Android phones often try to market specs, with companies throwing everything but the kitchen sink at their flagship phones. But the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is probably the first phone to throw the right specs at you – right, in the sense that they go a long way in justifying the price. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there.
Let’s start with the presentation. The display of the Galaxy S21 Ultra is 0.1 inches larger than the one on the iPhone 12 Pro Max. But this 6.8-inch display isn’t about size – at all. Instead, it’s about pushing 120Hz update rates at WQHD resolution, something Samsung has criticized for not being able to do before. In practice, this means you don’t have to configure screen resolution for smooth user interface (UI) transitions and so on. If you want to know what a good show should feel like, this is it.
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That said, we’d rather get more real colors, which Samsung market research shows is not the way to go. So if you like rich vibrant colors (read too much), and chances are you will, this is again the show you want. If you like ‘popping’ colors, Samsung has been claiming that for years now. The display is clear, rich and smooth, which is exactly what you should expect if you are reading the dedicated page for this phone.
The next big shoes on the spec page are the cameras – there are five of them. When a company boasts more megapixels, reviewers automatically fall back to the “no megapixels debate”. Samsung did just that, adding a ‘new’ 108MP camera on the back, a 12MP ultrawide, two 10MP telephoto cameras (with 3x and 10x optical zoom), and a 40MP front camera.
As true as the megapixel argument is, however, it doesn’t matter as long as the end result is correct. The Galaxy S21 Ultra gets as close to the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s camera as a phone can, though it doesn’t beat it.
This phone will make you look delicious, sceneries that make you miss travel and low light scenes that make you want to throw lots of other Android phones into the trash. Samsung still needs to stop at bright daylight photos though, which is an area where it will shower noticeably compared to the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Colors, again, are overshadowed, but the argument here is as it was for the show – people like it. We are ready to yield Samsung market research here.
Smartphone cameras get a lot worse when you shoot them in India, and Samsung can’t get past that. Nevertheless, it will do the best it can for an Android phone in India today. It has no celebrity shutter lag, can shoot great shots in all situations and has more features than most of its competitors. Your friend wielding an iPhone 12 Pro Max will get even better pictures at times, especially in terms of color reproduction, but people don’t always pick up their phone at parties above you.
That leaves us with performance and battery life, which are both robust for this phone. The S21 Ultra gets up to 16GB of RAM and a whopping 512GB of storage. The Exynos 2100 internal system doesn’t make you want the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, and the phone will support anything you can and want to do with a phone today. We used the phone for the ongoing Pokemon Go game over an additional 10 hours and had just over 30% battery left by the end.
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is the best that Android phones can offer. Aside from the price, the only reason you don’t buy this phone is if you don’t like phones that are overweight, inconvenient and threaten to fall out of the pockets of even men when they sit down.