Samsung Galaxy S23 specs leak for all three models before Unpacked — here's what you get

With just days before the Samsung Galaxy S23 becomes an official product, we’re not expecting any huge surprises. As is par for the course with a high-profile smartphone in the social media age, almost every detail of the upcoming trio has been shared in one form or another over the last few weeks.

But some leakers are more reliable than others, and WinFuture’s Roland Quandt is up there with the best of them. He’s now shared what appears to be the official specs comparison sheet for the handsets, giving an early look at the differences between all three members of the Samsung Galaxy S23 family.

As we’ve come to expect in recent years, Samsung essentially has two tiers of its flagship Galaxy S phones. The S23 and S23 Plus pack near-identical specs, with just screen size, battery capacity and storage options separating them, while the Galaxy S23 Ultra offers a substantial upgrade on both.

Not only does it pack a higher resolution screen (Quandt says elsewhere that it’ll be 3,088 x 1,440 vs 2,340 x 1,080 on the S23 Plus) and a built-in S-Pen, but the improvements on the camera are substantial. As long predicted, Samsung will be debuting its 200MP camera here — something the leaker Ice Universe described as “stronger than all the 200MP I have seen before”. 

But that camera upgrade masks one interesting downgrade — at least on paper. While the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra had a 40MP front-facing selfie camera, here it’s listed with a significant drop down to 12MP — the same as the other models in the range. We would be dubious, only, again, it’s something we’ve heard as possible before.

There’s more to a camera’s performance than just megapixels, of course, and its seeming parity with the cheaper S23 handsets could well be an oversimplification. We’ll have to see for ourselves when we get our review samples in for testing.

Looking at the specifications as a whole, there’s seemingly not a great deal of difference between generations, barring a modest but welcome 200mAh battery capacity bump on the two regular models. But the one thing that isn’t listed here is the processor, which could well be the S23’s trump card.

While it’ll come as no surprise to those who follow smartphones that it’s set to pack the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, we’d previously heard rumors of a souped-up Samsung exclusive model with a bit more power. And Quandt seems to confirm it with this interesting slide:

Given that the regular version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 already offers iPhone 14 Pro-equalling multi-core performance, it’s exciting to speculate how the “For Galaxy” edition might improve things further. 

We don’t have long to find out. Galaxy Unpacked, where all the Galaxy S23 handsets are set to be officially unveiled, is scheduled for Wednesday 1 February. Here’s everything we’re expecting from the event, but for full confirmation, be sure to check in on Tom’s Guide on the day itself, when we’ll have all the details and analysis you could wish for.