Return of the Note-tificent
Ok, I'm officially running out of Note puns by now, but I have to say, the launch of the Galaxy s22 Ultra, has been one of the more exciting to come out of Samsung in a while, at least for me.
It's easy to get jaded in an industry that moves as fast as technology where every brand looks to out-spec and out-feature their competitors. Consumers are also becoming increasingly more demanding, and generational improvements are expected to be leaps and bounds ahead of each other. All one needs to do is to glance at a smartphone specification sheet to see number like 100X zooms, 120W fast charging, 108MP camera sensors, 144Hz displays...
And then when you actually get the device, you find that these huge paper numbers do not really translate to the same real-world usage experience. Your high expectations are understandably muted. For sure, these devices are the best the industry has to offer, and those asteonomical specs are technically above board. There are many things to marvel at how far we've come to fit so much power, performance and function into a handheld brick. And yet, I cannot but feel nonchalant about the reporting of numbers.
What gets me going these days are the little things. Features and functions that I actually use on the daily or solves a problem that a brute force approach doesn't help. And we circle back to the S22 Ultra, the true Galaxy Note in all but name. What is in a name anyway? It has all the latest specs everyone expects from a flagship, but benchmarks won't tell you the story of just how useful a built-in stylus slot really is. And that single feature alone makes the S22 Ultra special, more so than the S21 Ultra was last year.
In the same vein, we feature products and technologies in this issue of HWM that aim to provide other forms of value over pure performance, be it the versatility of the Microsoft Surface Pro 8, the practicality of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, or even the creative customisability of the Nanoleaf Lines.
Technology shouldn't just be a specifications race, at least not for us consumers. Get the product with features you need to use, and it's perfectly ok if that product is not the fastest or most outrageous one out there.