The most basic Galaxy S23 phone remains a fine choice, but it’s expensive when compared to rivals
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PRICE 128GB/8GB, £708 (£849 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk
The S23 is the cheapest of the three phones in the series, with Samsung charging £849 for the 8GB version – but that only includes a 128GB SSD, so most people will be better served by the £899 option with 256GB of storage. If you want 512GB, you’ll need the S23+ (see opposite).
This buys you a larger screen and battery, but otherwise the phones are essentially the same. That includes the overclocked version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, and even with 8GB of RAM it massacres Gen 1 chips. It returned 1,522 and 4,876 in Geekbench 5’s single-core and multicore test, which is about 40% faster than a typical Gen 1 phone.
The Adreno 840 graphics chip will keep any game at 60fps or above, and games that support it should happily run at the screen’s peak refresh rate of 120Hz. The dynamic refresh rate ranges from 48Hz to 120Hz, with the OS clever enough to detect when it needs to boost.
It’s a lovely display, based on Samsung’s AMOLED technology, even if it’s essentially unchanged from the Galaxy S22 (see issue 332, p68). Because it squeezes the same number of pixels into a tighter space, the Galaxy S23 even beat the S23+ on pixels per inch: 425ppi vs 393ppi. Samsung claims it can hit 1,750cd/m2, but the 1,002cd/m2 we measured in SDR mode only increased to 1,340cd/m2 with HDR active. But let’s not quibble: this is a gorgeous, vibrant and fiercely bright screen that makes games, photos and videos look amazing.
After a while, I started to prefer the Dark Mode to the default, and that should save battery. Not that this proved a concern during my testing. Samsung squeezes a 3,900mAh unit into the Galaxy S23, a 200mAh increase over the S22, and it easily lasted more than a day; if I didn’t charge overnight, I could get halfway through the following morning. In our lab-based tests, the S23 lasted for 10hrs 27mins in Adaptive refresh rate mode and 11hrs 20mins at 60Hz, but you notice the judder of the latter.
There’s no charger in the box, but if you have a 25W charger to hand then the S23 goes from zero to 55% in 30 minutes. If you want faster 45W charging then you’ll need to buy the S23+ or Ultra, while the OnePlus 11 (see p72) goes all the way up to 100W. But with fast wireless charging and wireless PowerShare, I’m not going to complain. Incidentally, Wireless PowerShare isn’t on by default, but it’s easy to find with a Settings search. I used i
