The camera design on the rumored Galaxy S22 Ultra is puzzling

It’s Friday, it’s fall, there’s a breeze in the air (hopefully), and there’s fresh, I’d argue ridiculous, renders of Samsung’s expected Galaxy S22 Ultra to show you. The renders come courtesy of @OnLeaks and Digit, and they feature a new Samsung flagship with what looks like a Galaxy Note 20-inspired body and back that… well you should see for yourself.

Since deciding to skip the Galaxy Note in 2021 — apparently much to the chagrin of T-Mobile — Samsung’s been seeding Note features across its popular phones. Both the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the Galaxy Z Fold 3 offer stylus support. If these new renders are to be believed, the Galaxy S22 Ultra will go even further. According to OnLeaks and Digit, the new phone will come with the hole-punch selfie camera and candy bar shape of last year’s Note, along with stylus support and what looks like an actual stylus slot.

The render of the back of the device is where things get interesting, weird, or bad, depending on your taste. The Galaxy S22 Ultra appears to morph the camera “plateau” of the S21 Ultra into an unmistakable letter P shape. Is the P for… photos? Pictures? Maybe periscope? There certainly seems to be plenty of room. For reference, the previous Ultra included a main 108-megapixel wide-angle sensor, two 10-megapixel telephoto sensors, and a 12-megapixel ultrawide sensor on the back of the device. Who knows what the new S22 Ultra will fit?

Image: Digit, OnLeaks

There’s some reason to believe this could be Samsung’s design, beyond it fitting with a general trend of camera bumps becoming big and increasingly… visible on devices like the iPhone 13 Pro and the yet-to-be-released Pixel 6. OnLeaks has a fairly good track record of leaking phones, pretty closely matching the looks of both the Pixel 5 and the Pixel 6. This kind of refinement to a camera housing also doesn’t seem out of the picture, in many ways it’s a reduction of the S21 Ultra’s cameras: a corner has been removed. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t look strange, though.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge