I love the Galaxy S23 Ultra. I even loved the Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S23+ that I reviewed when the new flagships were launched, and what floored me the most about these phones is just how smooth and quick they are. While Samsung's mid-range phones languish in a state of near-perpetual stutter, the company has finally achieved true flagship-grade performance with its latest Galaxy S lineup.
To those who use an older Galaxy flagship and are thinking “what the hell are you on about? My phone also runs perfect!”, I would say you have to use a Galaxy S23 smartphone to find out just how much better it is. I've used every Galaxy S Ultra smartphone (and every Snapdragon-powered Z Fold since the Z Fold 2) in the last three years, and believe me when I say this is the most optimized one yet.
Nearly three months since I started using the Galaxy S23 Ultra, it continues to perform as well as it did on day one. There's no sign of lag or stutter no matter what you do. Well, I see the transition animation when opening a new app skip a frame every now and then, but it's extremely rare. Trying to, let's say, quickly open apps or switch between different apps would sometimes trip up previous Samsung flagships, but that's downright impossible on the Galaxy S23 series phones.
As we've said before, the excellent performance of the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra could become a hurdle for Samsung as it launches new flagships in the future (the company needs to make sure that next Exynos chip is amazing). But for me, the bigger worry has been that the Galaxy S23 series' performance — and the amazing battery life — could get negatively affected by its first big Android and One UI upgrade.
One UI 6.0 needs to be perfect before it comes to the Galaxy S23
And as we get closer to the second half of the year and to Samsung's eventual release of Android 14 and One UI 6.0, each day my Galaxy S23 Ultra continues to maintain its excellent performance and battery life makes me more and more worried that those things could be snatched away in the future as the S23 series gets major OS upgrades.
To be fair, the updates Samsung has released for the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra till now have been pretty stable, and I'm probably worrying for no reason. But there's no denying the fact that big operating system updates can mess things up.
And let's face it, this is the first time Samsung has managed to optimize a flagship phone so well (the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also gets credit for being so good), so the first major Android version bump will be our first clue to whether the Galaxy S23 series will retain its speed, smoothness, and battery life.
For now, all I want to say is that I hope Samsung takes as long as it needs before releasing Android 14 and One UI 6.0 to the public. Yes, I know many of us will become more and more impatient about the big update as the weeks and months go by. But my Galaxy S23 Ultra feels so perfect that I'm ready to wait it out, and perhaps even stay on Android 13 and One UI 5.1 if it means I can continue to get the best possible performance and battery life from the phone.
