Surprisingly, it isn’t more zoom
The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the ne plus ultra of the smartphone world, the best phone overall on our list of best phones, so of course we’re anticipating no other phone like the upcoming Galaxy S24 Ultra, rumored to be launching alongside the Galaxy S24 sometime after the new year. While it’s too late for Samsung to make any big changes to this phone, we can still hope for some realistic improvements and new features that will make today’s best phone even better.1. A big sensor would make zoom photos much better
The Galaxy S23 Ultra has the longest zoom lens of any phone we’ve tried, but zoom doesn’t make it the best camera phone. It’s the versatility of the numerous lenses, plus the great preset modes (that delicious Food mode!). Actually, the ultrazoom photos are … pretty bad. The 10X zoom lens uses the smallest sensor on the phone, and that means the images turn out blurry and pretty worthless.
Recent rumors suggest that the Galaxy S24 Ultra will shrink its zoom lens to only 5X, but that would be fine if the sensor size grew. If the sensor for the telephoto zoom on the Galaxy S24 is three times the size of the current sensor, then cutting the zoom in half would still result in better photos.
Sound impossible? The 200MP sensor on the Galaxy S23 Ultra is 7.5 times larger than the sensor on either of the telephoto lenses. Granted, it packs 200MP instead of only 10MP, but there is room to improve. Make the zoom sensor bigger, please.2. Simpler software, especially Settings, Samsung
Samsung’s One UI is getting out of hand. Don’t make me come over there and straighten things out (again). Yes, the phone has lots of features. Too many features. But I’m not asking Samsung to take away features. I’m asking for some easy decisions on behalf of the users.
Samsung gives us too many options, and many enable features that sensibly should be enabled by default. Like “Intelligent Wi-Fi” mode. Who wants dumb Wi-Fi? This doesn’t need to be a setting. Wi-Fi can just be intelligent, by default.
Now multiply that example by a thousand, because there are, like, a thousand layers of menus and settings on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Nobody is impressed by Settings. The days of rooting Android phones and customizing every nook and pixel have passed.
