When it comes to smartphones, "power" is hard to define. Is it pure computational ability? One may say so, but a smartphone with the best raw computational power but a borderline unusable user experience wouldn't be considered powerful. Is it the capabilities? Maybe, but there are mid-range Samsung phones that support DeX alongside all the other use cases of a normal smartphone. As a result, "power" is likely defined as a mix of the two, and that's why the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is, to me, the most powerful Android phone on the market.

For context, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in Europe was a complete mess thanks to its Exynos chipset, and it was a device that I referred to as "borderline unusable." The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra was good, but nothing really wowed me about it. I even used the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and found the experience subpar at best, though my judgment is admittedly clouded since I needed to send it back due to hardware problems.

All of this is to say that I am far from a fan of Samsung. However, this is the first time I've used a Samsung Galaxy smartphone and have been happy with both its performance and capabilities. It's an incredible smartphone that offers so much in one package that, overall, I feel it may be the perfect balance of power and capability in a smartphone on the market right now. However, if you're a mobile gamer, despite the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy marketing, maybe think twice.

About this review: XDA Developers purchased this Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra unit. The company had no input into the contents of this review.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra in green with transparent background showing front and back of the phone with S Pen stylus
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is one of the best phones on the market, packing an all-new 200MP sensor, a refined design, a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset, and One UI 5.1.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: The perfect balance

watermarked-s23-ultra-xda-batch-samsung-cameras00063

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra packs some of the best hardware possible in one package. It has one of the best displays on the market, UFS 4.0 storage, and a special Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy SoC.

However, raw specifications are only one part of the equation. Software plays a part too, and that's where Samsung really manages to solidify its position as one of the best. Not only does it have one of the most versatile camera systems on the market, but Samsung DeX has become so advanced that it can power portable computers inside cars.

As a result, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is, in my eyes, the perfect balance between hardware and software in any smartphone currently available today. It's super fast, very capable, and one of the best-performing devices I've ever used. It may not be the best-performing overall (that title probably goes to the RedMagic 8 Pro), but it's certainly up there as one of the best out there.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: Light vs Standard mode performance

Samsung has an interesting mode for performance in settings dubbed "Light" mode. It's not quite a power saver mode, but it's brilliant. Rather than cutting down the clock speed on your chipset completely so you'll feel a drop in performance but get back battery life instead, Light mode is kind of halfway there. It decreases the maximum clock speed of the chipset as the last few frequency jumps consume the most power, and as a result, you save battery life. It seems to drop the Cortex-X3 core from 3.36GHz to 2.84GHz, the performance cores from 2.8GHz to 2.59GHz, and the efficiency cores from 2GHz to 1.9GHz.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Standard mode

Light mode enabled

Efficiency cluster

2GHz

1.9GHz

Performance cluster

2.8GHz

2.59GHz

Prime core

3.36GHz

2.84GHz

We conducted all of these tests in normal mode, but I've been using Light mode for my normal smartphone usage. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary, and if Light mode had been switched on for me without my knowledge, I wouldn't have noticed it either. It's an impressive feature that I recommend you turn on if you pick up one of these devices. It'll save you battery life, and you probably won't even notice.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: Geekbench

Geekbench is a CPU-centric test that uses several computational workloads, including encryption, compression (text and images), rendering, physics simulations, computer vision, ray tracing, speech recognition, and convolutional neural network inference on images. The score breakdown gives specific metrics.

In Geekbench 5, the final score is weighted according to the designer’s considerations, placing a large emphasis on integer performance (65%), then float performance (30%), and finally, cryptography (5%). In Geekbench 6, integer performance is weighted at 35% and float performance is weighted at 35%. We ran this test with both standard mode and light mode in both Geekbench 5 and Geekbench 6.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Geekbench 5

Geekbench 6

Single core (light mode)

1,368

1,761

Multi core (light mode)

4,606

4,512

Single core (standard)

1,410

1,907

Multi core (standard)

4,205

4,789

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra performance: App launching

We created an in-house app launch speed test script using Android’s ActivityManager shell interface to measure how long it takes for the main Activity of nine applications — Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Messages, Google Photos, Google Play Store, Slack, Twitter, and YouTube — to launch from a cold start (when not in memory). I modified this test for the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. We launched these nine activities for ten iterations (and killed each app between launches) to reduce the variance.

All apps launch very quickly, and the phone is a joy to use. I had no issues flicking between apps and didn't notice stuttering or other problems.

SamsungGalaxyS23Ultra_app speed

In contrast to the OnePlus 11, it shows how good these results are. This phone manages to keep up with a device from a company that prides itself in its speed and actually beats it in the case of some apps. That's incredibly impressive.

OnePlus-11-App-Launch-Time

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: Sustained and peak performance

Burnout Benchmark allows us to easily measure the power consumed by a chipset in a smartphone. The following tests are run on different components of the SoC as part of Burnout Benchmark:

  • GPU: Parallel vision-based computations using OpenCL
  • CPU: Multi-threaded computations largely involving Arm Neon instructions
  • NPU: AI models with typical machine learning ops

Burnout Benchmark uses Android's BatteryManager API to calculate the watts used during testing, which can be used to understand the battery drain on a smartphone.

The results above are fairly standard for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, though interestingly, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra seems to do a little bit worse than the OnePlus 11 in the same tests regarding sustained performance. With OnePlus' own focus on speed and performance, that's not too much of a surprise, though Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy is supposed to be more powerful than a regular 8 Gen 2.

None of it really matters, though. The performance is close enough to OnePlus 11 that getting one less frame per second in some arbitrary test isn't totally representative of performance. Samsung hasn't typically extracted all the power from a chipset that it can at times, with the S22 Ultra performing a little bit worse than some other 8 Gen 1 devices. That isn't the case here.

In terms of overall efficiency, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra's battery life has been phenomenal. I'm frequently making it to the end of the day with 4 hours of on-screen time and above 40% of my battery life left. It's shockingly good, and both Samsung and Qualcomm have concocted a winner here.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: Gaming and graphics

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has Qualcomm's Adreno 740 GPU, though marketing materials simply refer to it as a "new" Adreno. It has a slightly boosted clock speed over the regular Adreno 740 found in normal Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipsets, which, in theory, should result in better performance. It does a little bit, at least compared to the OnePlus 11.

Given that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 already surpasses the iPhone 14 Pro's GPU with its A16 Bionic, this only serves to further widen the lead that Qualcomm has found itself in. Anecdotally too, gaming has been a pleasure, and I've been playing games like Ratchet & Clank through AetherSX2 without any problems. There are mixed reports that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra seems to struggle with the likes of Genshin Impact thanks to poorer sustained performance, but I haven't run into many problems myself.

As you can see from my above scores, this device seems to fare overall pretty well with gaming, boasting 72% stability over 20 loops of the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test. It may well be the case that because I live in a cooler climate that it was able to handle the heat better and thus didn't throttle as much as some other people may be facing, but it's still worth keeping an eye on it. You'll definitely notice a reduced performance after 20 minutes of playing, and I wouldn't say that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the best gaming experience on a smartphone or even the best long-term performance.

Speed-wise, UFS 4.0 is the fastest storage that you're going to get, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra packs it. It's perfect for gaming, app launching, and anything else that could be bottlenecked by slower storage speed. Fast storage is important, and you've got some of the fastest on the market here.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the best balance of performance and usability in a smartphone

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is genuinely one of the best smartphones released, and not just because of its power. I may not use features like DeX, but plenty of people do, and the phone has the battery life to back up that kind of usage. Not to mention the incredibly versatile camera array, the amazing screen, and the impressive speakers.

If we were talking about raw computation, then the A16 Bionic still beats the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy. But we aren't just talking about the chipset; we're talking about the overall device, and that's where the Galaxy S23 Ultra beats the iPhone. Samsung went from a borderline unusable smartphone in Europe with the Galaxy S22 to the best phone I've ever used with the Galaxy S23 Ultra. If you're a gamer then it's a bit of a different story thanks to that sustained performance drop-off, but none of those problems affected me in normal usage.

The biggest downfall of this particular smartphone is its sustained performance, and the problem is that gaming on your smartphone will always expose those biggest issues. Phones nowadays are capable of so much, and even mid-range phones in basic tasks can be indistinguishable (in terms of speed) from smartphones twice their price. It's gaming and other super-intensive tasks that really highlight these differences, and that's where the Galaxy S23 Ultra falls. If you don't hugely care about mobile gaming (I don't), then this won't be an issue for you.

As I mentioned previously, I've never fancied myself a Samsung fan. I've always loved the likes of OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Oppo for pushing boundaries more than I felt Samsung ever was. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the perfect smartphone, though, and if you need to buy a phone right now and cost is no object, then this phone is hands-down the only one you should even be thinking of.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra in green with transparent background showing front and back of the phone with S Pen stylus
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is one of the best phones on the market, packing an all-new 200MP sensor, a refined design, a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset, and One UI 5.1.