At Samsung’s first Galaxy Unpacked event for 2022, the company introduced a new lineup of Galaxy S22 phones: the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22 Plus. Samsung also announced the Galaxy S22 Ultra with an included stylus. It is essentially a successor to the once-popular Galaxy Note line.
Samsung claims the S22 Ultra has a faster response time for the S-Pen. The other changes are a bit more minor, including a slight redesign and updated night capabilities in the camera. The Galaxy S22 and the S22 Plus are also a bit iterative, despite being Samsung’s mainline flagships. These phones are very similar to the previous year’s models but are more durable and have better portrait mode capability.
Finally, there’s also a new high-powered Android tablet with the Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S8 — which has a notch. Here’s what Samsung announced.
If last year’s Galaxy S21 Ultra with a 6.8-inch screen looked like it should have had space for a stylus, it’s because Samsung was already thinking about it. This year, the Galaxy S22 Ultra is the new Galaxy Note but with an even better response time at 9 milliseconds for the S-Pen stylus.
The camera hardware is similar to the previous model with a 108-megapixel main shooter, 3x and 10x telephoto cameras, and an ultra-wide, but the low-light quality and portrait mode with depth mapping are improved. RAW shooting is also now available on the device, and the device can fast charge at 45W.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra starts at $1,199 with 128GB. It comes in a variety of colors (some of which are exclusive to Samsung’s own store) in a new design that may be a little polarizing.
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The Galaxy S22 and S22 plus look very similar to the outgoing Galaxy S21 models but have some new matching colors for the camera bump and body instead of contrasting colors.
The real physical improvement comes with the addition of Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on both the front and the back instead of the cheap plasticky glass that the previous base models had. The screens are 6.1 and 6.6 inches, respectively, both with 2340×1080 resolution.
The cameras are improved with better night imagining and a better portrait mode. The Galaxy S22 starts at $799.99, and the Plus version starts at $999.99 — both with 128GB capacity and 8GB of RAM.
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Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has a huge 14.6-inch OLED screen and starts at $1,099.99. The Galaxy Tab S8 12.4-inch (Plus) and 11-inch Galaxy Tab S8 models have 120Hz refresh rate displays, but the bigger one now has an OLED screen.
They run Android 12, including Samsung’s latest attempt to create a better multitasking experience. They can also connect to a Samsung PC as a second screen. The 11-inch Tab S8 starts at $699.99, and the plus model starts at $899.99.
YouTube videos can be watched live with friends using Google Duo
Samsung also continued its trend of partnering with Google to launch features on its phones first. This time, it’s remote watch parties for YouTube inside Google Duo and a YouTube Premium trial.
Lastly, in other ecosystem news, Samsung promised that Google Assistant support would be coming to the Galaxy Watch 4 but only specified that it would be “soon.”
