Galaxy S21 Ultra review: third time’s a charm

this is the samsung

galaxy

wait there, that's better this is the samsung

galaxy

s21

ultra

and I know what you're thinking another year another great Samsung phone am I right? Well not really, the first big Samsung phone this year is the galaxy s21

ultra

and it's different because this is our

third

ultra phone, there's the s20 ultra, the note 20 ultra and now this and three iterations means that Samsung has had Time to solve all the problems now in Samsung World ultra means it should be the biggest and best version. that you can get and last year the original s20 ultra was not much better than the normal s20, the camera had problems and was much more expensive this year the galaxy s21 ultra is much better, the camera has improved and the price has dropped 200 dollars , so it starts at 1200 so I guess the

third

time

's the

charm

so we have to start with the obvious about ultra phones: they're huge, the galaxy s21 ultra's screen measures 6.8 inches diagonally and if you're counting and you know that Samsung is counting which makes this phone 0.1 inches larger than the iPhone 12 Pro Max screen, but the S21 is taller and narrower than the Max and therefore for me it is much easier to hold.

Samsung has kept the curved edges on the screen and in fact, don't worry here, I think it works and means the bezels are much smaller and the phone can be much narrower. The iPhone 12 Pro Max simply feels much bigger because it is wider as we compare the Samsung phone. to the iPhone, let's leave everything aside at the top right now. I think some of you will disagree with me, but I think the galaxy looks better. I love the new square edges on the iPhone, but you know. What the camera bump here is one of those things we forget seems strange because we get so used to camera bumps, but it is strange, so Samsung's solution to camera bump is to make the rails In fact, I think it looks very slippery and it means that the camera glass here is a little recessed, although yes, there are a lot of holes for the camera here and that looks strange talking about the back part.

It's Gorilla Glass Victus, also the same on the back. front and it has a matte finish which is quite nice and yes it is ghost black and looks very black in person. It also resists fingerprints pretty well, but might be a little more delicate than I'd like it to be. We just set it up. this on concrete to take a photo and it already has a small scratch where you can see silver underneath, maybe it was a dumb idea but now you know anyway look you will only get this phone if you love big phones and Samsung is just better than Apple at making big phones as they have been doing it for much longer.

The Samsung version of Android allows you to size the text however you want. It may have a small side rail on the side that you can slide for additional functions. makes it quite easy to split apps on the screen and allows you to turn apps into little pop-ups that shrink into floating bubbles. You can do a lot more with these phones. Look at the size of these phones. They are basically tablets and Samsung is just. better by putting tablet options in your software, a phone this big, well, sure, sure, but honestly, it's not that hard to find a big Android phone.

The goal of the s21 ultra is to be the most powerful and capable Android phone, price be damned, and right now, yes. this is let's go back to the screen, it's 3200 by 1440 pixels and you can set it to have an adaptive refresh rate so it can dynamically change from 10 to 120 hertz which makes scrolling and animation smooth but saves battery when there is nothing moving. on the screen and on the s21 ultra for the first

time

, you can have full resolution and high refresh rate at the same time, you don't have to choose one or the other, in fact, it's a funny story about the screen, usually when Samsung releases a big new phone, it will talk for about an hour about its screen technology, but with this one they say yes this is the best screen and yes it is, I mean sometimes I would even change the color from natural which I usually prefer to vivid .

Just to feel more alive, I think this screen looks great. This is also the first mass-market phone with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 888 processor, so it has Wi-Fi 6e. Both types of 5G have better graphics and of course it's fast. It compares very well. Although of course the iPhone still beats it, but for me the important thing is that it feels fast and there are never any lags and for the first time on an S series phone there is support for Samsung's stylus and stylus , they are separated and I guess it will work fine. Samsung didn't ship this one so I can't test it, but looking at the demos, if you've ever used a note it'll probably be the same experience here minus the bluetooth support, now the base model 1200. has 128 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of ram for $50 more you can go up to 256 gigs of storage and there is a 512 model that has 16 gigs of ram and costs $180 more and you should really get one of those models with more storage because to bring the price of this phone down from where it was last year samsung had to take some things out so we know they took the ac adapter out of the box because apple of course samsung will but they also cut out the micro sd card slot and that move seemed inevitable , but it's a shame not to have expandable storage, especially for a phone that can record 8k video and lets you take 108 megapixel photos if you want, but for me, none of the specs I just listed, positive or negative, were as important to my experience using this phone as the following specification.

It has Qualcomm's newest, fastest and largest in-display fingerprint sensor. There is a much larger area that you can tap to unlock. and I mean just touch it's like boop unlocked boop unlocked boop it's cool and you also know it works if you wear a mask and talk about great battery life on this phone for the

review

I turned on all the bells and whistles. It had a maximum resolution adaptive refresh rate always on the screen. I had the brightness turned up to maximum most of the time and then spent days and days taking tons of photos and testing 4k and a bit of 8k video and never drained the battery. until basically halfway through day two, there's a five thousand milliamp battery in this thing and I think that's enough, although what Samsung wants to separate the ultra galaxy phones from the other galaxy phones are the cameras, the ultras are the ones that get the 108 from Samsung. megapixel sensor and they are also the ones with the longest telephoto lenses, so what do we have here?

Five cameras. There's the main 108-megapixel sensor at f 1.8 that outputs 12-megapixel images by default. There is a 12 megapixel ultra wide angle and then there is no. one but two 10-megapixel telephoto lenses, one with a 3x zoom and one with a 10x zoom and the other hole here is for the laser autofocus sensor, then the fifth camera is the 40-megapixel selfie camera on the front which is 6.5 megapixels by default, but you can get the full 40 megapixels if you want, so let's start with that 108 megapixel camera because it's the heart of this whole system. It is a second generation Samsung sensor.

The first one was on the original Galaxy S20 ultra and that 100 megapixel sensor was a Smells, it had focusing issues that Samsung then had to fix on the Note 20 Ultra with a laser for autofocus which is also here, but other than that, It wasn't worth it. Samsung's regular cameras on the regular S20s were almost as good. now with the galaxy s21 ultra good, it's fine now, I haven't had any shutter lag, I haven't had any focus loss issues and things like the narrow focus plane also seem a little better, it's a notable step up from the last year.

In fact, there's only one other smartphone camera that's in the same league as this phone and it's not the Pixel 5, which I must say has really fallen behind this year. No, the other phone worth talking about here is the iPhone 12 Pro Max. which also has a larger sensor compared to the other iPhone, so you know, let's look at some samples, so I think this first photo is a very good representative example of what the s21 ultra can do. I set the focus point through the fence and I love that it captures the sharpness and detail of everything behind the fence, while letting the fence go out of focus a little.

Plus, the colors here are super accurate to what I was seeing during that session. Here's a night mode shot and let's get into s21. ultra vs 12 pro max I prefer how Samsung laid out the bike here, but I think they're both good and just look at the tire tread detail in this shot. Here's another comparison photo and you can start to see how these cameras have different opinions on how to expose things. Samsung still wants to make things a little brighter than I like. Well, Apple honestly learned its lesson and is happy to leave the contrast and shadows behind.

Now here we compare the portrait mode and again Samsung does it a little bit more with the colors a little bit, but I think it has slightly better sharpness compared to the ultra wide ones. They both seem fine. I think it just comes down to choices, preferences, color, and overall exposure. I think the iPhone has a very slight advantage in these comparisons, but it is very light, on the other hand the s21 has a lot of other tricks and this year I think they are more than just tricks, so let's talk about the zoom, here is a zoom of 3x and a 10x optical zoom, which means you can get better. zoomed images in that kind of sub 10x range without having to resort to weird cropping tricks that Samsung sometimes does, here's an example starting at the main sensor and then to 3x and then to 10x, all very well, so Samsung still has this space zoom feature which is supposed to let you go up to 100x and I guess it's better than last year.

You can get something decent at 30x and very good light, but of course at 100x it's still a mess, but that 10x zoom with its periscope lens really performs better. results that you can get from other cameras on the iPhone specifically, so if you start here, this is a very challenging low light shot, but then you zoom in at 10x and yes, the galaxy definitely wins at that zoom level, then there's video and there are a lot of Samsung Camera Tricks here too, so for example you can now record 4k 60 with each camera lens, which seems complicated, but I've noticed a significant improvement in recording quality with the ultra wide camera.

It can also record 8k videos, but now. you can get a slightly better image out of the 8k if you want, it also has a built in director mode so you can p

review

what's happening with each lens and switch between them as you shoot. I wish you could record. edit them all as separate sequences and edit them in post, but that's probably too much to ask for as far as the results go, we're very happy with the stabilization, adjusting exposure on the fly during a shot, and the sharpness. This is a very good video. camera and I also have to say that I love Samsung's pro modes for both photo and video.

It's nice to have them integrated into the main camera. Samsung also has a raw option for photos, but you know what I'm going to stop talking about that until we can look at it a little closer versus Apple's Pro Raw another time, oh yeah, Samsung does other tricks too, so here am I kidding with a single take two that combines all of Samsung's tricks into a single button that you can press and keep doing things, oh my goodness. this is where i'm landing the camera system on the galaxy s21 ultra is very good i think it's the best you can get on android right now but you probably want to know what i think compared to the iphone 12 pro max see if it do you drink tea. 50 photos with each of the main cameras of these phones.

I think 30 would be a toss-up depending on your personal preference, so the s21 would clearly be better at I don't know seven, eight or nine and the iphone 12 pro max. It would clearly be better at 11, 12 or 13. Very, very close and I think the story is more or less the same on video, but the Galaxy S21 has a lot of other things you can do built into the camera and unlike previous years , with samsung some of those new tricks are really good one last thing with the camera and for me one of the most important things here is a selfie portrait mode taken with the wind making my hair go crazy the s21 handles portrait well , but pay attention to The lines on my face what you're seeing here is that you can finally soften the whole face, I mean, now it makes me look like an old man, but that's what I am, so thank you, okay, let's talk about software, that's how Samsung works.

Android versionsThey work get too confusing and complicated and then we all complain and finally Samsung makes things simpler and then the cycle starts again and right now we are heading towards the land of Samsung complications. One UI is still good for big screens, but there are too many options, I mean look at the quick settings, most of the things don't mean anything to the average person and then I don't know, let's check out the default weather widget on the screen Of start. Oh look, there's an ad built into the software. Great, then there's Bixby which is Samsung's digital assistant and surprisingly it's not total rubbish if you set it up and configure smart things for your home and just live that whole Samsung life, it's totally acceptable but you don't need the assistant either.

Google is still here on this phone and you might as well have to use some third party software to remap the button, but look it up, it's worth it. Then there's the texting situation here in the US, for some reason Samsung is made to ship Samsung. messages by default, while everyone else gets android messages and therefore rcs directly from Google, now some US carriers support rcs in Samsung messages, but only a little, they don't make rcs that work with other carriers e.g. , there's also this cross-carrier messaging initiative that doesn't seem to be doing anything and is still a mess and look, the rcs issues aren't Samsung's fault, but as the largest seller of Android phones in the US, one I would think Samsung would try harder to fix this problem, but you know.

You can install Android messages, you will be fine and that is the story of all Samsung phones. If you know Android, you can make this s29 ultra an amazing, powerful and efficient phone. You can set the left side of the home screen to search on Google. from Samsung's weird content offerings you have all those multitasking options you have wireless desktops to turn this into a desktop you just have to know how to do it all and if you do it's great and if you don't it's a little confusing so that It's the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra It has the fastest speeds The best camera system and the prettiest screen of any Android phone right now It has a battery that lasts more than a full day It has a beautiful new design and some dubious software options, I don't think it's going to convince anyone to upgrade from something like an iPhone 12 Pro Max, but it's basically an equivalent phone if you prefer Android to iOS and if you're wondering how the smaller Galaxy S21 phones compare.

To this, that review will be published next week, but I will just tell you that it is a little disappointing that if you want the best Galaxy phone you have to get the biggest one and make no mistake, this is the best Android phone. you're willing to deal with the screen size and price. I don't know how long the galaxy s21 ultra can retain the best Android phone crown, but it definitely has it right now. Thank you all so much for watching, let me know. Do you think the s21 ultra is for you? Do you love phantom black?

Talk about it in the comments and also ask me what you want to know about the smaller, regular galaxy s21 because I'm working on that review right now.