Galaxy S21 Ultra—$200 cheaper but still not competitive - Ars Technica

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The Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Ron Amadeo
The back has this crazy new camera layout. It's built into the corner.

Ron Amadeo
There are so many cameras. The left column, top to bottom: the 12MP wide-angle, 108MP main, and 10MP 10x optical. Right column: Laser AF, LED flash, 10MP 3x optical.

Ron Amadeo
The camera bump is part of the corner of the phone, and it's pretty tall.

Ron Amadeo
A light app gives you an idea of the bezel sizes.

Ron Amadeo
The front camera uses Samsung's standard hole punch cutout.

Ron Amadeo
You can see the tiniest curve to the display on the left and right sides.

Ron Amadeo
The bottom has a speaker, USB-C port, and the SIM tray. There's no MicroSD slot.

Ron Amadeo
The top edge.

Ron Amadeo
One more camera bump shot.

Ron Amadeo

Next up on the review bench is Samsung's latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S21 Ultra. Like most Samsung phones, it's technically competent and features a new Snapdragon 888 SoC, a new 10x optical zoom camera, and Samsung's, uh, interesting approach to charging. The big news is that the S21 Ultra is $200 cheaper than the S20 Ultra, and there aren't many features missing. Cheaper is good! But other phones still offer better value for the money.

There's not much new about the Galaxy S21 design. The phone has the usual metal frame with big glass panels on the front and back. The front looks almost exactly like previous models, with slim bezels and a centered front camera hole in the display. The sides of the display are curved ever so slightly, which serves no purpose and makes the edges of videos a tiny bit distorted. This is Samsung's second generation of 120Hz display, and it comes without the tradeoffs of the first generation. Previously, the Galaxy S20 could only run either at max resolution or at 120Hz but not both at the same time. The S21 120Hz display comes with no such compromises.

The back contains most of the major design changes. The most noticeable is the crazy new camera bump, which is integrated with the corner of the phone. The whole camera bump is actually aluminum, as the aluminum sides wrap around the corner of the phone and join another flat aluminum plate that houses all of the cameras. The rest of the back remains glass. This year Samsung offers a matte finish to the glass, which does a great job hiding fingerprints.

Samsung's main priority with the weird camera bump feels like it was "being different," and if that was the goal, the company definitely succeeded. The back doesn't look like an iPhone or like any of thousands of Android phones. But thanks to the camera bump being tall and lopsided, the phone is unstable when lying on a flat surface; tapping just about anywhere on the left side will make the phone tip over.

That rectangle is the ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint reader. Normally it's completely invisible, but if you blast the display with a flashlight and crank up the photo contrast, you can see it.

Ron Amadeo
Here's the fingerprint reader next to my thumbprint. It's definitely bigger than last year, but still not big enough! (Also please don't frame me for murder or anything.)

Ron Amadeo
For comparison, here's the Galaxy S20 fingerprint reader from last year. The S21 is a big improvement.

Ron Amadeo

One of the best changes this year in terms of day-to-day usage is a bigger fingerprint reader. Samsung is the only major company shipping Qualcomm's in-screen, ultrasonic fingerprint reader. Ideally, you would want a fingerprint sensor as big as your fingerprint, which would be something like 14mm×14mm. The S10 and S20 fingerprint sensors only measured a tiny 9mm×4mm sliver of your fingertip, while the S21's 8mm×8mm sensor now offers a bit more wiggle room.

Ideally, you would want a fingerprint sensor that covers a huge chunk of the phone screen. The number one thing that makes these in-screen fingerprint readers fail is the user missing the fingerprint sensor location, so bigger is always better. It would be a huge improvement to just blindly slap your finger anywhere on the lower third of the phone screen and have it do a scan, but we aren't there yet. Qualcomm announced what sounded like a major step toward this goal a year ago with the 3D Sonic Max, a crazy-big 30mm×20mm fingerprint sensor. Qualcomm originally said the sensor would be out in 2020, but a phone never launched with it. Now the company says that a phone with the new sensor will be out sometime in 2021.

As for the S21, there's no denying that the bigger fingerprint sensor is an improvement. It's easier and more reliable than it was last year, and I'd say it's about as good at the optical readers that most other phones use. The fingerprint reader is always ready to scan your finger, even if the display is totally off, but by default the reader has no indicator when the screen is off, so good luck blindly hitting the bullseye. The best thing you can do to make the fingerprint reader better is to use the always-on display mode, which—besides displaying the time and notifications—shows you a target for the fingerprint reader.

	Galaxy S21	Galaxy S21+	Galaxy S21 Ultra
SCREEN	2400×1080 6.2-inch 120Hz (424ppi) OLED	2400×1080 6.7-inch 120Hz (393ppi) OLED	3200×1440 6.8-inch 120Hz (516ppi) OLED
OS	Android 11 Pie with Samsung One UI
CPU	Eight-core, 2.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, 5nm
RAM	8GB	8GB	12GB or 16GB
STORAGE	128GB or 256GB	128GB or 256GB	128GB, 256GB, or 512GB
NETWORKING	802.11b/g/n/ac/ax, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC		(Same) + 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E
5G support	sub-6 GHz and mmWave	sub-6 GHz and mmWave	sub-6 GHz and mmWave
PORTS	USB Type-C
REAR CAMERA	12MP Main 12MP Wide Angle 64MP Telephoto (1.06x optical)	12MP Main 12MP Wide Angle 64MP Telephoto (1.06x optical)	108MP Main 12MP Wide Angle 10MP 3x Optical Telephoto 10MP 10x Optical Telephoto Laser AF
FRONT CAMERA	10MP	10MP	40MP
SIZE	151.7×71.2×7.9mm	161.5×75.6×7.8mm	165.1×75.6×8.9mm
WEIGHT	171g	202g	229g
BATTERY	4000mAh, 25W charging	4800mAh, 25W charging	5000mAh, 25W charging
STARTING PRICE	$799.99 at Samsung	$999.99 at Samsung	$1,199.99 at Samsung
OTHER PERKS	Wireless charging, in-screen fingerprint sensor. IP68 water and dust resistance

The $200 reduction in price does come with some small feature loss. In the US, Samsung Pay's MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) support has been removed. MST was an innovative solution that enabled tap-and-pay support on old credit card readers that didn't have NFC. Hardware inside the phone would generate a magnetic field and beam data to the mag stripe reader inside the credit card terminal. MST was an emulated, wireless version of a magnetic stripe, allowing even the oldest, dumbest credit card readers to work with tap-and-pay.

MST was only ever a stop-gap solution, though, and with NFC having greater adoption now, Samsung has axed the feature from the US Galaxy S21 line. Samsung hasn't removed MST from every country, but it doesn't provide a detailed breakdown of which countries have MST and which ones don't. MST was a solid reason to use Samsung Pay, but with its removal, there's little reason to pick Samsung's payment solution over Google's.

Another removed item is the MicroSD slot. Samsung's MicroSD support was never great, since it didn't support Android's Adoptable Storage feature, which let you merge SD storage with the internal storage and just not worry about it. Your only option for more storage now is to pay Samsung for a roomier phone model. The S21 Ultra starts at 128GB for $1,200, while the 256GB version is $1,250, and the 512GB version is $1,380.

Samsung opts out of the charging wars

Samsung is really falling behind the competition when it comes to wired quick charging. The S21 Ultra actually charges more slowly than the S20 Ultra from last year; it has 25W charging, down from 45W on the S20 Ultra. I timed the S21 Ultra charging from zero to 100, and it did about 1 percent a minute for the first 20 minutes, hit 50 percent at 43 minutes, and charged to full in 1 hour, 35 minutes. That's really bad.

A OnePlus 8T has a 65W charger and can power a 4500mAh battery from 0 to 100 in 39 minutes. The S21 Ultra only hit 46 percent in that time.

The speediest charging device on the market is the "120W" Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra (apparently, actual power to the phone is more like 80W), which will rocket a 4500mAh battery from 0 to 50 percent in seven minutes—or to full in 21 minutes. This phone is part of Qualcomm's 100W+ charging scheme called "Quick Charge 5," which should be coming to more phones soon.

Enlarge / The world's slowest "fast" charging.

Ron Amadeo

In the flagship smartphone world, where not much changes each year, fast charging has been one of my favorite recent phone features. It's becoming especially valuable as charging times get more extreme. When you can charge your phone to full in the same amount of time it takes to hit up a gas station or get ready to go out (remember going out?), it removes the anxiety about your phone's battery life. If you're driving somewhere, you can even get a car charger and be close to full by the time you get to your destination.

Samsung's dramatic cuts to charging also come with the removal of the charger from the box, which mirrors what Apple did with the iPhone 12. Apple's removal of the charger maybe makes sense for Apple, since the company has never pushed for fast charging on the level of Android. The iPhone 12 only charges at 20W, and lots of people have 20W chargers. Any good Android phone is going to continue to need a brand-new charger, every year, for the foreseeable future, if they want to charge at max speed. Instead of copying Apple, Samsung should be pushing the state of the art; completely giving up in the charging wars is not a good look for a company that is usually all about speeds and feeds.

I know absolutely zero companies are going to listen to me, but charging is not a solved problem yet, and we still need new chargers while the technology improves. When every phone can charge from 0 to 100 percent in five minutes, then you can start removing them.

Software

The home screen and app drawer.

Ron Amadeo
The notification panel and quick settings.

Ron Amadeo
Recent apps and the settings.

Ron Amadeo
The Google Discover feed and the lock screen.

Ron Amadeo

Samsung's Android 11 skin is mostly fine. It doesn't offer any killer features and doesn't break too many things. But Samsung is slow at delivering updates, there are tons of packed-in apps, and Samsung packs the phone with ads in the notification panel and in some of the packed-in apps.

Samsung's software is mostly just Android 11 with a new coat of paint. The notification panel, recent apps, and lock screen all work like normal, and everything else is an app that can be replaced if you don't like it. Samsung's settings screen has a nice nod toward reachability with big starting headers that push the list content down to the middle of the screen, where it can easily be reached one-handed. We've praised this design since it debuted on the Galaxy S10, and it's apparently a good enough idea to make it upstream to Android 12, which adopts a similar settings design.

This year Samsung moved slightly away from Bixby by junking the Bixby home screen, instead choosing to ship the Google Discover screen (basically a personalized Google News feed) as the left-most home screen panel. Samsung and Google made a huge deal about their new partnership during the S21 unveiling, with Samsung's president of mobile communications, T.M. Roh, calling the S21 the start of "a new and expanded partnership with Google" and Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer getting some time on the virtual stage. Lockheimer talked up the pre-loaded version of Google Duo; while internationally some version of the phone comes with Google Messages, that's not the case for the US version.

Despite a new partnership with Google, the S21 still seems to specifically discriminate against the Google Assistant. The power button is so configurable now that Samsung calls it the "side button," and by default it launches Bixby. You can't configure it to launch the Google Assistant instead of Bixby, but you can configure it to launch an app—as long as that app is not the Google Assistant app. The "Ok Google" hotword can still be set up, though, and it works just as it does on a Pixel.

The phone comes loaded with a suite of apps from Samsung, Google, and Microsoft, so there is a lot of overlap. There are two app stores (Play Store and Galaxy Store), two browsers (Chrome and Samsung Internet), two email clients (Gmail and Outlook), two gallery apps (Google Photos and Gallery), two forms of cloud storage (Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive), two office suites (Microsoft Office and Google Docs), two social networks (Facebook and Linkedin), two music players (YouTube Music and Spotify), two voice assistants (Bixby and the Google Assistant), and two system-wide account systems (Samsung and Google).

Dealing with all the Samsung apps can be strange. By default, Samsung Pay exists on the bottom edge of the home screen, and you can swipe up from the bottom to open the app. Normally on Android (and iOS), a swipe up and hold will trigger the recent apps screen, but on the Galaxy S21 homescreen, the Samsung Pay trigger is smack in the middle of the bottom edge of the display. If you want gesture navigation to work like normal, you'll have to turn this off in the Samsung Pay settings.

If you happen to open the pre-installed "Samsung Global Goals" app, the first thing it will do is automatically highjack your lock screen wallpaper, replacing it with full-screen ads for charitable organizations. The charities seem to support admirable causes like ending poverty and hunger, but promoting them through malware-style tactics is not appreciated.

The major non-Android feature left in Samsung's skin is "Dex," a desktop mode that lets you run bigger versions of your Android apps on a mouse and keyboard. It sounds like an interesting idea until you realize regularly using it would mean having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard lying around that isn't attached to a dedicated computer, and there's no good sales pitch for why anyone would do that. A phone is probably the most inappropriate device you could use to drive a desktop computer setup. A phone is slow, battery-powered, and passively cooled, and with the magic of data-synced cloud computing, there's little benefit to using a phone as a desktop.

Samsung is promising three years of major updates for this phone and monthly security updates. Lately, it takes Samsung about three months to ship a major update.

The Snapdragon 888

Some international versions of the Galaxy S21 will come with Samsung's own Exynos 2100 SoC, but here in the US, the Galaxy S21 has the brand-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC.

This year, Qualcomm is using ARM's new Cortex X1 design for the CPU. The easiest way to explain this is with some ARM design history. First, ARM SoCs had a "big.LITTLE" layout, with four slower, lower-power cores for background work (the "little" cores) and four faster, higher-power cores (the "big" cores) for whatever app you were currently using. Then ARM came up with a "Prime" core design, which addressed single-threaded performance by taking one of those "big" cores and clocking it higher than the other three. With the X1 design, ARM has further evolved this "Prime" idea by making the Prime core a bespoke core design, built for bursty smartphone usage like loading apps and webpages. The Snapdragon 888 is a 5nm chip with one "Prime" Cortex-X1 core at 2.84GHz, three "medium" Cortex-A78 cores at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz.

When the Snapdragon 888 was announced, Qualcomm promised a moderate speed boost of 25 percent from the CPU and 35 percent from the GPU. At least on the Galaxy S21 Ultra, we did not see 25 percent faster CPU scores compared to the S20 Ultra. Comparing our Geekbench 4 scores, the S21 Ultra overall multicore score is only up 6 percent, while the (admittedly more important) single-core score is up 19 percent, showing the power of that X1 CPU. The phone gets surprisingly hot while running benchmarks or games, and you can easily get the GPU to throttle down to last year's performance numbers.

The bigger-than-normal change this year is that Qualcomm finally got its ducks in a row when it comes to 5g, and it is shipping the Snapdragon 888 as a single-chip solution with an onboard modem, just as 4G phones are normally made. Last year, Qualcomm rushed 5G to market with the Snapdragon 865, which shipped with a 4G and 5G modem on a separate chip. The phones also needed to pack in several mmWave modules from Qualcomm, ballooning the size requirements even further. These early 5G chips made phones bigger and more expensive, and, once the summer rolled around, there were plenty of heat problems. I don't think we'll ever see phones get smaller, but at least, now that we're back to a built-in modem, the whole S21 line is $200 cheaper.

I would love to do some kind of mmWave 5G test, but it's impossible for me to get a 5G signal, and that's still the case for most people in the US. 5G remains something few people should care about, because most either can't get a signal or won't see a significant speed increase. If you live smack in the middle of a major city and frequently see capacity (not reception) issues, like cell service going down during rush hour, then maybe 5G will help. 5G is now mandatory when buying a flagship smartphone, but at least it's a more mature design with an onboard modem, and it's not compromising the 4G design.

Another fun test we can't do yet would involve the Galaxy S21 Ultra's support for Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi 6E (which is different from Wi-Fi 6) extends Wi-Fi into the 6GHz spectrum, and the Galaxy S21 Ultra (and only the Ultra) is the first phone to support it. Having 6GHz gives Wi-Fi networks a much bigger chunk of spectrum to play with compared to 2.4GHz and 5GHz versions, enabling better networks in crowded areas where 5GHz spectrum might be overloaded. You need new clients and access points for Wi-Fi 6E to work, and now that the first smartphone client is out, several access points should launch sometime this year.

Camera

The S21 Ultra camera takes a picture of my plant. It's fine.
The Pixel 4 XL (the same camera as the Pixel 5, and 3, and 2) is much brighter and better looking.
I feel like I want to say this a lot: this OnePlus 8 Pro shot looks just like the Samsung camera, though it is a bit darker.
This is the 10x camera from across the room. It's a lot darker and duller, but it's a zoom lens, what do you expect?
A darker shot with handheld long exposure. The S21 Ultra does a good job of lighting up the scene while not smudging up the details. Yoshi is still fuzzy.
The OnePlus 8 Pro shows what not to do: BLUR. So much blur.
The Pixel 4 has a similar level of detail. If we really want to pick nits, it's a bit washed out maybe.
In the spirit of night mode, here's the S21 Ultra in the dead of night. This is really tough, but the S21 finds a good balance between the lights in the background and getting some light on the foreground.
The Pixel 4 has better ground details but blows out the lights. It interprets the color as very gray. I don't think "very gray" or "very yellow" is really correct.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is the worst at detail.

It's a shame that Samsung's marketing around the S20 and S21 cameras is so bad, because it obfuscates real improvement that has happened. The S20 Ultra and S21 Ultra are both labeled with a "100x zoom" rating, so you might think they have similar zoom capabilities, but the S21 Ultra's "100x" zoom is a big improvement over the S20 UItra's "100x" zoom. Samsung's zoom rating refers only to how far the AI-powered zoom feature will go. The S20 Ultra has a 4x optical zoom, and everything after that is digital zoom and AI-powered nonsense. The S21 Ultra has a 10x optical zoom, and while both cameras at 100x turn your picture to unrecognizable mush, the S21 Ultra can zoom in much more before Samsung's software starts ruining your picture.

The 10x optical camera feels like a valid tool to have in your camera toolbox. It's much more valuable than the smaller zoom cameras, which barely made a difference. The 10x optical turns in decent shots, but it's definitely darker and less detailed than the 1x camera, so "zoom with your feet" if you can.

Samsung's camera switching at 10x is wonky. You would hope that the "10x" zoom button would just switch to the 10x optical camera, but covering the lenses to see which camera is in use will show that sometimes you get the 10x optical camera at "10x"... but sometimes at 10x you get the 3X optical camera with AI smudgification. You don't have any control over this in the UI. The "10x" button is either really buggy or has some kind of heuristics that pick which lens to use. It seems to favor the 3x optical zoom for closer objects, even when the 10x optical has no problem focusing on the object. I wish you could turn this off, because the "fake 10x" 3x optical with AI is definitely inferior to the 10x optical zoom.

Here are crops from two "10x" pictures of my computer screen from about 3 feet away. The real optical zoom (bottom) shows actual pixels, while the "3x optical with AI" version of "10x" just fudges all the details. You have no control over this.
We can give Samsung's 100x zoom camera an eye exam with this printout. This is a photo of a piece of paper at 1x, but even the bottom rows are not as good of quality as they should be.
10x optical zoom, taken from a few feet back so the framing is the same, looks just as clear as 1x.
Back up even farther and here's 30x, where the AI starts to kick in and destroy the bottom four rows.
50x mushes the bottom five rows.
I couldn't back up quite far enough for 100x, but here the bottom eight rows are wiped out. You can't even count the bottom rows.

The comparison above gives us an idea of how Samsung's AI just makes up details and fudges textures. These are both pictures of my computer screen at "10x" using both the 10x optical and 3x optical lenses with AI upscaling. The image should just be a uniform grid of pixels, but the AI version has a totally crazy background. The AI also seems to recognize points of high contrast and gives all the letters a fake solid-white routine instead of continuing the grid. It's a shame there are no controls for this, because the bottom picture is good, and the top picture is bad. Now when I'm zooming, I tend to just wave a finger over the 10x camera lens to make sure it's in use.

If you pinch-zoom on the screen, you have fine-grained control over the zoom setting and can increment it by 0.1x, but you should always keep in mind what you're asking the 3x optical and 10x optical cameras to do. "9x" means a 3x optical photo and then AI upscaling to get the rest of the way to 9x. 10x, if the camera app doesn't act up, doesn't use upscaling and will look way better.

Other companies offer the same thing for less money

The Galaxy S21 Ultra's lower price is definitely a step in the right direction. It's just $200 cheaper than last year without much in the way of corner cutting. Even with the price cut, though, the S21 Ultra still isn't a great deal compared to the competition. Our usual top Android flagship pick, the similarly sized OnePlus 8 Pro, still has an MSRP of $900—or $300 cheaper than the S21 Ultra. Samsung has a slightly bigger battery (5000mAh versus 4510mAh), but OnePlus has speedier charging options. There's certainly nothing in the S21 Ultra that feels like it's worth $300 more than the OnePlus 8 Pro. Most of the hardware differences revolve around the S21 Ultra being a generation newer than the OnePlus 8 Pro, so you get a Snapdragon 888 instead of the older Snapdragon 865, 2GB more RAM, and Wi-Fi 6E. Assuming OnePlus doesn't totally screw up the OnePlus 9, these generational differences will only exist for a month or two. OnePlus also doesn't pack your ~$1,000 smartphone with ads.

The problem with Samsung phones still hasn't changed. They're expensive, but that price increase doesn't come with any good technologies that are exclusive to Samsung. The Galaxy S21 happens to be the first phone to launch with the Snapdragon 888, but this is available to every other phone manufacturer, and you'll see tons of devices with it in the next few months at lower prices. The best Samsung-made part in this phone is the display, but Samsung's OLED division sells similar displays to any OEM that comes asking.

The display and cameras are from Samsung, the SoC is from Qualcomm, the software is from Google, and every part can be found in a third-party phone for cheaper than Samsung is asking. The only unique thing in the Galaxy S21 that isn't for sale to every other OEM is Samsung's Android skin, which is probably the weakest part of the Galaxy S21. You'll get slower updates, some odd Bixby lock-in, and lots of ads and crapware. Why bother?

The good

It's $200 cheaper.
The matte back does a great job of hiding fingerprints.
The bigger fingerprint reader is a nice improvement over the tiny S20 and S10 readers.
The 10x optical zoom is nice to have, but zoom in much more than that and you'll get an ugly picture.

The bad

It's still not price-competitive with OnePlus.
Around every corner of Samsung's software is a new checkbox asking to show you ads.
Tons of packed-in app overlap with two app stores, two account systems, etc.
Smaller OEMs than Samsung, with less money, do a better job of delivering updates.

The ugly

Why has Samsung completely abandoned fast charging?

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"still" - Google News
February 16, 2021 at 10:39PM
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Galaxy S21 Ultra—$200 cheaper but still not competitive - Ars Technica
"still" - Google News
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