SAMSUNG Galaxy S23 FE Review – A Flagship Experience

If you have not read our unboxing & 1st impression, CLICK here to read it.

Now the FE series is well known within the Samsung smart devices lineup as the Fan Edition in the past, but it has slowly grow into a step further as a Flagship Killer that is getting popular with other competing brands as well. With that said Samsung also introduced the FE series for Tablets and Earbuds too, creating an FE all round experience ecosystem of smart devices.

Today we will look at the core and most aspects to be reviewed within this article for the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE.

Design

Samsung Galaxy S23 FE towards the very basic design language is pretty much adopted from the mainline S23 series with a mashup of the Galaxy A series, putting it clearly that this phone stands in between the two. Weighted around 209 grams, it does felt every slightly over the heavy side but considering its overall material, one can accept it gladly as it is made of aluminum frame with glass back from Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. While glass back is elegant, it does attract fingerprint smudges, so to avoid that its easy to just get a casing and install on it, or just wiping the back should solve your problem. The Galaxy S23 FE is IP68 water and dust resistance. Overall the phone is easy to be held overall and feels and look elegantly as the mainline flagship series carry a thickness of just 8.9mm.

The rest remains the same, a USB C port for charging and data, dual speakers, two microphone for communications and noise cancellation and a dual sim card slot.

Display & Audio

The display of the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE is measured at 6.4 inch, along with AMOLED 2X 120Hz refresh rate and peak brightness up to 1450 nits, which is great for those who is always out and about, whether it is bright sunny outside or dark rooms, where the phone will also dynamically dial the brightness based on the environment. The display will dynamically switch down to 60Hz also depending on the apps or games and this in overall preserving battery consumption while Vision Booster helps in bringing in vibrant colors when viewing your favorite content. Overall experience is pretty good too thanks to the smooth operations from the Samsung Exynos 2200 SOC. Furthermore the front glass is protected by the famous Corning Gorrila Glass 5, however a slight downside is the screen to body ratio of about 82%, which bezels can be spotted easily near the bottom part of the screen.

Now lets get to the audio portion, as mention earlier, the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE has 2 speakers, one works as bottom firing and another one located at the earpiece, both were well supported with Dolby Atmos. This will give you access to customized Equalizer settings and also upscaler for a boosted clear listening experience.

Combining both, this does gave one of the great experience for your all round portable multimedia experience.

Camera

Let have a look at the camera setup, the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE has a triple rear camera setup. There is one 50MP with PDAF and OIS, another with 8MP telephoto lens and a 12MP ultrawide lens. The selfie camera is a 10MP wide lens which is able to capture video recording up to 4K at 60FPS. The rear camera module a S5KGN3, which is an ISOCELL GN3 with Dual Tetrapixel RGB Bayer Pattern color filter.

The overall camera experience on the Galaxy S23 FE performs well and that should be expected when inheriting some of the best software features from the S series. Day time as usual all of the images came out vibrant and colors were true to the captured area, with reasonable contrast ratio overall. In some instances during night time, the images may come out dull within darker areas which I believe this can be slightly improved with software updates and dont get me wrong, as long there is some light sources, even dimmed ones, the phone can actually snap things out quite good with most details retained within the captured image, in part that is due to Samsung’s continuous effort in improving their low light performance, or Samsung calls it the Nightography. Selfie cam wise, I have no complains in fact a praise of including 4k 60FPS front camera recording that exceeds my expectation with good portrait captures there.

Included as above is a short video of 4K 60FPS rear video recording on day time which exemplifies good color representation and smooth recording overall with very minor stutters exhibited. Oh yeah, it does support a maximum of 8K at 24FPS on the rear cam recording, which will give you pretty good cinematic video experience.

Performance & Software

Now most phones at this price range and position would be using a last year’s flagship processor from Qualcomm or MediaTek, but for most of the regions, the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE uses last year Exynos 2200 Octa Core processor. Pack in together internally you get 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM with a choice of 128GB or 256GB of internal storage. Since this phone is part of the S series topline phone, you will also get WiFi 6e, Bluetooth 5.3 and NFC for all round fast connectivity with your compatible devices and internet router. There is no expandable storage as expected but there is so many cloud storages out there such as Google Drive and it’s rather simple too redirecting all the backups there.

Software wise, the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE is driven with Android 13 and One UI 5.1 which brings in updated, modern features that is not too far different than the existing new Samsung S23 series. Among worthy mention of the features are RAM Expansion up to 8GB, Samsung DeX, Themes, Multi Control, Smart Things, USB to HDMI support just to name a few, basically almost all of the S Series features in terms of capabilities and functionalities are retain in the Galaxy S23 FE.

To my experience, over day to day usage, actually quite similar in between last year’s S22+ and S23 Ultra that I have been using for quite a while, where one would hardly find any differences in terms of multi tasking, gaming, email, calls and social media. Your picture snapping will be almost the same, you get near flagship quality there. Gaming with Genshin Impact is smooth with some minor drop frames expected so long setting it between a mix of medium settings all the way, this in part also the inclusion of AMD RDNA2 in it with Xclipse 920 GPU. I still can get about a mix of 12 hours usage on and off, which is decently good if you are not sticking to a power point all the time. Recharging with a fast PD charger will get you back from empty to full in about less than 2 hours with the included 4500MAh battery, although you will need to get one since the adaptor is not included in box, but it’s fairly easy to purchase one anywhere.

Here’s a benchmark comparison coming along, and it does shows that the Exynos 2200 holds well against some of the flagships out there with not too far results and performance.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy S23 FE is a phone that Samsung finally filled in the gap with their own flagship killer, which in our course of experiencing the unit, it is one of the phone that carries all premium flagship features but at the same time you are paying lesser to enjoy it. It is expected too that Samsung will be providing long support at least over 4 years of Android OS updates and security updates and for the price you are paying for, this phone is one worthy consideration that one could purchase and having the best of the S Series in it, and this phone is still new, Android 14 is waiting there too in the upgrade list bringing in better features along with One UI 6.

Pricing & Availability

The Galaxy S23 FE is now available at the price of RM2999 for the 128GB storage and RM3299 for the 256GB of storage, For more information on the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE, CLICK HERE to find out. Buy the Galaxy S23 FE now and get RM300 discount & Extra RM350 when you trade-in your current device.