Above: Samsung’s S22 product colour line-up. Photo courtesy Samsung

Originally published in Newsday BusinessDay for March 24, 2022

“The S22 is the most pre-ordered phone in the history of phones,” said Gianmarco Leri, Samsung’s Product Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Samsung’s home country of South Korea, ZDNet reported, pre-orders were estimated to have passed one million units.

In Puerto Rico, pre-orders were double that for the S21, which sold more than 25 million units during its product cycle and in Latin America and the Caribbean, pre-order volumes for the new devices have been twice or triple previous orders.

Pre-sales were sweetened by incentives, including external batteries and Samsung Bluetooth earbuds.

Surprisingly, according to Leri, these massive pre-order numbers have been led by the priciest device in the line, the S22 Ultra, which he described as “groundbreaking.”

That balance has held in sales after the release of the phone. The S22 line was introduced in early February. Trinidad and Tobago was selected as the first country in the Caribbean region to receive S22 devices for sale soon after a launch of the S21 Fan Edition at Gulf City on February 02.

The S22 officially went on sale on March 14.
Samsung has since introduced the A33 and A53 lifestyle smartphones on March 17, which will go on sale globally on April 01.

“Trinidad and Tobago is one of the most important markets for Samsung in terms of market share, that’s why we launched first here in the Caribbean. We have very loyal customers here.”

“The S22 Ultra is the best of two worlds,” Leri explained, “taking everything that was great about the Note and the S series Ultra phones and delivering them in one device.”

“It’s also our most intelligent smart phone, with AI and neural processing.”

The S22 Ultra merges the most compelling feature of the Note series into the S series line by including a stylus built into the device. The other S22 and S22+ can also be used with a stylus, but it’s an additional purchase and there is no slot for it in the camera body.

The emphasis on the new S22 series has been on improving the camera system.

“More than 75 percent of our Galaxy S users are taking photos with their phones and uploading them to social media.”

Samsung has increased the size of the image capture sensors in the new S22 devices by 22 per cent and introduced new hardware stabilisation as well as software based techniques to improve the quality of images in low light and night photography conditions.

Samsung  emphasises lifestyle photography with a subtly improved camera system featuring a 3x, 10MP telephoto lens, 50MP standard wide lens, a 12MP ultra-wide lens and a 10MP front facing camera on the S22 and S22+.

The S22 Ultra upgrades that lens array with a 40MP front facing camera, a 108MP standard wide lens and two 10MP telephoto lenses, one at 3x and the other at 10x.

The new devices are available immediately at local Samsung Experience stores and as part of the company’s new emphasis on reducing e-waste, do not include external chargers or headphones.

There has been after market demand, Leri said, for the company’s 45 watt fast charging wall adapters which can charge these new phones and their two-day battery capacity to 45 per cent in 30 minutes.