Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy S21 series hands-on: Ultra-fine”.
All right guys, so it’s that time of year again another galaxy s phone is coming down the line. Now this year, samsung’s decided to kind of align the galaxy s title name with the year, so it’s the galaxy s21 for 2021 and technically they did that for the s20 as well. But you know they were obviously just lining it up with s10 anyway, anyway, it doesn’t really matter so. Samsung brought me out to a place in new york city, with proper covered precautions, of course, to check out the new galaxy s21 line.
So i wanted to give you my impressions, okay, so just like the previous couple years, where we had three different galaxy s. Phones, we’ve also got three different galaxy s phones this year, but last year all three galaxy s. Phones were really premium, and this year i kind of feel like samsung split, the difference between making that more affordable galaxy s10e, like they did a couple of years ago and the s20 that they did last year and not to spoil this whole impressions. Video for you, but the samsung galaxy s21 is gon na start at 7.99, whereas the galaxy s 21 plus starts at 9.99 now last year at the s20 started at 9.99. So that’s a pretty big difference.
Ultimately, i think that was probably a good thing. Almost every single manufacturer now has like 700 phones or cheaper that are pretty much flagships, so samsung had to bring down the price of the galaxy s21 series in order to kind of compete with their competitors. Unfortunately, the galaxy s21 and s21 plus are really freaking, similar they’re, almost the same phone, except for just a couple of little exceptions. While the galaxy s 21 and s21 ultra are made of gorilla glass invictus.
The galaxy s21 is made of glastic and i know that’s a little bit of a bummer, but this is the better glastic that we saw in. Like the galaxy note, 20 series, as opposed to the much cheaper glass stick, that we saw in the galaxy a series and honestly, if you have two phones side by side, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference. I was pretty impressed with my hands on time with it all right, so, glass, stick aside. The first thing: you’re, probably gon na notice, is the design. Now samsung went pretty bold this year. With this really interesting camera bump.
I would make an association with like cyborg from team titans and i’m sure there’s going to be a lot of memes that pop up about this camera bump, because that seems to happen every single year. Personally, i think it looks pretty good when i first saw renders of it. I thought it looked kind of tacky, but it’s definitely grown on me over time and i think that it looks better than the samsung galaxy s20 series devices.
Also, the phantom purple color gets like a gold accent on that camera bump, as well as on the ridges of the device. So it’s kind of this cool duo, tone thing and the matte black colors on the other phones. Look amazing as well. I think, overall, these phones look pretty freaking good. The cameras, though in those bumps, are really similar to the galaxy s20 series like like really really similar. You won’t find a lot of differences between the s20 series and the s21 series in their camera.
Bumps you’ve still got that ultra wide 12 megapixel sensor, you’ve got a 12 megapixel main sensor with optical image. Stabilization and you’ve got a 64 megapixel, 3x optical hybrid optical. It’S not really optical. It’S like a crop sensor that allows for 3x zoom and again that probably feels really familiar, and that’s because it is, there aren’t a lot of camera improvements in the galaxy s 21 and s21 plus most of the camera changes are reserved for the ultra this year. On the front of these phones, you’re going to find a 6.2 inch and 6.7 inch display on the s21 and s21 devices respectively, but there’s a little bit of a caveat here: they’re fhd, plus instead of qhd plus like last year. So that’s another downgrade from the s20 series.
It kind of feels like a little bit of a stab in the back from samsung, not not great. Here now those displays are adaptive refresh rate. They go from 48 hertz to 120 hertz, depending on the content you’re viewing.
So that should hopefully help the battery life just a little bit. Oh – and one interesting thing to note about the s21 and s21 plus, is that they have flat displays it’s kind of been like a key feature of samsung galaxy s. Phones since, like the galaxy s8 to have a curved display so samsung moving to flat displays for their flagship phones, except for the ultra seems kind of interesting, but i’m not against it. I do like flat displays now.
I know that a lot of this seems like the same or maybe even a little bit worse than the galaxy s20 series, but generally a new galaxy s. Device means a new flagship processor and this year samsung put the snapdragon 888 processor in the galaxy s20 series. Now this makes it the first phone line in the united states to ship with the processor and just the second phone worldwide right next to the me 11 from xiaomi. The global variant of this phone, though you’re, going to get the samsung exynos 2100 and we’re not totally sure how that’s going gon na perform in this phone, though previous exynos chipsets, have gotten much worse battery life than their qualcomm counterparts.
But we’ll have to do some testing before we can tell you that definitively the s21 and the s21 plus are both gon na have eight gigabytes of ram and they both have the option to get 128 gigabytes of storage or 256 gigabytes of storage. Now, sadly, there’s no expandable storage in either of these devices and uh that’s kind of a bummer, because now we lost the headphone jack, we lost expandable storage and on the s21 and s201 plus we also lost qhd plus displays. So it feels like they’re kind of falling back a little bit here now. As for batteries, the s21 is using a four thousand million power cell and the s21 plus is using a 4 800 milliamp hour cell and, like you, probably anticipated samsung’s, not including a charger in the box with these devices, they support up to 25 watt fast charging.
But again, you’re gon na have to go buy one of those fast chargers. Unless you already have one which is also kind of a bummer, they do have fast wireless charging and reverse wireless charging. If you want that, but again, i think a lot of people are gon na start hopping on this getting rid of the charger train in their smartphones. So you got ta, get ready for it all right. So that’s about it for the galaxy s21 and s21 plus now, like i said before, i think this year, samsung’s really focusing in on the galaxy s21 ultra. The s21 ultra has the same snapdragon 888 chip that we saw on the other two devices, but it has some changes. You’Ve got 12 gigabytes of ram or 16 gigabytes of ram for this device, and you’ve got 128 256 and 512 gigabytes of storage.
The s21 ultra also has a 6.8 inch, qhd plus display with an adaptive refresh rate. This one can go down to 10 hertz if you’re like reading a book or something to really save battery life, and it’s packing a 5 000 milliamp hour cell, just like the galaxy s20 ultra alright, so ultra last year, was really focused mostly around the camera and They’Re doing that again this year, but i think this year they made it a bit more versatile on the s21 ultra you’ve got that 12 megapixel wide angle sensor. You’Ve got the megapixel main sensor that does nona binning down to 12 megapixels for better low light performance, and it also has optical image.
Stabilization you’ve got a 3x optical telephoto sensor with optical image. Stabilization and now you’ve also got a 10x telephoto sensor with optical image. Stabilization and i think that this is quite a versatile camera system that 10x optical telephoto sensor really puts it in line with the huawei p40 pro plus, which really shocked us last year, when it showed off that 10x sensor and having the 3x optical telephoto sensor gives You a really nice range if you want to capture something a little bit further away or really far away. One of the biggest problems that i had with the galaxy s20 ultra was that the 100x space zoom was pretty much unusable. It was extremely muddy and grainy, and the biggest problem was that i wasn’t really able to focus on anything because it would shake like crazy when i was trying to take a photo.
Samsung has done a lot of software magic here, alongside that optical image. Stabilization. To make it a lot more stable when you’re zoomed in especially when you’re zoomed in to 100x, and i can confirm that from with my hands on time with the device, it is really freaking stable.
It honestly kind of feels like it’s on a tripod even up to 100x, which is way way better to see now. The other major problem that the samsung galaxy s20 ultra had was that its autofocus was really really bad and samsung. Galaxy s21 ultra brings a laser-guided autofocus sensor, which should hopefully fix those problems and make it so you can actually take photos now on the front of course, you got a 40 megapixel selfie shooter, which generally bends down to 10 megapixels. But of course, if you really want to take 40 megapixel selfie images, you can do that too all right and on the galaxy s 21 ultra there’s something really interesting.
Here too now there been a lot of rumors that samsung was going to get rid of the galaxy note line and it’s still possible that they do we’ll have to see whether or not we actually see a note this year. But in the galaxy s21 ultra samsung is giving it support for a special s, pen and they’re, actually selling this s pen, alongside a couple of different cases that hold the s pen with the galaxy s21 ultra. Now this s pen doesn’t have bluetooth, so it has pretty limited functionality compared to like the galaxy notes, s pen, you can’t use it to take photos of yourself or anything like that, but it can be used for writing and doodling, and you can bring up the Little actions menu with it when you hover over certain areas of the display, it will be nice for a lot of people who really like to have a really high quality stylus with their phone. It is kind of sad, though, that you don’t get all the quality features that you get with the note 20 ultra s pen.
Now you can buy this s pen alone for forty dollars. You can buy the silicone case that comes with the s pen for seventy dollars and you can buy this flip cover case. That comes with the s pen for 90, which is um all a lot of money. But i think that samsung wants you to spend your pre-order credit on that, if you happen to pre-order those devices so last year, samsung priced the galaxy s20 ultra at 1300, but this year the galaxy s21 ultra is starting at 1200, which is a lot more reasonably Priced even though that’s still a really really expensive phone, so my analysis this year is that samsung’s definitely pushing people towards the galaxy s21 ultra. It seems like they don’t really care as much about the galaxy s21 or s21 plus again, it kind of makes the comparison between like the galaxy s10 and the galaxy s10e, especially because the galaxy s21 is glastic, whereas the s21 plus is glass and the s21 ultra Is glass, but if you want that new snapdragon 888 processor with all the new features it provides like shooting with three cameras at the same time in samsung’s new director’s view mode, i mean that is something that you would want to get these new phones for. Also, the design of these devices, in my opinion, is definitely better than the s20 series.
So if design is important to you, that could be worth considering as well anyways all three of these devices are available for pre-order today. Now, if you pre-order a galaxy s21, you will get a hundred dollars in samsung store credit. If you pre-order a galaxy s21 plus you get 150 and a galaxy s21 ultra gets you 200 worth of credit, which again i’m thinking that samsung probably wants people to spend on those expensive cases. Also samsung’s gon na throw in the samsung smart tag if you pre-order, which i think is like a tile competitor, and it’s also kind of like getting ready for air tags to compete with that, basically just a little device finder, which normally sells for about 30.
So i’m curious: what do you guys think about these phones? Do you think that they’re underpowered overpriced just what do you think about them in general, i’ll, be sure to let you guys know in my full review, which is coming very soon so stay tuned to android authority for that until next time, i’ll catch, you guys in The next article .