Above: MovieTowne. Photos by Taran Rampersad shot with the S22 Ultra.

After using a Huawei P10 Pro for about 4 years and change, so the S22 Ultra was a step up. I loved the camera on the Huawei, but battery life was diminishing and as I used it, I found it slowing down. The antenna seemed like an issue as well, perhaps due to the phone having met the ground just a few too many times.

It was time to upgrade.

I was about to buy a Samsung S21 Ultra when I found out that the S22 Ultra would be in Trinidad and Tobago in less than a month. The upgrade between the two is slight, but when buying a new phone at this level it’s generally better to get the latest. It will last longer, and with 4 years of software support by Samsung, it seemed best to stretch that support as much as possible.

The purchase coincided with the S22 Ultra launch at West Mall, and because of the timing of the purchase, for a bit more I got a Samsung watch as well – something I have yet to fiddle with.

First Impressions

The phone has a nice heft to it and, by pure mistake, I’ve already dropped it about 4 feet onto a tile floor without any damage other than a fleeting chest pain as I watched it happen. Setting it up was simple enough – sticking the sim from my old phone in, then going through Samsung’s setup process which was fairly straightforward once I convinced the phone I wasn’t a native Spanish speaker.

After the setup, the keyboard layout was stuck with a Spanish-American keyboard, but the software design showed through and that got fixed by adjusting the settings for the keyboard, which you have access to whenever you are using it. Good UX.

The stylus is something I’ve missed. The S22 Ultra is a Galaxy Note in disguise in this regard. Over the years, I have fallen in love with using a stylus because I come from the pre-thumb typing of mobile phones, and I like to sketch things out sometimes which I am happy to say the S22 Ultra does well.

I even wrote a note and saved it as a PDF in the Samsung note app, sending it to a friend. Imagine a PDF document needing a signature. This could be very useful.

It does everything much more quickly than my old phone, which is to be expected. The graphics of the screen are stunning. I fiddled with a friend’s iPhone 13 a day or two into it and I don’t see a reason why I would have gone with the iPhone 13, myself. It’s nice, but… I have the stylus, and I have the telephoto lens. Both are big pluses for me.

Overall, I’d say that this was money well spent so far.

The camera is lovely. How does it stack against an Apple iPhone 13? I can’t tell you, but I can tell you that the S22 Ultra’s telephoto is praised for having more detail than the iPhone 13, and since I don’t do selfies and portraits as much as landscapes and distance photography, I believe I got the better deal.

The photo of my coffee cup at 4 a.m. in the foreground (and not in focus, by design) is hard to truly appreciate unless you were looking at the coffee cup at 4 a.m. What was dark in the foreground was discernible. It reminds me of an HDR process I have sometimes used with shots taken with a DSLR camera by merging multiple exposures.

Video? Well, I haven’t had anything of worth to record other than a horrible rendition of an attempt at Mongolian throat singing. You have been spared.

Beyond The Samsung Camera

The editor suggested I try out the Expert RAW app, which I am still playing with. You can find it in the Galaxy Store (not the Google Store). It allows more control of the camera itself, and allows you to edit in Adobe Lightroom, with the understanding that Adobe will pester you for a subscription on much of it’s editing ability. It’s pretty interesting otherwise, allowing you to set up the camera for very specific things should that be your interest.

Is It Worth It?

For what I do, communicating and dealing with documents as well as being on the move, my ‘office’ ability while out and about has already started paying dividends. With dual sim ability, I can link to both Digicel and bMobile with prepay, giving me better mobile data as needed without getting stuck with a service contract for either.

Pictures on the fly with the point and shoot are simple and of high quality, and while there are great filters, I rarely use them.

This is either an expensive toy or a good tool, depending on how you look at it, and if it can fit in your budget, it’s worth looking at.

About the author

Taran Rampersad has over three decades of experience working with technology, the majority of which was as a software engineer.

He is a published author on virtual worlds and was part of the team of writers at WorldChanging.com that won the Utne Award and an outspoken advocate of simplifying processes and bending technology’s use to society’s needs.

His volunteer work related to technology and disasters has been mentioned by the media (BBC), and is one of the plank-owners of combining culture with ICT in the Caribbean (ICT) through CARDICIS and has volunteered time towards those ends.

As an amateur photographer, he has been published in educational books, magazines, websites and NASA’s ‘Sensing The Planet’. These days, he’s focusing more on his writing and technology experiments. Feel free to contact him through Facebook Messenger.