Samsung unveils the Galaxy S22: Talking Tech podcast

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Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. We have new smartphones to report about. This time it' Samsung. Samsung, on Wednesday, rolled out its new Galaxy S22 smartphones. They're available for pre-order starting now, and they'll be in stores on February 25th. I wrote about these phones in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com.

There are three versions of the S22. There's a standard model, the S22 Plus, and the S22 Ultra, which I think is the most interesting of the three because if you were a fan of the Galaxy Note, which was they're super big phablet, remember back in the day when phablet was a word, it was a phone, tablet hybrid, that was the Galaxy Note. And the S22 Ultra really kind of feels like a spiritual successor. It feels very similar. If you love the Note, that phone is probably the closest that there is to it now. The S22 will start at 799.99. The 22 Plus is 9.99 99. And then the Ultra starts at around 1200.

The first two phones, the 22 and the 22 Plus will be in four colors. The Ultra same with that, the difference is it'll have a burgundy color as opposed to the pink gold that's available in its other models. The storage varies. You can start at 128 gig. If you pick the Ultra, you can go all the way up to one terabyte, for the other models it only goes up to 256 gigabyte.

I also, along with writing this story kind of about the big feature, I wrote about comparing it to the iPhone 13. We'll get to that in a sec. But real quick, here's a quick rundown of what to expect. The S22 has a 6.1 inch screen, the S22 Plus is 6.6 and then the Ultra is 6.8, so it's interesting when you compare it to the iPhone line. The 13 and the 13 Pro, the real notable difference is the camera. You you get an upgrade in camera. It's much better. You can do a lot of other cool things with it, the macro photography that I think is a really fun feature.

What I find interesting though, with the S22 and the Plus is that they give you the upgraded camera at the entry level, but then they bump up the screen significantly when you go to the Plus. So as opposed to the 13 and the iPhone 13 Pro, where the screens are the same size, and you really don't get a bump screen size until you go up to the Pro Max, Samsung gives you the big screen at the second level, and you get the better camera across the board. So I think that's what's kind of an interesting comparison.

Some of the upgrades that are coming to S22, there is a cool feature called auto framing. And basically what it does is when you capture video, if it sees up to 10 people in the video, it'll be able to automatically just focus on every face so that everyone looks clear. There's not a lot of blurry faces in your video. S22 also boasts all day battery life, according to the company. It's interesting because, with Apple, whenever they introduce a new iPhone, they spell out, this is how many hours of time you can watch video. This is how many hours you can spend listening to music. Samsung doesn't really go into that detail. Again, they only mention that you get all day battery life. So it's not really clear how much better the battery might be compared to Apple, but this is something obviously that you'll see as you spend more time with it, and you can figure out what it does.

And of course, those higher end S22s are going to offer you even more battery life. Samsung says more than a day. So again, not sure what that means. The S22 Ultra though, as I mentioned, feels very much like the Note. It is the bigger touch screen. It also comes with an S Pen, so if you really like that, stylus, it comes with the phone, which is a nice touch. According to Samsung, it has the most powerful camera on any device. It's got four lenses. So if you see the iPhone and the S22, they both have three lenses. There's a wide angle, there's an ultra wide and then there's a telephoto, you get a second telephoto lens on the S22 Ultra, so you get four total. There's also a 40 megapixel front facing camera.

It also has 100X space zoom, which is a super powerful zoom. And obviously it's meant for night sky. If you want to get really close up shots of the moon or something fun like that, it's there. The Ultra has fast charging as well. Samsung says you can charge the phone for 10 minutes and then record up to more than 50 minutes of video, so that's a pretty big deal.

Again, it's hard to compare the two, the S22s and the iPhones, because, obviously they're not in my hands and so I can't say clearly, but just based on the specs and the details they give, there's some interesting things and there's trade offs there. The other thing to note too, is the S22 Ultra is actually more expensive than the iPhone 13 Pro Max. It's by 100 dollars or so. So I think that was another interesting note to that as well.

But really, I think a lot of it's going to come down to user experience, and I also think it comes down to what users want. If you really like that big screen, and you want to spend a little less maybe, you could go with S22. If you're a fan of the cameras that iPhone has and a lot of those features, then maybe iPhones right for you. I think you either way, both these phones are going to offer something really valuable to consumers and some interesting options there.

If you want to read more about the S22 and how it compares to the iPhone 13, you can check out my story on tech.USAtoday.com. Listeners let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, show ideas, any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @BrettMolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.