Mobile gaming is becoming more popular by the day, now accounting for around 30 per cent of all digital game sales in the UK. It has lead to a rise in games-specific devices, such as the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro and RedMagic 8 Pro.

However, while Samsung has extolled the benefits of mobile gaming for years, it has never ranged a dedicated handset. The company did dabble with a gamepad for Galaxy phones about a decade ago, but didn't really explore the market much further. Until now.

The Korean manufacturer believes it has created the ultimate gaming phone in the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but without needing to pigeonhole the device in the process.

"[It's our] first premium smartphone that's been developed with mobile gaming at the forefront," Pocket-lint was told in an exclusive chat with Samsung UK's vice president of product management, Nick Porter.

"We've looked at what the needs are of gamers today and tomorrow, and built a product with the technology that can withstand and be ready for this rapidly growing part of the market."

Part of this is because of the custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip that has been developed by Qualcomm especially for Samsung: "With the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy, that CPU performance coupled with the vapour cooling gives unrivalled digital realism with that advanced GPU and CPU processing," he explained.

"On the basic level, you can operate on the highest resolution, on the fastest frame rates, and for the longest time without either lag or the battery running out quickly."

Samsung UK's Kadesh Bedford added that the S23 Ultra's memory makes big difference too: "We've also put the latest, fastest and most power efficient LPDDR5X RAM into the device," he said.

"On top of that, we have UFS 4.0 [storage] which our semi-conductor team brought to the market. So, you've got the fastest storage, the fastest processor, the fastest RAM with the longest lasting battery life and a high frame rate. It literally makes it the number one smartphone for gaming and across the board."

So, it's unlikely that Samsung will design and released a dedicated gaming phone anytime soon because it believes it now already has one in its product range. We just have to get it into the Pocket-lint test labs to check out the performance against more conventional gaming handsets ourselves. Watch this space.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was announced alongside the standard S23 and S23 Plus models during Galaxy Unpacked. One of the games that Samsung highlights as running particularly well on its new devices is Wreckfest, which was released for mobile at the end of 2022. It is downloadable on the Google Play Store now.