Earlier than in years prior, Samsung have launched their latest flagship Galaxy S21 range. Like last year, the range starts off with the Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S21+ (at lower prices this year). Its high-end flagship, the Galaxy S21 Ultra, looks to fix some of the issues with their first ultra device – the S20 Ultra.
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In every way, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra looks to offer the very best technology a smartphone can deliver in 2021. It sits a tier above the regular Galaxy S21 devices in several ways.
Display
Samsung have been at the top of the pile when it comes to for years when it comes to smartphone displays. This device has a beautiful 6.8-inch AMOLED display, that offers the highest levels of brightness in any of its smartphones (a full 1,500 nits). More importantly, there are some changes under the surface.
One of the biggest criticisms of the Galaxy S20 Ultra was the fact that it could only utilise the full 120Hz fast refresh rate at a 1080p resolution. At the highest 1440p resolution it would revert to 60Hz refresh rate. In effect, you had to choose between a smoother experience or a sharper image quality. No more – the display will now run at the full 120Hz refresh rate at 1440p resolution.
It comes with a smart adaptive refresh rate as well, which will automatically change use the optimal refresh rate between 10Hz and 120Hz depending on the content you are viewing. This will save battery life, as it won’t consume full power to show you 120Hz when you are reading a static article page, for example.
The display on the S21 Ultra is also compatible with Samsung’s capacitive S Pen for the first time. While it doesn’t have its own silo within the device itself, you can buy an accessory case that will house the S Pen (which costs an additional $70).
Performance
There are two variants of the S21 Ultra, one running the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset and the other running their proprietary Exynos 2100 processor. Samsung have said that their Exynos processor is now on par with the Snapdragon version, but this remains to be tested. That being said, the Snapdragon 888 is a new 5nm process chip that offer a lot of performance gains over last year’s flagship Snapdragon 865, which is sure to be felt in the device.
The base model has 12GB of RAM (as opposed to 8GB on the S21 and S21+) and 128GB of storage. There are then 256GB and 512GB of storage models, both with 16GB of RAM. As you would expect, these specs lend itself to ultra-fast performance at first impression.
The ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner has been upgraded over last year’s model as well. It is now 1.77 times larger than in 2020, so hopefully combined with the mammoth amounts of RAM it will be faster as well.
Cameras
Another area that disappointed with the S20 Ultra was the camera setup. While it had the guts of a very good shooter, there were some software optimisation issues that plagued the hardware. For example, the laser autofocus did not worked as it should with the new 108MP shooter which made the auto photography experience a lot more frustrating than it needed to be.
In the S21 Ultra, we have a similar 108MP main shooter, although the sensor size has been increased. Last year the S20 Ultra struggled a bit with colour saturation, which meant the regular S20’s 16MP camera actually delivered better photos. Hopefully the larger sensor size has solved that problem in this year’s device, which we’ll confirm in the full review.
It then has a 12MP ultra-wide camera, which on paper seems to be identical to last year’s lens. While we don’t expect the image quality to be any better, Samsung have added a new software feature where you can use this camera to double as a macro shooter to take close-up shots of subject. This is extremely commendable, as we’ve always bemoaned the haphazard addition of a bad macro lens to mid-range devices for the sake of adding another camera to the setup.
The S21 Ultra also has two telephoto lenses – one 10MP 3x zoom lens and another 10MP 10x telescopic zoom lens. This combination is meant to give the user the ultimate zoom experience with various options. Within the app you won’t even notice the transition from the one lens to the other as you zoom in further. There is no digital zoom between 1x and 10x as a result, and with a hybrid zoom up to 30x you can deliver great quality images. While Samsung will advertise the 100x Space Zoom again, we see it as more of a gimmick (albeit impressive) as the quality drops off significantly as you use digital zoom on the 10x lens.
Battery
The S21 Ultra has a slightly larger 5,000mAh battery when compared to last year. Interestingly, the company didn’t opt to include super-fast charging capabilities, topping out at 25W. Compare that to some Chinese manufacturers that have batteries that can charge at 55W-65W.
However, Samsung have said that this was purposely done to make sure the battery lasts longer, and its capacity doesn’t drop off after 2 years of use.
