The Galaxy S23 Ultra should not be released for a long month, but that does not prevent rumors from circulating. Samsung’s ultra-high-end mobile should, among other things, feature a brand new photo sensor made in Samsung.
Samsung wants to hit hard to compete with Apple. While the iPhone 14s have not even been officially released yet – despite an avalanche of rumors – the Korean manufacturer is already sharpening its weapons to compete with Apple smartphones. In its arsenal, we obviously find the future Galaxy S23 Ultra, the ultra high-end version of its family of star smartphones. While the mobile should not be released before the beginning of next year, technical information is already beginning to circulate.
200 Mpx for what?
The first comes to us from the famous, and always well-informed, Ice Universe Twitter account. According to these early rumors, the Galaxy S23 Ultra should use “almost certain” an unprecedented 200 Mpx photo sensor for its main module. No question of using the Isocell HP1 or the Isocell HP3 that the firm unveiled earlier this year. The S23 Ultra will undoubtedly be equipped with an Isocell HP2 on which Samsung would still be working on, a new sensor that would be better than the two previously mentioned models according to Ice Universe.
With such a density of pixels, the size of the photosites should not exceed 0.6 μm according to Ice Universe. The HP2 should therefore find a happy medium between the HP1 and its photosites of 0.64 μm and the HP3 at 0.54 μm. The difference on paper is not huge, but we will have to see what Samsung manages to do with a component like this. Stacking the pixels certainly allows to have more details on a photo, but also decreases the sensitivity to light of each photosite. Probably Samsung will call on the pixel binding (technique that merges photosites) to improve photo performance in low light. The photo sensor is not everything and we will have to see if Samsung manages to come up with a processing algorithm worthy of the name to accompany this new sensor, to compete with the iPhone 14 of course, but also other mobiles like the Pixel. 6 from Google.
A Snapdragon chip that becomes clearer
But the S23 Ultra will not only innovate on the photo side, it would seem. As some rumors already indicated, the S23 Ultra (and the entire S23 family) would abandon Exynos processors in favor of Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm. And not just any chip of course, the mobile should use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, a revised and corrected version of the current Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This processor, which Qualcomm should announce later this year, would ship one Cortex-X3 core, two Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A710 and three Cortex-A510 for a total of 8 cores. This should allow him to juggle all types of tasks without problems. Everything should be engraved in 4 nm by TSMC.
All these beautiful people would be accompanied by a 5000 mAh battery; no change here compared to the previous generation. The Galaxy S23 Ultra may not be released before early 2023, but its technical sheet should already appeal to the most power-hungry users.