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The Galaxy Note 22 – no wait, the S22 Ultra?! Note the S-Pen oval on the bottom.
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Grab a load of that “P” shaped camera block.
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It’s not clear how a periscope camera would fit into that P-notch at the bottom. Looks like it needs more vertical height, but Samsung makes cameras so you never know.
It’s never too early to talk about new Samsung phones, right? OnLeaks has released a series of renders for the Galaxy S22. These are mostly based on CAD renderings given to housing manufacturers, and while some of the minor details may be wrong, the cutouts, camera block and other key features should be correct.
First up is a Galaxy S22 Ultra render, and here’s a shock: it has an S-Pen! Samsung dropped the Note line this year to focus on foldable phones, but apparently it still can’t let go of the idea of phone handwriting. Samsung supplied pen accessories for the S21 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold 3, but they needed some sort of case for storage. This render shows the S22 Ultra with the telltale oval along the bottom, just like an old Note phone. Push it in and the pen pops out.
The advantage of an integrated S-Pen is that if you want to write by hand on your phone, you always have the pen with you. The downside is that the S22 Ultra battery will be smaller than it could be because a lot of space is taken up by the pen holder. It’s also a huge disappointment for anyone who wants a premium Samsung phone but has no interest in handwriting as they have to put up with the pen eating up battery space. You don’t get a choice.
Designing around the S-Pen holder means that the S22 Ultra generally has a Galaxy Note 20 style design. There’s a flat top and bottom edge, and the high angles make the phone a full rectangle, giving the S-Pen a little more room to store. The front screen is also a full rectangle, with only minimally rounded corners. The phone still has a punch camera, instead of the under-screen selfie cameras that Samsung has packed into the Galaxy Z Fold 3.
The only major departure from the Note 20’s design is the rear camera block, which is now missing a piece in the lower-right corner (so it forms a “P” shape). The missing piece is opposite the periscope camera lens; previously, the Galaxy S21 Ultra needed that space for the periscope camera, which took up a lot of space horizontally. Now it looks like the normal periscope footprint won’t fit.
OnLeaks also has renders of the base model S22 and S22+, which look identical to last year’s models.
The most interesting thing about the S22 phones has to be the SoC. Samsung is going all-in on its own Exynos chips and starting a partnership with AMD, which will provide the GPUs to match ARM-designed CPUs. Samsung and AMD announced this partnership back in 2019, and Samsung’s Exynos division said the fruits of that partnership should be visible in its next flagship product, the Exynos 2200 SoC planned for the S22.
Samsung typically doesn’t ship Exynos chips in many parts of the world, opting to split the lineup with Qualcomm for major markets like the US and China, but it’s hard to imagine the company introducing Radeon + Exynos SoCs. and wouldn’t roll out anywhere. Samsung has previously made a global Exynos launch with the Galaxy S6, and recent work with Google on the Pixel 6 — which will bring an Exynos modem to the US for the first time in years — shows the company is ready to launch. expand into more territories.