Samsung Galaxy S22 and S22+ review: excellent performance, cameras, build quality, and support policy, but battery life is poor and One UI feels cluttered
Allison Johnson / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Allison Johnson's verdict on the standard Galaxy S22 and S22+ lands a week after The Verge's Galaxy S22 Ultra review, and the pattern across both is consistent: Samsung nailed performance, cameras, and build quality in 2022, but battery life is the weak point of the entire lineup.
The longer arc matters more than any single verdict. Back in 2020, the Galaxy S20 shipped with only two years of software updates; by the time of the Galaxy S23 review a year later, battery life — this review's biggest complaint — had been fixed outright.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing within the 2022 Galaxy S family face the same tradeoff at every price tier: the S22, S22+, and Ultra all pair excellent hardware with lackluster battery, so the decision hinges on whether they need the Ultra's S Pen rather than endurance.
- One UI's cluttered feel gives Samsung's software team a concrete critique to answer, distinct from the hardware praise.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's next-cycle response is already visible in the corpus: the S23 review credits much-improved battery life, suggesting the 2022 criticism directly shaped the following generation's priorities.
- Rival flagships can compete on endurance alone against the S22 line, making battery benchmarks a decisive comparison point for reviewers and shoppers that year.
Third-order effects
- The support-policy trajectory — from the S20's two years of updates to the S26's seven — points to software longevity becoming a standard flagship expectation, shifting competition from annual hardware specs toward multi-year ownership value.
- If each generation fixes the prior one's headline flaw while introducing new compromises (the S23's short telephoto, the S24's occasionally weird AI features), the yearly upgrade case weakens and hold cycles lengthen.
The trend: Samsung's Galaxy S line is converging on a fix-the-last-flaw cadence where battery life and update commitments, not raw specs, decide each year's upgrade pitch.