Samsung Galaxy S23 & S23+ review: Samsung without the fluff

Flagship goodness, courtesy of Samsung

TLDR: Samsung could do more in between each generation of Galaxy S devices, but the Galaxy S23 and S23+ are great options even in the current smartphone landscape.

In this age when most people are obsessed with getting the biggest and the greatest, some phones will inadvertently fall through the cracks and be overlooked. Some for a good reason, but others, like the Samsung Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S23+, deserve more limelight than they’ve gotten during the Galaxy S23 series launch.

Like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (review here), there aren’t many physical changes to the phone, with most of the upgrades within. 

Both the S23 and S23+ come with 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM. The two models have a 256GB storage option, although only the S23 has a 128GB storage option, and only the S23+ has a 512GB storage option. Other than the UFS 3.1 storage on the 128GB Galaxy S23, the rest carry UFS 4.0.

Additionally, both phones come equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which does mean faster performance, which you’ll see in our benchmarks later. 

While we don’t see new cameras on the rear for both models, the selfie camera has been improved slightly from the old 10MP to a new 12MP version that offers HDR10+ support for selfies. 

Since the launch of the S23 series, Samsung added a new Galaxy Enhance-X app that utilises AI to help edit photos for their blurriness, removes unwanted shadows and more. We’ll explore how this new app works in the imaging performance section of the review. 

Are there any compromises when you’re not getting the flagship model? Are they significant? Let’s take a look. 

A standardised look across the range

The biggest and most noticeable change externally is that there’s no more Contour Cut raised camera housing hugging the lenses. It looks almost identical to the S23 Ultra, with each camera protruding individually from the body. 

Love it or hate it, Samsung has started to ensure that the rear of their phones looks congruent, from the flagship S23 Ultra to the budget Galaxy A series phones. 

Durability was improved slightly, however. While the frame is still made of aluminium, the glass front and back are now using Gorilla Glass Victus 2 instead of Gorilla Glass Victus+, which Corning said can better survive drops onto concrete while still maintaining the same level of scratch resistance as Gorilla Glass Victus. 

The display panel sizes are pretty much the same as before, 6.1-inches for the S23 and 6.6-inches for the S23+. Both models have an FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, supports HDR10+ and can reach a peak brightness of 1,750 nits. Both S23 and S23+ come with flat displays, unlike the S23 Ultra’s curved edges, which can be a crucial differentiator subject to your display appetite.

Viewing content on both phones is an enjoyable experience with their rich and vivid colours. Their 120Hz refresh rates also help with web browsing and gaming, making graphics and scrolling through websites buttery smooth.

In the hand, both 2023 models feel almost identical to last year’s S22 series. There’s still IP68-rated dust and water resistance on both, so there’s absolutely no problem when bringing these phones out and about with you to the beach or pool. 

These phones have a wide variety of colour options and are the same choices across both the S23 and S23+. There’s Lavender (which we have here with the S23) and Cream (which we have on the S23+). There are also Phantom Black, Green, Lime and Graphite colourways. The Lavender and Cream colours are gorgeous, and we reckon the Lime would be just as fun for people who prefer a hue beyond the standard black or grey colours for phones. 

Another big difference between these two models and the S23 Ultra is that there’s no S Pen support. 

The stereo speakers on both models are decent for games and videos, but you’ll want to invest in a pair of earbuds for when you’re in the mood for some music. 

Zoom in and… Enhance

We’ve reviewed most of the new Samsung’s One UI 5.1 software in our Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review, so we won’t repeat them here. 

One cool new app that Samsung released after the phones’ launch window is the Galaxy Enhance X app. Samsung said it’s still in beta (at the time of publishing) and only available for the S23 lineup. However, the company has mentioned it’ll be coming to the S22 series and other A series Samsung phones in the future.

Five main features come with Enhance X: Magic, HDR, Upscale, Moiré and Shadow Removal. 

Magic is your foolproof, all-in-one magic button. It detects noise, blurriness, loss of detail, low-light conditions and more, using AI to try and fix it all. 

HDR, as the name implies, analyses the highlights, shadows and contrast before adjusting each component to create a more vivid photo with a greater dynamic range. 

Upscale is the option for compressed images. The app is supposedly able to upscale the resolution up to 4x for images under 1MP and remove compression noise. 

If you’ve ever taken a photo of your television or computer monitor, you’ll be no stranger to those wavy lines called moiré. The Moiré option here removes those wavy lines from the image.

Lastly, Shadow Removal identifies and removes shadows from photos that might obscure the main subject. 

Let’s get to how it all comes together with the hardware.

Imaging Performance

As mentioned, Samsung kept the 50MP main camera on the rear for the S23 and S23+ instead of bumping it up to the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s 108MP, which is a bit of a shame. Fortunately, increasing the megapixel count may not matter much to most people who use their photos for social media. Digitally, it’s not that big an issue to me.

There’s the same 12MP ultra-wide camera (f/2.2 aperture,1.4µm, 120˚ FOV) and the 10MP telephoto lens (f/2.4 aperture, 1.0µm) and, the phones are still using the Dual Pixel PDAF from before. Both phones can pixel-bin to a 12MP image with their primary camera, resulting in better performance under low-light conditions. 

Main camera standard shots (pixel-binned 12MP)

Taken straight out of the camera and pixel-binned to 12MP, the shots have the hallmarks typical of Samsung, with vibrant colours and decent detail retention. Under low-light conditions, the Nightography mode does a very good job of brightening the image. 

Main camera 50MP shots

You get more pixels and detail retention here, but again, it’s rare to require the full 50MP if you’re just using these photos for social media.

Ultrawide camera

The ultrawide camera is pretty serviceable on both the S23 and S23+ with their 13mm focal length giving you plenty of space to capture subjects, while being light on distortion.

3x optical zoom

The optical zoom caps out at 3x on the S23 and S23+, instead of the 10x that the S23 Ultra has. They are still serviceable and sufficient for tighter shots on a subject.

Nightography (aka Night Mode)

Samsung’s Nightography has certainly improved over the years, and there’s a marked difference in the shadows when Nightography is enabled versus when it’s not. The downside is that the phone needs to be held still for 1 to 3 seconds, depending on how dark the scene is, while multiple exposures are taken and stitched together. So, if there are moving subjects, this won’t be very useful. 

New Enhance X app

Let’s now get into Enhance X. 

First, the Magic function. I purposely took a blurry shot of this bowl of oxtail stew to see how the app would fix it. After enabling the Magic function, it noticeably sharpened up the image while bumping up its saturation and contrast. If you don’t need additional tweaks beyond fixing blur, there’s an alternate Fix Blur option that allows control over the rest of the photo editing process. 

As for HDR, there are five levels you can choose from. The fifth level is too exaggerated for my taste. Levels One and Two offer very decent boosts while not making the image too artificial or overly edited. 

Upscale is a tad bit redundant as most photos nowadays look decent even after compression, but we did try it out by compressing an image that was initially 4,000 x 3,000 resolution and 3MB large into a 1.18MB image, and compressing it further to 640 x 480 before throwing it at the Galaxy Enhance X app. Under the download button on the top left, there’s the option to rescale the resolution by 4x, up to 2,560 x 1,920. 

The upscaler makes some details look slightly sharper and less pixelated, but parts of the photo also looked smudged. After all, you can only do so much when the AI is working with such limited detail. 

Moiré works very, very well and if you need to take photos of screens regularly, this is an excellent tool to make the moiré lines much less noticeable. 

Shadow removal is also decent as it mitigates the darkest parts of the shadow, although it’s still visible. 

Benchmark Performance

Like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the S23 and S23+ both come equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which performed admirably in our earlier review, so we’re expecting similar performance here.

JetStream 2.0

JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system’s and browser’s ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 6

Our Geekbench 5 benchmarking will soon be replaced with Geekbench 6, the updated version that tests single-core and multi-core CPU performance. Geekbench 6 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 2500, which is the score of an Intel Core i7-12700. We’ll continue to populate this new benchmark with more scores from our review units before fully transitioning over.

3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.

In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.

PCMark for Android - Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0

PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device - the higher the score, the better.

Since this is a newly introduced benchmark in our reviews, we’re building up our database of PCMark scores for Android phones.

Benchmark Performance remarks

Again, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is an impressive chip that handles everything we throw at it remarkably well. Both the S23 and S23+’s synthetic benchmarks are very similar to the S23 Ultra.

Our real-world experience showed no lag or problems while scrolling through web pages and playing games. The S23 does heat up under more intense use with the temperature hitting 42°C while benchmarking and playing games, although it typically hovered around 32°C during everyday use, which can be attributed to its smaller chassis. The S23+ capped out at 41°C during benchmarking with average temperatures of 30°C during typical use.

Battery Life

Our new battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more. 

To enhance consistency in battery results, we start the test at: 

• 100% of the phone’s battery capacity until 20% left
• A fixed display brightness is calibrated at 200cd/m2 (200-lux) with the help of a luminance meter 
• Max resolution
• Refresh rates unlocked
• 0% audio, or completely silenced where possible
• Full bars of Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth, and notifications enabled
• Only one other battery recording app opened in the background
• Scored in uptime minutes; the higher, the better

In real-world use, the Samsung Galaxy S23’s 3,900mAh battery was just about enough for almost a full day of moderate usage texting, gaming and watching videos with ~10% left at the end of the day. The phone drained roughly 10% in an hour of taking photos and videos, and used up around 15% for an hour of 60-120Hz gaming. 

Wired charging is decently fast at 25W. It took us 28 minutes for the phone to charge from 0% to 50%, and a total of 1 hour 18 minutes from nothing to 100% using a third-party 65W wall charger. Samsung does have a first-party charger sold separately, but it’s not included with our review set. We used the included cable. 

The Samsung Galaxy S23+’s 4,700mAh battery is closer to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 5,000mAh, and it performed surprisingly well in our battery life tests. When it came to real-world usage, though, it’s more on par with the S23, albeit longer-lasting. 

At the end of the day, it had 25% battery life left with the S23+ using the same 10% in an hour while taking photos and 15% for an hour of gaming. The S23+ supports up to 45W wired charging, with the phone taking 27 minutes to charge up to 50% and a total of 1 hour 14 minutes to charge from 0% to 100%. Both phones also support 15W wireless charging, consistent with the S23 Ultra. 

The new benchmark will succeed our outgoing Battery Life benchmarking, which has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email

Conclusion

Nowadays, phones have come to a point where multiple options in the flagship series mean you get a plethora of very similar choices in terms of specs and performance at various price points. We have to give Samsung props for keeping all three models of the S23 series relatively similar in terms of aesthetics and performance. There’s very little FOMO (fear of missing out) even if you pick the base S23 over the S23+ or S23 Ultra. 

A fair comparison might be to the Xiaomi 13, which uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and comes with features like LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage while maintaining a similar price point. However, Samsung's advantage is its robust ecosystem and the promise of five years of security updates, versus Xiaomi’s promise of four years of security patches. All things considered, the S23 and S23+ have to be one of the better choices in the affordable flagship category. 

If we wished for one thing, it’d be fantastic to see the excellent camera system and new 200MP sensor in the S23 Ultra brought to the future S24 and S24+ models, although it’s more likely we’ll see a move to the old 108MP sensor for a few years before that. 

Faster wired and wireless charging speeds would also be excellent, with 67W and 120W wired charging speeds now quite commonplace among Chinese-made Android flagship handsets. 

Both S23 and S23+ suit users who don’t require the S Pen that the S23 Ultra comes with. They also offer an excellent value proposition without compromising on the really important aspects of the phone like the feel in hand, the performance with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, the compatibility with other devices in the Samsung ecosystem and more. 

As such, the Galaxy S23 and S23+ are ideal choices for people who want a true flagship experience, both in terms of hardware and software, without having to fork out the same premium price that the premium tier (like the S23 Ultra) commands. There are a few compromises here and there, but they are minor and hardly affect real-world use. For users who want the latest and greatest minus the bells and whistles, while expecting a reliable, high-performing smartphone, the S23 and S23+ are excellent. 

	Design	Features	User-friendliness	Performance	Value	Overall
Samsung Galaxy S23	8.0	8.0	8.0	8.5	8.0
Samsung Galaxy S23+	8.0	8.0	8.0	8.5	8.0

The Samsung Galaxy S23 and S23+ retail in the following configurations at these official prices: 

• Samsung Galaxy S23 (8GB RAM +128GB storage): S$1,038 
• Samsung Galaxy S23 (8GB RAM + 256GB storage): S$1,148
• Samsung Galaxy S23+ (8GB RAM + 256GB storage): S$1,328
• Samsung Galaxy S23+ (8GB RAM + 512GB storage): S$1,418 

You can find the Samsung Galaxy S23 and S23+ at the Samsung Official Store, Amazon and Shopee. The phones are also available at our consumer electronics retailers (Best Denki, Challenger, Courts, Gain City, Harvey Norman) and local telcos (M1, Singtel, StarHub).