The first purported “real world” images of one of Samsung’s next flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S22 Ultra, have been published. They come by way of the sometimes-reliable tipster Jon Prosser of Front Page Tech. While the photos look like they were snapped when someone was running out the door, the camera array on the back looks worse than when it was teased in renders a while back.
From the blurry photos, the Galaxy S22 Ultra looks like a phablet-sized smartphone. One of the images even shows an S Pen sliding out, which means the renders that Onleaks posted were somewhat on the mark: this is the return of Samsung’s Galaxy Note though without the separate branding. The Galaxy S22 Ultra looks angular around the edges, too, which feels like a pure callback for those Note lovers feeling left in the dust.
But that rear camera design is something else. With its four lenses and one sensor clustered together, the camera array looks pasted together. This is to say, it doesn’t exactly exude the sleekness of Samsung’s past flagship launches. It doesn’t appear flush like the way Samsung finished the camera setup on the S21 Ultra, or in its own refined housing as in those previous renders. Even Google figured out a way to bundle the three cameras on the back of the Pixel 6 in a way that doesn’t look like it just... dropped in a bunch of camera hardware.
Prosser says the Galaxy S22 Ultra will have a 108MP wide-angle primary camera, a 12MP ultra-wide lens, a 10MP telephoto lens with 10x zoom, and a second 10MP telephoto lens with 3X zoom. There’s no immediate word of which of those cameras will have optical versus digital zoom. That fifth circle on the back of the Galaxy S22 Ultra is apparently a laser-autofocus sensor.
Other supposed and unconfirmed specifications of the Galaxy S22 Ultra include a 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s also likely to be paired with up to 16GB of RAM and at least 512GB of storage.
We’re only a few months away from Samsung unveiling its next batch of slabby, not-folding smartphones. The rumor mill pegs the Galaxy S22 for an eventual February release, which aligns with Samsung’s previous launch timelines.