 This is a Samsung Galaxy S22 Note. I mean Ultra, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. But it's also kind of the Galaxy S22 Note. It's big, it's loaded with cameras, and it comes with a stylus built in. Sounds like a Note, right? That's because Samsung has merged the Note and the S series phones, making the S22 Ultra more or less the new Note. That move gives the Ultra a distinct identity in the S22 series, more so than last year's S21 Ultra. This isn't just a big phone with flagship specs, it's a big phone with flagship specs, a stylus built-in, and a handful of other unique features. And they won't appeal to everyone, but they turn the Ultra into something very extra. Do people still say extra? Without even turning the phone on, it's obvious from the design that the S22 Ultra has an identity separate from the S22. It has a boxier shape, which it inherited directly from the Note series, and there's a curved rather than flat display. As for the camera bump, well, there isn't one. The Ultra's rear camera lenses are just there, protruding from the back of the phone. It's a departure from the S22 and S22 Plus design, and once I got used to the idea of a phone with no camera bump, I have to admit I kind of like it. The spaces between lenses tend to trap a little bit of dust and lint, so you might need to get in there occasionally with a cleaning cloth. But who knows, maybe 2022 is the year that we leave the camera bump behind once and for all. Probably not. Of course, the S22 Ultra shares plenty of top-tier specs with its fellow S22 flagships. It has the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, IP68 weatherproofing, and the latest Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on the front and back. It looks and feels every bit the $1,200 flagship that it is. Performance is excellent. Switching between apps is quick, and animations look buttery smooth on that big 6.8 inch 120 Hertz OLED display. What doesn't feel quite flagship-like is the Ultra's battery life. The phone includes a big 5,000 milliamp battery, which it absolutely needs. The downside to using a first-generation chipset and a huge bright display is that it makes the S22 a very power-hungry device. I got through a day of lighter use with plenty of power to spare, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to push the battery below 20% by the end of the day. If you're a power user, you'll need to keep an eye on your battery percentage, and that kind of sucks on a flagship phone. But let's get back to the star of the show, the stylus, or S Pen as Samsung calls it. Just like with the Note series, it pops out of a dedicated silo built into the bottom of the phone. When the phone is unlocked, this brings up a menu of stylus-centric options to do things like start a new Note or take a screen grab and write on the image. Samsung says the S Pen is more responsive this year with 70% lower latency. It's tough to judge the accuracy of that claim. It's measured in milliseconds, but writing with the S Pen feels fluid and natural. One of the Ultra's tricks is identifying handwriting and converting it to text, which is now supported in a dozen more languages, and it's surprisingly good at translating my awful scribbles into human-readable text. Outside of these improvements, there's not much that's new about the S Pen or the stylus features that the Ultra supports. If you're new to the stylus life, it can take a minute to get comfortable with all of its features. You can also dial in settings to your liking, such as how long it waits after you've stopped writing to convert your text. It's a powerful set of features once you get the hang of it, especially if you've been hanging on to an aging Note 9 or 10. But be prepared to spend some time getting a feel for things if you're new to the S Pen. Now let's talk cameras. These aren't exactly the same sensors and lenses as the S21 Ultra, but the differences are minor. Samsung is touting big improvements, mainly when shooting in portrait mode in low-light. The company says that subject detection is now more precise in portrait mode, and that low-light imagery is more detailed thanks to AI improvements. And you know what? It's actually made good on these promises. The differences are subtle, but they're mostly good and occasionally great. Let's look at portrait mode first. Samsung says that its depth mapping can now identify details as small as individual hairs on your subject. Precisely identifying subjects and separating them from the background remains a tricky feat for smartphones, and it's one of the ways you can usually tell a smartphone portrait from one taken with a larger camera. Samsung hasn't perfected this quite yet. If you look close at this one, you can see where it gets tripped up around the subject's beard. But overall, the portraits I've taken with the S22 Ultra are some of the best, most convincing images I've seen from a phone so far. The phone really does handle fine detail like hair better, both on humans and pets, which are now officially supported portrait subjects, by the way. Portrait mode images from the standard wide camera still look artificial. They're just trickier to pull off. But photos from the three times telephoto in good lighting look great. The transition between sharp and blurred parts of the image is smooth, and it isolates individual strands of my hair rather than just smoothing them over and calling it a day. Next up, that 10x optical zoom. It's not new. The S21 Ultra had one too, but it's still much more reach than the typical three times and four times telephoto cameras on other flagships, and something you'll only get on the Ultra model, not on the standard S phones. As far as telephoto lenses on smartphones go, it's not bad. It's stabilized, which is a huge help keeping your shot steady. You can go beyond 10x up to 30x and even 100x digital zoom, but image quality goes downhill real fast the farther you go out. You don't have to look too hard to see where it comes up short versus a traditional camera with the zoom lens, but photos at 10x and even 30x zoom in good light are definitely passable for social media. You won't always have good lighting to work with, so that's where Samsung's night imagery improvements come in. Samsung is trying to call this nightography, but let's just stick with night photography. Now you can capture full 108 megapixel images with night mode. Previously you could either use one or the other, but not both at the same time. The results in extremely low light are impressive. Night mode doesn't make much of a difference in dim lighting, but in near darkness, high-res photos look much less noisy with better color. Overall though, low-light photography is still a little hit or miss in terms of quality, especially if you're photographing a moving subject like an infant. You can take a portrait mode night selfie now in really dark conditions, which seems impressive, but the results are not great. High-res night mode has some interesting applications for landscape photographers, but these aren't features I would use very often, and I suspect most people wouldn't either. Samsung hasn't exactly revolutionized night photography here, just slightly improved it. The Ultra also supports a new camera app called Expert RAW. Now this gets a little complicated. While you can still take a regular single frame RAW image with the native camera app, the Expert RAW app captures data from multiple frames and combines them into one RAW file. The resulting image has less noise than a single frame RAW, and like traditional RAW images, can be manipulated in photo editing software. There is a shortcut to edit directly on your phone with Samsung's Lightroom app, but you can easily export the photos to edit them on the software of your choice. It's not something I'd use all the time, but it is more useful than a traditional single frame RAW file from a smartphone. The S22 Ultra ships with One UI 4.1, which is Samsung's take on Android 12. It introduces new customization options like the ability to change the system-wide color palette to match your wallpaper. You can apply this change to things like control panel buttons and opt to expand it to app icons. I find that kind of jarring, so I stuck with the system controls, and the effect is nice. As intended, it does actually make the phone feel a little more me, so job well done Google and Samsung. The S22 Ultra is a really good phone that lives up to its name by piling on extras like the S Pen, a decent 10x zoom, and some new low-light photography options. These are all decidedly niche features, so if one or more of those really appeal to you, then you'll be very happy with the Ultra, because there's just no other device that does all of those things. But if you're just mildly curious about the zoom lens or the stylus, you'd probably be better off saving a couple hundred bucks and going with the S22+. 2022 may not actually be the year that the camera bump disappears. It's definitely not the year of the night photography revolution, but it is the year that Samsung established the Ultra model of its mainstream S series as something different. It's no longer just the bigger, beefier spec model of a trio of flagship phones. It has a few distinct offerings that add up to a device unlike anything else on the market. Ultra indeed. Hey, thanks for watching. I'm at home recording this on the Ultra's built-in selfie camera and microphone. It's not exactly night photography, but let me know what you think about the image quality in the comments.