Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is a gorgeous, big-screen device that you might want to hold more carefully
It started when I felt a tiny ridge – an imperfection – on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra’s perfect plane of glistening Gorilla Glass. My finger caught on something I could not see. I absentmindedly ran my finger back and forth over the screen, which was currently displaying my Twitter feed. Did I feel something? Nah…no, wait…there is it. I stopped reading angry Tweets and started examining the screen as my mind flashed back to two days prior. Standing in my kitchen, I fumbled with the 6.8-inch Android 12 smartphone, which I’d been using frequently, especially for its stellar photography chops. It slipped from my grasp and clattered to the tiled floor roughly one meter below. « What was that? Was that your phone? » my wife called from the other room. I quickly snatched the prone device from the floor. It’s nestled in a white-rubber Samsung case, so I wasn’t too worried. I looked it over, noticed no breaks, and yelled back, « Yes. It’s fine. » « Why do only my phones shatter? » asked my wife. First, I don’t drop phones. In nearly 20 years of testing them, I’ve never broken a review unit. I did once drop a 12.9-inch iPad Pro on a glass end table, shattering the screen, but that was an arguably unwieldy tablet. I don’t drop phones…or rather, I didn’t. Now, on the train, running my finger over what I now realized was a crack, I understood what I’d done. The closer I looked, the more I could see that this fine fissure, which starts at the top of the phone just above and to the right of the selfie camera, and snakes like the Amazon nearly two-thirds of the way down the face of the display to the right edge.
