With the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Samsung has hit the right spot.
Samsung continues to provide the flagship smartphones each year with S-series as we saw with the Galaxy S20 series last year. This year Samsung has launched the Galaxy S21 series at the end of January which is slightly ahead of its launch date which was last year in mid-February.
The Galaxy S20 Ultra had packed some very beefy internals that included a 5000mAh battery, a powerful set of cameras that includes a 108MP camera, a larger display, and came with either an Exynos 990 or Snapdragon 865 chipset depending on the region.
But it had some issues like the 108MP camera's 100x zoom images suffered from bad quality, the Exynos powered one suffered from bad battery life compared to Snapdragon one. Plus the camera had autofocus issues, the camera hump was slightly large and the back caught a lot of fingerprints.
The Galaxy S21 Ultra seems to have addressed some of the issues by offering a better camera setup, a newer design, and comes with either a Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 region-wise. While it has a similar software experience as that of the Galaxy S20 Ultra, it also brings support for S-Pen which we have seen in the Galaxy Note series and further improves in many areas.
Is this the perfect Samsung flagship that the consumer needs or shall you still consider the older Galaxy S20 Ultra? Let's find out in the full review and see what improvements it brings over the Galaxy S20 Ultra?
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Design:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra sports a newer design compared to last year's Galaxy S20 Ultra (Review) that had a glossy back that caught a lot of fingerprints. The camera bump was slightly huge but this time the Galaxy S21 Ultra has a newer camera design that houses five cameras with an LED flash and it integrates well instead of protrusion like on the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
The back has a matte glass finish which provides better grip while holding it in hand and gives a frosted feel like we have seen on many flagship smartphones. The curves to the sides have reduced slightly compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Both the front as well as the back are protected by the Corning Gorilla Glass Vivtus which we first saw on the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (Review).
The placement of all buttons is similar to that of the Galaxy S20 Ultra were to the right side, we have volume buttons with a power button while the left side is cleaner. To the top, there are two holes for the secondary noise-canceling microphone and to the bottom, there is a USB Type-C port, a primary microphone, and a dual SIM card slot.
However, Samsung has ditched the microSD card slot for storage expansion and the internal storage only is the storage which you get with the smartphone. Like the Galaxy S20 Ultra, there is no 3.5mm headphone jack which may not bother much in 2021, but it does have an IP68 rating making it splash and water-resistant.
The Galaxy S21 Ultra is available in three different colors - Phantom Navy, Phantom Black, and Phantom Silver color. The Phantom Black looks premium and it shines when the light strikes at the back. The smartphone weighs 227 grams and Samsung has nailed the perfect weight distribution.
The display has shrunk from 6.9 inches to 6.8 inches which is not an issue while you are getting the same larger display with a punch-hole camera at the top in the center. Overall, the design feels better than the Galaxy S20 Ultra with smaller improvements.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Display:
On the front, there is a 6.8 inches Quad HD+ (3200 x1440 pixels) Dynamic AMOLED display with a screen to body ratio of 20.5:9. This display has support for 120Hz refresh rate like the Galaxy S20 Ultra but now you can use the 120Hz refresh rate with the Quad HD+ resolution which was not the case with the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
To the sides, there are minimum bezels but now we have a dynamic refresh rate where the display adjusts to different refresh rate ranging from as low as 20Hz to 120Hz where for example while reading a webpage, the refresh rate is switched to 10Hz (the Galaxy S21 and S21+ can go low as 48Hz), and during playing heavy games, it switches to 120Hz.
The peak brightness is 1500 nits which is the highest for any Android smartphone to date and if you compare brightness with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, the screen brightness has improved when viewed under direct sunlight or even in dark. There are two different modes that include Natural and Vivid.
There is an additional new feature called the Eye Comfort Shield which is more or less like the Blue Light Filter and can adjust according to the Adaptive mode which automatically adjusts the color based on the time of the day and you can now schedule it accordingly.
There is a newer Qualcomm's second-generation in-display ultrasonic fingerprint scanner that is 77% times larger in surface area compared to the one on the Galaxy S20 Ultra and 50% faster also. The face unlock is faster and works accurately too. The display supports Widevine L1, has support for HDR10+ and it covers 81.4 % of the DCI-P3 gamut.
The Always-On display works good and you have different styles to suit your needs. In terms of display, nothing has changed from the Galaxy S20 Ultra except that the Galaxy S21 Ultra can be used with the 120Hz refresh rate at Quad HD+ resolution which is a big improvement.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Performance:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra is powered by either an Exynos 2100 or Snapdragon 888 which are the most powerful chipsets to date on the Android side. In regions like Europe or India, we have the newer Exynos 2100 chipset. This chipset is built on the newer 5nm process and has the powerful Mali-G78 MP14 GPU.
The Exynos 2100 has 1x2.9 GHz Cortex X1and 3x2.8 GHz Cortex-A78 cores (both are higher clocked ones) and another 4x2.2 GHz Cortex A55 cores which are lower clocked ones. This new Cortex X1 core improves upon the older Mongoose M5 cores and since there are the new Cortex A78 cores, the performance leap is around 46-percent which is great.
On the Galaxy S20 Ultra, we had the Exynos 990 which suffered from bad battery life and the performance was not as good as on the Snapdragon 865 chipset. The Exynos 2100 chipset has better thermals and the back of the smartphones does not feel warmer.
It handles all the heavy games like Call of Duty, Asphalt 9 with ease at the highest graphics settings. All tasks from multi-tasking, browsing webpages or streaming social media felt easy on the smartphone. This newer chipset brings many improvements and closes the gap which we saw last year between the Snapdragon 865 and the Exynos 990.
In terms of benchmarks, on Geekbench 5.1, the smartphone scored 1074 and 3335 in single and multi-core tests, and in Antutu v8, it scored 6342220 which is good but still slightly lower than that on the Snapdragon 888.
This year both the Snapdragon 888 and the Exynos 2100 have an integrated 5G modem so you have the sub-6GHz band and mmWave 5G. The Galaxy S21 Ultra ships with 12/16GB LPDDR5 RAM and has 256/512GB UFS 3.1 storage which is enough, but sadly there is no scope of storage expansion.
Overall, the performance feels much better than before and Samsung brings big relief to all the customers with the newer Exynos 2100 chipset thus improving performance and gaming by a huge margin.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Software:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra runs on OneUI 3.1 built on top of Android 11 out of the box. The OneUI 3.1 is a slight upgrade over the OneUI 3.0 but brings some very noticeable changes that include small tweaks to background call videos, Director's View feature has been introduced where you can record with both the front as well as the rear camera both at the same time and quick access to widgets.
The OneUI 3.0 had a lot of new features that included bubble notifications, Samsung Free that provides some free applications for usage. There is also Google-Feed while swiping from the left of the home screen. The Bixby Assistant is present and it works well most of the time, but there is no dedicated Bixby button.
Samsung has some Google stock applications like dialler, contact, messages, and calendar. However, we do miss on MST on most of the Galaxy S21 Ultra which mean we cannot use our credit cards with Samsung Pay in malls or shopping places by just placing the smartphone, but it depends from region to region.
The OneUI 3.1 is cleaner but there are some advertisements noticed much which will not bother you much but considering this as one of the premium smartphones in the market, you do not expect ads in the software. There are a handful of Samsung specific applications and Microsoft ones that do eat up space but can be useful at times.
This is the first time on a Samsung non-Note smartphone to have support for S-Pen but you need to purchase it separately. There is no space to keep the stylus and for that Samsung provides some extra cases where you can store the stylus for use.
There are the Air commands, and the Screen-Off memo works perfectly well to take down notes on the lock screen, you can select a particular area using the S-Pen to take a screenshot. Still, it may not provide an outright Note experience, but still, it's good.
Samsung also promises another three years of Android and security updates which means it can be updated to Android 14. With the dynamic refresh rate, the multi-tasking feels much better and provides a good overall good software experience.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Cameras:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra has a slightly different camera setup compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Here the Galaxy S21 Ultra has a similar 108MP camera as the Galaxy S20 Ultra but there are some improvements. The main camera on the Galaxy S20 Ultra had some focusing problems, the 100x zoom from the telephoto camera was a disaster and barely usable.
But with the newer Galaxy S21 Ultra, we now get two telephoto cameras at the rear. So the following cameras are:
- 108MP f/1.8 Samsung ISOCELL Bright HM3 main camera with OIS
- 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera with dual-pixel AF and 120-degree field of view
- 3x optical telephoto: 10MP f/2.4 camera
- 10x optical telephoto: 10MP f/2.4 camera
- Laser autofocus sensor
The images from the main camera come out with excellent details and punchier colors. The dynamic range is excellent but there is some oversaturation noticed in the background. The noise is very much lower but this time the white balance and color retention is much better handled compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
At night, this is where the new Samsung HM3 sensor outshines the HM1 sensor on the Galaxy S20 Ultra and the Note 20 Ultra. The images during the night have a good dynamic range and the noise is also very lower due to the presence of OIS. The details are good but colors do seem a bit over-saturated.
Turning on the Night Mode does handle the exposure well and long exposure shots are handled well. The highlights in shadows are well-retained. There is also an Auto Night Mode that gets triggered automatically and the images from it have good saturation, dynamic range, and lesser noise.
The images from the 108MP mode have good details but the dynamic range is not so good and there is some amount of noise present. The colors look well saturated but the images do look softer but you can apply a crop from the 108MP images for a better result.
The second camera on the Galaxy S21 Ultra is the 12MP ultrawide camera which now gets autofocus helping it to get a better focus. The images have good colors but not as good as on the main camera, still, the dynamic range is good but there is some distortion in the background. There is no noise but some improvement is needed in terms of details.
At night, the images from the ultrawide camera lack detail, and the colors look a bit washed out. There is a lot of noise present in the background. The Night Mode resolves most of the issues, thus restoring some of the details, improves the highlights in shadows, and also improves the dynamic range.
There are two telephoto cameras this time around, one being the 3x zoom and another being the 10x zoom. This makes it convenient for the people to change to 3x or 10x optical zoom. The images from the 3x zoom camera have good details and dynamic range. The colors look punchier and the noise is also not present.
However, the images shot at 10MP upscales to 12MP due to software enhancement and do look sharpened especially due to Samsung's great image processing. The images ta 10x zoom have good details but the colors do look slightly washed out and there is plenty of noise. You can also go up to 100x zoom like on the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
At 30x zoom, the images retain good details and do look sharper, and if you go more than 30x, there is not much of a problem as Samsung has provided an anti-shake system which helps focus on the subject and also prevents some amount of noise in the background. At 100x zoom, the images are barely usable as there is a lot of noise.
But still, when you compare it with the Galaxy S20 Ultra images at 100x zoom, they resolve slightly better detail and have saturated colors. This is a big improvement and similarly, at night, the images from the 3x zoom camera have excellent details, lower noise, and have better contrast and dynamic range compared to the 10x zoom camera.
Night Mode is present on both the 3x and 10x zoom cameras and turning on the Night Mode helps resolve details, It helps improve the exposure and all the long exposure images have lesser noise. The 3x zoom images are excellent and you can clearly notice that there is no noise at all but heading towards the 10x, we too get excellent details but there is some kind of distortion here.
This clearly shows Samsung's effort in bringing out very good telephoto cameras and improving over the Galaxy S20 Ultra's telephoto camera which had some issues. In OneUI 3.1, Samsung has renamed the Live Focus to Portrait Mode and the portraits come out with excellent details.
The laser autofocus helps attain good edge detection on human subjects and certain objects in the background. The main camera does crop at 2x zoom, thus providing a clear separation between the subject and the background.
You can also adjust the background blur after taking an image which is quite handy. There are various portrait effects and all these have excellent contrast and dynamic range. The skin tones also look natural and have lesser noise.
The ultrawide camera doubles up as a macro camera so the output of the macro images at 12MP which results in images with excellent details and dynamic range. The presence of autofocus helps in getting the camera closer to the subject thus resulting in sharper and clearer images.
On the front, you get a similar 40MP f/2.2 camera which shoots to 10MP by default as we had seen with the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The details look sharper, have excellent dynamic range and the colors look well saturated with a natural-looking skin tone. There is no skin smoothening but the front camera does tend to crop when shot at 40MP resolution for better detail.
The noise is lower to a good margin. In terms of selfie portraits, the edge detection works really well and the background blur is well maintained. With OneUI 3.1, Samsung has introduced two new modes for selfies that includes Bright and Natural.
Natural provides more contrast whereas Bright brings much better details in the shadows. Overall, the selfie camera remains the same but smaller tweaks make it much better. Similarly, at night, the selfies and the selfie portraits have excellent details and dynamic range but could have done away with a little bit of noise.
In terms of videos, the Galaxy S21 Ultra can record video at 8K at 24fps. Now since you have the latest Exynos 2100 chipset, all three cameras can record 4K videos at 60fps which was restricted to the main and the ultrawide camera on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The video quality is really good on all the cameras.
The dynamic range and contrast are excellent. There is no noise present but there is some amount of over-saturation in the background. In terms of stabilization, both the OIS and EIS help resulting in much better stabilized videos with lesser noise and great detail on all four cameras. We liked the video from the 3x zoom camera which is by far has the best video of all.
Similarly, on the front, the 4K videos at 60fps came out great with excellent detail and dynamic range with natural-looking skin tones. The portrait videos also come out great with proper edge detection and have lesser noise.
Samsung has introduced some new features like Single Take 2.0 that can create multiple types of media from recording one video through all the different cameras. There is also a Director's View which is the most interesting of all that lets you record videos from both the front and the rear cameras simultaneously and you can also switch between the lenses now while recording.
The Director's View will show three different thumbnails at the bottom of the screen to show a preview of the video and let you switch between different zoom levels also. The videos look much better and switching between cameras is a hassle-free experience.
Overall, the cameras clearly show how much Samsung has put in the effort to address all the issues of the Galaxy S20 Ultra and the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has brought in the best camera setup in the Android smartphone segment.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Battery Life:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra sports a similar battery size as seen on the Galaxy S20 Ultra i.e. 5000mAh which seems to do a good job as the smartphone lasts for one and half-day with heavy usage and the display being set to 120Hz at QHD+ and with normal usage, the Galaxy S21 Ultra can last for two days with no charge.
With the dynamic refresh rate and the efficient 5nm process, the Galaxy S21 Ultra gives much better battery life compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra which suffered from battery life due to the Exynos 990 chipset. The standard screen-on time is around 6-7 hours which is really good considering the massive Quad HD+ display and larger 5000mAh battery.
But interestingly there are some downgrades. First of all, you no more get a charger bundled inside the box. This is what Apple started the trend with the newer iPhone 12 series without providing a charger inside the box. But Samsung has bundled a USB Type-C to USB Type-C cable inside the box and you can connect with any charger.
Secondly, you do have support for 25W fast charging but there is no more support for 45W fast charging which we saw with the Galaxy S20 Ultra and now Samsung has removed this particular feature here on the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
However, the Galaxy S21 Ultra retains the 15W wireless charging and also 9W reverse wireless charging but still, the speed is slower compared to 30W Warp Charging on the OnePlus 8 Pro (Review). The 25W fast charger takes around 0-100 percent in 65 mins which is fast but slower compared to OnePlus 8T's 65W charging and other fast chargers around.
Still, with the dynamic refresh rate and an efficient Exynos 2100 chipset, the Galaxy S21 Ultra provides really good battery life.
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Audio Quality:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra has a stereo speaker setup that sounds better than last year's Galaxy S20 Ultra. It does not have a 3.5mm headphone jack, but there are a set of wireless earphones and Samsung came up with True Wireless Buds Pro which sounds really good.
There is Dolby Atmos and support for Hi-Res audio output, so the sound is clear and the loudness levels are much more improved.
Verdict:
The Galaxy S21 Ultra makes for a complete flagship smartphone with all the necessary upgrades over the Galaxy S20 Ultra in terms of cameras, processor, and design. It is one of the very few smartphones to sport the newer Snapdragon 888 chipset (in the USA) whereas the international version gets the Exynos 2100 chipset.
The extra functionality of the S-Pen makes it easy for people who wanted to use the S-Pen on a Samsung non-Note smartphone. The battery life shows a significant improvement over the Galaxy S20 Ultra with the newer chipset and performance also.
The dynamic refresh rate makes it much better to use and combined with OneUI 3.1, it provides a good experience overall. The cameras are one of the best as it provides two different telephoto cameras and the main camera feels a lot more improved compared to the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
However, there are some downgrades that include no charger present inside the box, there is no more support for 45W fast charging and in many regions, there is no support for MST. The Galaxy S21 Ultra also misses on microSD card slot for storage expansion but still, you have 256/512 GB storage which is enough.
So to conclude overall, the Galaxy S21 Ultra has the best build and design, best display, a better chipset (compared to last year) and has the best set of cameras while being priced cheaper than the Galaxy S20 Ultra at launch. Samsung has done the right homework.
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