Now, for the negatives…
Weight
While the smaller size has been lovely, I simply wasn’t prepared for the bump up in weight. Whereas my S21 feels as light as paper, by contrast my Galaxy S23 is a brick.
That could be due to the S21’s lighter plastic back, compared to the S23’s heavier glass back, but it’s been noticeable.
According to the specs sheets on GSMArena, the S21 should be heavier at 169g, than S23 at 168g – and yet, it actually feels like the opposite is true. The S23 is heavier.
And it’s not by just 1 gram… it feels more like 100 grams of difference?!
That has meant discomfort when using the S23. My arms and wrists had become so accustomed to lighter phones, that I simply wasn’t prepared for using heavier devices like the Galaxy S23, and I was suffering with RSI a lot sooner than I ever have with any other phone I’ve ever used.
Gaming has therefore felt better on my S21 due to its lesser weight – and that’s even when it’s being used with my Turtle Beach Atom controller. It means I haven’t seen much benefit from the better performance of the S23’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, in my first year of ownership. Hopefully that might change into the 2nd year as I become more accustomed to its weight.
Screen burn in, or image retention?
The screen isn’t bad. In fact, even though it’s only a 1080p AMOLED, the quality of media appearing on the screen is remarkable. I’m glad I didn’t waste my money on its bigger and more expensive siblings – the Galaxy S23+ or Galaxy S23 Ultra.
But the quality of the screen was one of my earlier queries with the base S23.
On my S21, in the settings of the Always on Display, I had the white fingerprint placement logo enabled. I had no problems with screen burn-in or image retention. I also never used my phone on full brightness for long amounts of time (just the odd occasion when I was outside, in direct sunlight).
However, within the first 2 weeks of using my S23, I noticed that when I had the screen on and I was using apps, I could see a faint black mark of where the fingerprint logo was on the AOD.
It was weird, and worrying. Just two weeks into ownership, and it was potentially already suffering from screen burn-in. Wow.
At that point, I disabled the AOD fingerprint placement logo, and tried some of the screen burn-in fixer apps on the Play Store, hoping it was a temporary image retention problem.
Fortunately, for my sake, it was temporary. But it was very disconcerting that I hadn’t yet used the phone at full brightness, but already its OLED display was suffering with potential burn-in.
This was also the first time, and the first Samsung phone I’ve owned, that’s had this problem at all, let alone so soon after purchase. That includes my old Galaxy S7, Galaxy S9+ and Galaxy S21 5G.
One UI 6 broke my S23
My Galaxy S23 shipped with Android 13, (One UI 5), and that was great.
The update to Android 14 (One UI 6) was not great. It completely broke the phone.
Not bricked, but broke.
On Android 13, I extensively used the Device Control menu in Quick Settings to control my smart lights. Although the phone works better with Samsung’s own SmartThings app, I’ve personally found Google Home works better with my accessories, so that’s what I used.
(Disclaimer: your experience might be different, so if the reverse is true for you, I can only apologise. This is simply my experience, i.e. what has happened to me!)
Thinking there would be no difference in Android 14/One UI 6, I continued to use Google Home in the Device Control menu to control my smart lights.
However, after exiting that menu, that’s when things went awry. The first time I did this, the phone completely froze.
It was completely unresponsive. The screen didn’t work. The buttons didn’t work.
But it was weird. The screen was still on, and it was blurred – the same blur you get on the Notification Centre, when pulling down the Quick Settings panel. Except, I couldn’t scroll up, or do anything. The screen was just… blurred.
I couldn’t even switch off the phone, as the Power Off & Restart toggles were hidden behind the blurred screen which I couldn’t remove – nor would the screen recognise my touches on the blurred power toggles.
I could only switch off the display by pressing the power button (side key), but then when I pressed it again, the screen would come back on and blurred again.
Reset, reset, reset…
I felt hopeless.
A soft reset was the only option, and when my phone restarted, the only way to make sure it was fully responsive again was to go into Settings > Apps > One UI Home, and Clear Cache and Data.
That meant losing all my icons on my Home Screen, and the folders I’d set up in my App Drawer. It was like a factory reset, without actually doing a factory reset.
And to be honest, this was only a short term fix, as the problem would return the next time I used the Device control menu.
Obviously, you’re probably saying “well, don’t use it then” – but it was force of habit, and it was a routine / chore I was so used to doing on my phone that I didn’t think twice about it.
Doing some reading and research online, I thought it may have been a bug from an app that was causing this issue, so I resorted to just using my phone in Safe Mode.
But as the issue was specific to the Device Control menus (something I couldn’t use in Safe Mode), I didn’t have the issue again until the next Restart.
The issue wasn’t with Google Home either – I controlled my accessories just fine with the app. The issue appeared whenever I scrolled down and used Home or SmartThings within the Device control menu.
I felt bad. With all the other issues accumulating rapidly, it felt like buying the base Galaxy S23 – with its features and cameras which could be compared quite favourably against the iPhone 14 Pro – was a mistake.
I figured if it was a software issue, it could also be affecting the Plus and Ultra models, but in that moment I felt alone. I know everyone else prefers the S23 Ultra model for its better camera array and bigger screen, and that I was therefore in the minority.
That said, I did actually back up my data and perform a Factory Reset – three times, in fact, but it made no difference. The issue kept on coming back, screen blur and non-responsiveness galore!
I’d like to say that was the only occurrence, but in reality this happened every day for a few months. All the way from the initial release of One UI 6.0 in November 2023, to the release of One UI 6.1 in March 2024.
Switching to the SmartThings app in the Device Control menu also didn’t alleviate the problem, as by this point it was too late.
Also, it wasn’t a problem with the Google Home app – that was my first thought, too. Using the same version of the Google Home app, on my other devices, worked flawlessly, so it was definitely an issue specific to my Galaxy S23 and One UI 6.0.
Why not use SmartThings?
At this point, even though I’ve already said Google Home works better with my accessories (particularly, Philips Hue lights, connected to a Wi-Fi Bridge), you might be asking why I don’t just use SmartThings.
After all, it’s a Samsung app, designed to work better with Samsung’s phones.
Just use it!
Well… I can’t.
You see, every time I use SmartThings, the app always thinks my Hue lights are “Offline,” yet in both the Philips Hue and Google Home apps, they are ‘online‘ and ready to use.
I’ve found that removing and then re-adding my accessories to the SmartThings app does nothing. They’ll be recognised by the app for a few minutes and work perfectly, then the next time I open the app, the lights will be marked as “Offline” again – despite the fact that both the Hue and Google Home apps, again, recognise that they are still, in fact, online and ready to be used.
Typical SmartThings!
And, just for reference, in case you’re going to assume it’s the Hue light bulbs that are the problem, and not Samsung… I had the light switches turned on every time, and the lights were on – all I wanted to do was dim them or turn them off, as per usual.
I even factory resetted the Hue lights and the Hue bridge, and then finally updated the lights via the Hue app on my S21 to make sure it wasn’t them that was the problem.
Nope, even after re-adding them into SmartThings, the Samsung app still reckoned they were offline, and when I tried to operate them via the Device control menu, my S23 still froze.
I was even able to control the lights every time, without fail, via Apple’s “Home” app on my iPhone 6s.
That meant that the Apple Home app, the Philips Hue app, and the Google Home app were all reading my lights as online. It was only SmartThings that thought it was smart enough to point out the lights were, to its knowledge, offline and unavailable.
Again… typical SmartThings!
One UI 6.1 to the rescue
That [literally] phone-breaking behaviour first appeared early in November 2023, when my S23 first received the One UI 6.0 update (Samsung released the Stable version of Android 14, One UI 6.0, starting from 30 October).
I found that Samsung’s incremental monthly security updates over Christmas, and into the New Year, did nothing to alleviate the issue, meaning I had to wait until the next major One UI update to benefit from any change.
It meant that I had to wait 5 months until March 2024, when the next major feature update was released with One UI 6.1, to use my phone properly again.
That meant that until March, I had to remember to not use my S23 to control my smart lights. I had to refrain from using my S23 as anything other than a phone.
Every time I wanted to operate the lights, I had to remember to instead use my old Galaxy S21, iPhone 6s or Galaxy Tab S5e.
It meant I couldn’t fully use my Galaxy S23 yet, meaning I was using a half-broken, half-working phone until One UI 6.1 was released.
The hardware was perfect, the software… not so much.
Thankfully, One UI 6.1 did fix the issue somewhat, although instead of bricking my phone, it would just crash the whole phone instead.
But thankfully, simply restarting the phone, or clearing the Cache of the One UI Home app, could fix the issue.
There was no longer any need to Clear Data (meaning I could keep my Home Screen and App Drawer settings), no need to use Safe Mode to identify the issue, and no need to Factory Reset.
However, it wasn’t until the May 2024 update that I noticed any real change. My phone no longer froze. No more bricking, no more needing to perform a Soft Reset.
Just… perfection.
Now, onto my conclusions – which I’ll do in a separate post, due to my thoughts sometimes (no, often) rambling on for a long time!
– Chris JK.
KPH tech blog 
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