It’s no secret that Samsung saw tepid sales of the Galaxy S20 series. Thankfully, the company got its groove back with the Samsung Galaxy S21 series, which has been both a critical and commercial hit. With half of 2021 done, it’s time to start looking forward and speculating on what we might see with the Samsung Galaxy S22 series.
Truth be told, if Samsung just upgraded the phones to the newest chipset and left pretty much everything else the same, we’d be happy. The Galaxy S21 series offers something for everyone, whether you’re looking for just the basics or an all-out specs monster. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
Related: Samsung Galaxy S series: A history of the biggest name in Android
Still, there are a few things we’d love to see Samsung change. Below, you’ll find six things we hope to see with the Samsung Galaxy S22 series. These are all realistic wishes, meaning they are not pie-in-the-sky hopes — it would be totally feasible for Samsung to offer all these changes. Let’s get to it.
Faster wired charging
Samsung has been way behind the curve for years now when it comes to wired charging speeds. The phones in the Galaxy S21 series all top out at 25W speeds when using a cable, which is less than half of what the OnePlus 9 series offers. In fact, it’s less than what the OnePlus 8 series offered in 2020 and what the OnePlus 7 series offered in 2019.
With more and more companies offering faster wired charging speeds, Samsung simply can’t ignore the trend any longer. Every phone in the Samsung Galaxy S22 series should offer 45W wired charging. The Galaxy S22 Ultra should offer 65W (or more), but as long as everything hits 45W, that would suffice.
See also: How fast charging really works: Your guide to wireless and wired fast charging
To be clear, we aren’t asking for the 100W+ speeds some companies are going for. Power transfers that fast degrade battery life significantly. We think 45W is a nice middle-ground as it passes the shower test: you should get enough charge to get you through the day while you’re in the shower.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty much guaranteed Samsung won’t offer 45W chargers in the boxes of the Galaxy S22 series. That’s unfortunate, but at least people who care about fast charging will have the option. Either way, 25W just doesn’t cut it anymore.
More perks for the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus
In the past, the differences between the vanilla Galaxy S and its Plus counterpart have been significant. Usually, we see more rear camera lenses, higher resolution displays, more RAM, etc.
That wasn’t the case with the Galaxy S21 series. Aside from a glass back, larger body/display, and slightly bigger battery, the Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S21 Plus are pretty much the same. This isn’t a big problem on its own, but when you factor in that the Galaxy S21 Plus is $200 more expensive, it becomes a real head-scratcher.
Related: Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus review: The typical middle child
We’re going to get more into our hopeful pricing structure for the Samsung Galaxy S22 series in a bit. For now, though, we’ll say that if Samsung continues offering a Plus model, it either needs to add more perks or drop the price. We suggest offering faster wired charging, a higher-resolution display, and a slightly higher-end camera system, along with the glass back and larger battery we saw in the Galaxy S21 Plus.
Otherwise, the price of the Galaxy S22 Plus needs to come down by at least $100. There’s just no reason to spend $200 more to get a slightly bigger phone.
More storage and/or return of microSD slot
The phones in the Galaxy S21 series all support recording 8K video. Recording at that quality requires massive amounts of data, about 10MB per second. Even if you decide that’s overkill and stick to 4K recording, your files will still be huge. Yet, strangely, the Galaxy S21 series starts with 128GB of internal storage with no option to expand it.
See also: The best Android phones with expandable memory
We understand why Samsung removed microSD card support from the Galaxy S21 series. It’s not a popular feature for the average consumer, and it makes phones more expensive and trickier to design. However, the company can’t have its cake and eat it too; it can’t remove support for expandable storage without offering higher levels of internal storage as a baseline.
We’re hoping the company will rectify this mistake with the S22. We’d love to see the return of the microSD card slot — that seems like the perfect compromise. If not, though, we want to see 256GB of internal storage as the minimum for the phones. That would allow you to record at least five hours of 8K footage before you start to run out of space (and need to figure out to which cloud service you’re going to save it).
A wider range of color options
This item on our wishlist is a bit nitpicky. Most Galaxy S fans know that Samsung is offering a whole swath of colorways for the Galaxy S21 series, a few of which you can see in the image above.
While we will agree that Samsung offered many colors, it’s the kind of colors it offers that we hope to see changed with the Samsung Galaxy S22.
See also: Region-exclusive smartphone colors need to stop, please
For example, the vanilla Galaxy S21 comes in four colors: Phantom Gray, Phantom White, Phantom Pink, and Phantom Violet. I don’t know about you, but as a man in his 30s, I don’t really have much interest in the pink or purple ones. So that leaves me with two choices: white or gray. Boring. The Galaxy S21 Ultra is even worse, with your color options being Phantom Black or Phantom Silver (or Navy Blue if you head to Best Buy). Not a whole lot of variety there.
We’d love to see Samsung continue to offer many colors for its phones, but maybe some that run a wider gamut would be cool. I shouldn’t need to choose between boring neutral colors or Easter pastels. There’s plenty of room in there for more options.
Seamless updates
This is one of our biggest complaints with not only the Galaxy S line but all Samsung phones and tablets. When you receive a system update, your Samsung device needs to restart, go through a long series of updates, and then, once it restarts, analyze and optimize all the apps on your phone. The whole process can take anywhere from five to 20 minutes. It’s excessive.
Meanwhile, Pixel phones have seamless updates. This means most of the actual update process happens in the background while the phone is powered on. You can continue to use your phone normally while it’s happening. Once it’s done, a restart that takes the normal length of time finishes it all up. It’s much more user-friendly.
We sincerely hope Samsung ends its ridiculously long update procedure with the Samsung Galaxy S22 series. Not only would it be more convenient, it would help people update more often. How many users out there avoid updating their Samsung phones simply because they know it will take 20 minutes to do it? That’s not good for user security and certainly a bad look for Samsung.
With Google offering all the tools Samsung needs to take advantage of seamless updates, there’s no excuse anymore. It’s time for seamless updates to be the norm.
Samsung Galaxy S22 pricing matches Galaxy S21
Samsung nailed the pricing strategy for the Galaxy S21 series. At $799, the vanilla Samsung Galaxy S21 is a perfectly adequate affordable flagship. Meanwhile, at $1,199, the Galaxy S21 Ultra offers pretty much everything a power user could want at a price that’s significantly lower than 2020’s Galaxy S20 Ultra.
Now, we’ve already touched on how the Galaxy S21 Plus was the odd man out in the pricing scheme, but a $999 phone in the lineup makes sense. We hope Samsung sticks to this pricing strategy with the Galaxy S22 series — or at least emulates it as closely as possible.
See also: How the price of Samsung Galaxy S phones changed over the years
This is what Apple has been doing for years. Ignoring the iPhone 12 Mini, the vanilla iPhone 12 starts at $799. The iPhone 12 Pro starts at $999, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max starts at $1,099. Who would’ve thought that what works well for Apple would also work well for Samsung, eh?
Depending on the upgrades we see in the Samsung Galaxy S22 series, these prices might need to increase. However, we hope Samsung does everything it can to avoid that. 2021’s strategy worked very well, and there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t work well again in 2022.