Bigger battery tipped as key selling point for compact Samsung Galaxy S23

Will Samsung bring a radical flagship redesign to the table with the fast-approaching Galaxy S23 family? Probably not. Will the camera capabilities of the "vanilla" S23 and the non-Ultra S23+ be vastly improved in any meaningful way compared to the S22 and S22+? We highly doubt it.

But even though the charging and display specifications are similarly expected to more or less stay the same for the entire premium Galaxy handset trio, there is one very important aspect Samsung is reportedly working hard to substantially upgrade.

How big of a battery life improvement should you expect?

Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to answer that question with even a moderate degree of confidence at the moment and things are unlikely to change on this front in the near future. That's because a phone's real-life battery endurance is heavily influenced by a number of different factors, including its processor's energy efficiency, its manufacturer's software optimizations, and even the way you use said device.

Of course, the main ingredient of this intricate and sometimes inexplicable recipe remains a phone's battery capacity, and perfectly in line with our guesstimate from just last week, it looks like the Galaxy S23 will add 200mAh to the 6.1-inch S22's 3,700mAh cell.

That's at least according to a new Chinese social media post by Digital Chat Station, who's been known to make very accurate assumptions and predictions of this nature in the past about other unreleased and highly anticipated Android handsets.

The S23's battery should feature a "rated value" of 3,785mAh and a "typical" (aka advertised) 3,900mAh capacity, representing a bump of around 5 percent over the aforementioned typical rating of the S22's ticker.

That may sound... underwhelming, but with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor reportedly focused primarily on keeping power consumption to a minimum (while still packing quite an impressive punch), it seems safe to assume that the total battery life upgrade will amount to significantly more than 5 percent in regular day-to-day use.

The non-Plus and non-Ultra Galaxy S22, remember, didn't exactly shine in our battery testing, falling well short of its 6.6-inch brother's result while largely matching the scores of both the S22 Ultra and the 6.2-inch Galaxy S21.

As tipped by those very familiar-looking renders leaked a couple of weeks ago, the Galaxy S23 is today rumored to retain its predecessor's 6.1-inch display as well. 

Furthermore, the 6.1-inch Galaxy S23 is expected to leave the 1080p screen resolution of the S22... and S22 Plus unchanged, but that's hardly surprising.

What will certainly be... interesting to see is just how wise Samsung's decision to squeeze a larger battery into virtually the same body as that of the Galaxy S22 will prove in the long run. Based on Steve Hemmerstoffer's information accompanying the first batch of leaked renders, we're not only talking the same screen diagonal here but also extremely similar overall height and width numbers and an identical depth measurement.

Although the weight is under wraps for the time being, we can totally understand if you're starting to fear a repeat of the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco from all the way back in 2016 as a result of this potential battery size increase.

But with the Galaxy S21 measuring 6.2 inches in screen diagonal and packing a 4,000mAh battery without catching fire or blowing up (to date), it really shouldn't be a problem for Samsung to engineer a completely safe-to-use (at least for the first few years), reliable, blazing fast, and hopefully, long-lasting 6.1-inch S23 with a 3,900mAh cell under its hood.