations that you can do with this phone, and all Samsung phones running this software, that you just can’t do on stock Android.

Routines is one great example. I have a routine set to automatically invert colors when I open specific apps that don’t have a dark mode, and can’t be forced to use a dark mode with developer settings. This makes it so that I can have a dark mode in every app even if it means my phone will automatically invert the colors when I open that app and automatically turn color inversion off when I leave the app.

Accessibility and Bixby

A couple of other accessibility tweaks that I really like about Samsung phones are the ability to answer a phone call with just a press of the volume up button and the ability to set an additional accessibility shortcut using the volume up and side key. Not only is this shortcut much faster than having to press and hold both volume keys for 3 seconds, but it’s just nice to have an additional shortcut to assign an accessibility service to. While not technically an accessibility feature, it is nice to be able to customize your lock screen shortcuts to any app you want rather than having them only open phone or camera.

Bixby is something else I enjoy using. If I had to choose between Bixby and Google Assistant, I would choose Google Assistant. But the fact that I don’t have to choose between them is great. I use both on this phone and there are certain things that Bixby is much better at.

Samsung phones running one UI have access to an app called GoodLock. This app and its modules can allow you to further customize your phone in ways that the built-in settings app does not allow. For example, there is an app called sound assistant that lets you choose how sensitive your volume stepper is, it lets you choose to have notification and ringtone sounds only come through your headphones if they are connected, it lets you volume keys to skip tracks while the screen is off, and it allows you to add specific apps to have their own volume channel in addition to the regular media volume channel.

There is another app called home up that lets you customize the home screen and I use this app to modify my recents screen as well. I have my recents app page to show as a text list of apps rather than full size thumbnails and this makes it much easier to switch between and find apps that I have recently opened.

Some other things you can do with GoodLock apps include setting certain fingerprints to perform routines when you unlock your phone with a specific finger, customizing what a long press of the side key does, and changing the order in which the notifications are displayed if you would rather have most recent notifications always at the top.

TalkBack

This section is going to come with a huge caveat, but I couldn’t not talk about talkback. That caveat is the fact that one of the first things I did to this phone was to remove Samsung’s version of TalkBack and install Google’s version of talkback. So all of my comments here will be with my experience using Google’s version of talkback, although a lot of this probably applies to both.

One thing I recommend you do right out of the gate no matter which version you’re using is to go into developer settings under talkback’s advanced settings and turn off the switch for handle gestures and talk back. Gestures in Android 13 are really bad in my opinion. And turning off the switch for handle gestures and TalkBack will give you the old gesture experience before they updated it. A couple of other things I had to do for using Google’s version of TalkBack is to turn off audio ducking, because this kept Bixby from working correctly, and I also went into the battery optimization settings for Android accessibility suite and set it to unrestricted, because TalkBack was hanging from time to time.

After tweaking settings how I needed them, this has been the most fluid TalkBack experience I’ve had. Even in apps that tend to struggle with talkback like Facebook and Amazon shopping, there was pretty much no lag at all. And when comparing it to commentary screen reader, I could no longer till a difference in responsiveness on this phone while using TalkBack and using csr. I’m not sure if the speedy performance has to do with the new processor, or the fact that this has 12 GB of RAM in it, but I tend to lean on the former.

I should also mention that I have exclusively used Samsungs TTS during this 2 weeks, so I can’t really comment on how other TTS engines perform.

Conclusion

I may be a little biased, but I don’t think you can go wrong with this phone. In fact, I would even recommend the s23 or s23 Plus if you want to save a couple hundred dollars and aren’t really too concerned about the cameras and s-pen. So if you are on the fence about whether you want this phone or not, go ahead and jump!