Galaxy S21 Ultra Exynos Review It's NOT A Keeper! Cameras Need Software Fixes ASAP. By TechTablets

So, yes, this is the s21 ultra. I know it was reviewed by everyone about three weeks ago, but it only released last week here for me in Europe, and I bought this from Samsung. It's the Enos, the European version, and no the title is not clickbait. There is one area of this phone and well maybe a second that is truly disappointing so far that hopefully, is going to be corrected with software updates. So my model here is the 128 gigabyte version of the s21 ultra, and it has 12 gigabytes of ram, of course, that Enos 2100 chipsets the new one, five nanometer process, it's very good. The new 108 megapixel sensor is probably where my complaints lie.

Really with that and just how Samsung has it optimized on this Enos version is downright horrible and not at flagship level, as you'll find out in this in-depth review. So first up the build quality, very, very good, this one. The first thing you do notice, though, when you get it in hand that hang on this is quite a hefty phone, and it's 230 grams. It is quite heavy, and you'll see here when you look at it side on that. It's not too bad.

The thickness, at least here on the left. We've got two antenna lines right there middle frame around the outside. This does have an ip68 water resistance, so that is up to 1.5 meters, so I wouldn't really go swimming with it because you're asking for trouble there. But if you have a look at the camera here, see that it does stick out quite a bit, it's not as bad as the note 20 ultra, which had a huge camera bulge on it. This one isn't quite as bad and there are buttons.

So we don't have a dedicated Bixby button anymore, good thing. They got rid of that and those buttons are made out of metal. They have a very good feel to them. So the curvature of this screen here, which is covered with gorilla glass rectus, has a tiny bit of a curve, and you can see a little of that light. Shifting the color shifting just out on the edges.

I wish it was a completely flat display, but it's not a bad display at all, as you'll see as I get later on into a little of depth with the screen that it's a very nice one and the bezels they're not too bad, they are very, very slim, as you can see, especially the left and right and there's the tiny bit of a chin there too, as well with this phone, so all up very, very solid, build quality and up the top you'll see right here. We do have two microphones. So yes, two of them there's no IR transmitter other antenna line and then down the bottom. We do have a type c port. Now this type c port does support the video out with Samsung's desktop mode as well.

So this is USB 3.2, our sim tray, so it takes two NATO sims. There is a rubber gasket around it and then our single downwards firing loudspeaker, there's a loudspeaker in the earpiece here as well. Now this one there's a tiny little gap here you can barely see it. You need to look at it in the light to actually see where the earpiece is, and that is where the sound comes out too, and I'll give you a sample in this in-depth review of exactly how the loudspeakers sound on this phone at 100 volume and that's our front-facing camera right there, which is 40 megapixels this one. Now I do absolutely love the finish of this phone here in the silver.

I think it looks perfect, especially how the light captures on the screen, the glass, and it's a matte glass too, and it just reflects very, very nicely here. It looks premium. It is premium. Furthermore, it's super expensive. You could almost say overpriced, of course, and then our camera set up here on the rear.

So it's very, very busy here- and this, for me, is the disappointing area, at least with the Enos model. The way it currently is with the current firmware, so the main camera is this one right here in the middle that is 108 megapixels. It has an aperture of f 1.8. We have a 10 megapixel, telephoto 10 times optical zoom camera with f 4.9, and it doesn't seem to at the time of this video, at least with the software, have any electronic image stabilization to it. It seems to rock around all over the place, so it's not very steady at all three times optical camera, which is this one is uh 10 megapixels as well, and a 12 megapixel ultra-wide.

So it's busy with the cameras- and we do have our infrared- assist laser focus just to try and correct any focus issues that this camera or these cameras could have mainly for the main camera, though, that one so Samsung are well known for having top end displays and this phone no exception to that rule- that they have got a top-end display. This is very, very nice, so enough sharp resolution, 120 refresh rate and what we have with this particular display. When you go into settings a lot of different options too, so resolution on this one is 3200 by 14 40p. So it's basically a 1440p display and under our display settings we've got all night mode, dark mode, and you're, probably seeing a little of banding that is coming through here at the moment. For me, there is one essential feature on an AMOLED display that should be there for lower brightness levels, at least is DC dimming, and that, sadly, is missing.

There is no mode for that here. Now I've got a phone that I'm currently in the process of reviewing. I can't mention its name because I'm under embargo, but it has a high-res screen, 120 hertz refresh rate, and it does have DC dimming, and it looks a lot better, especially on camera. It's mostly on camera. You will see this so full screen gestures are enabled here, of course, with this we're running android 11, it's been there full screen gestures in android for quite a while.

Now and overall, it is really, really nice screen. So I'll show you some samples of just what it looks like color, wise that it is really great, and the touch response is excellent. I've increased the sensitivity because it does have a pre-applied screen protector on it, and maximum brightness is 740 nits. According to my measurements that is indoors, I believe outdoors, it will actually go a lot higher than that very, very good screen. You can make it out in direct sunlight.

Let's have a look at some of the options we do get with this. So we've got our eye shield. That's all normal! There screen mode, then it's on by default. I put it on this because it's default and I actually prefer natural. That's a little better to my eyes, at least in advanced settings.

You can adjust your white balance and everything else with this. So overall it is a premium screen very, very nice. I just wish it was 100 flat, but the curvature on the left and the right isn't too bad. It's only minor. So my version is the European version.

It is the Enos 2100, with the 12 gigabytes of ram 120 gigabytes of storage non-expandable. Sadly, so it is a very, very quick phone 120 hertz screen running at that sharper resolution does not impact the performance at all. With this now just talk a little too about that screen resolution. One thing I didn't focus on before that. If you wanted to save a little of battery, you can put it onto full HD plus, you can also put it under 60 hertz, and it will give you yeah a little of an additional battery boost there, and I'll get on to that later on too, in this review, better life.

For me so far and now the about four days I've been using this phone non-stop is kind of disappointing, and I'll get on to that soon. It's a very good multitasking performance. It is really, really quick. Now one thing to point out too system apps: there have been some complaints about advertising in the ROM and system apps, I'm not seeing it here with the European version. It does not seem to happen.

It could be carriers putting their own ads into the system apps. But I've seen on some people posting on Twitter that right here there would be a big advertisement. Well not with my unit right here. So when you first get it, there's a bit of bloatware you're going to get Spotify Facebook, some Samsung apps, Microsoft apps in there, but it's not too bad. They haven't installed all these crappy games and other things that you just have to go and spend 20 minutes or removing, not here, so they're toning down on that slightly, not as bad as some manufacturers like Xiaomi.

It's a free available space, only 101 gigabytes with this out of the box. That's not really that good! Is it if you take a lot of 4k video and even a bit of 8k video that this phone can also record in then you're going to run out of space, pretty quick and no expandability, no micro, SD card support with this one is a real shame. Now the an tutu score is good. Very good. Don't get me wrong, but it is disappointing for next gen I'm able to get with previous gen phones like snapdragon 865 phones into the 600s, and this really is not that much faster at all.

However, we have some impressive speeds for our internal storage. Very, very good. I mean look at this sequential reads and writes amazing, random, reads and writes, which are very important and probably the most important one really for loading up your applications and installing apps perfect. This is like NVMe drive speeds here, very, very good with that. Now the wireless 2 as expected, perfect, no problems right up close to my Wi-Fi six routers.

I am able to get amazing speeds and away from it, so at a distance with only two bars of signal, strength or three bars still getting over 200 megabits per second is quite good, not the fastest. I've seen I have seen from some Xiaomi phones around 350, but it still is good. It's acceptable, so dual-band, dual frequency, should I say, GPS is on board with this one, and the GPS performance is very good. When you look at the average signal strength, as you can see, and all the satellites have a very good signal quality there. However, the accuracy, it's only around four meters, all the time for me on the Enos version here.

For some reason it will not go to three, and I know that with some other phones that don't have these restrictions, you can even get accuracy of one meter. So it's going to be good. Moving around town I haven't noticed, any problems doesn't lose my place. That is the main thing. The average signal strength is very good, so it does have a security level, one for wide vine Netflix, supported Disney, plus, all of that in full HD.

I have tested this out, hdr10 the screen supports and then the refresh rates you can see there too, as well now camera two API. This one should be level three supports the maximum on the hardware level, it's full, which is not too bad. That's still going to give us, I believe, access to pretty much everything we need for running a Guam port there. If you wanted different photos, that is- and here we have battery most important battery life. So first test done.200 nits of brightness runs down stops at 20 percent 8 hours and 52 minutes is not an amazing score at the maximum resolution.1440P! That's that's not brilliant! That's really! Not that good okay, but it's going to be a full day's use for most people there. Now, if you put it on to full HD plus resolution hertz, we gain an additional four hours, then of on screen time and run time bringing it up to then I would say about an almost two-day phone, then for most people at the sacrifice of the resolution and the fluidity of the UI, of course, only running at 60, 120 hertz is the way to go.

It's just so much smoother and better, of course, and then charge time to using my own charger here which runs on this superfast charging. That's the maximum 25 watts, 126 minutes it took to charge this battery, which is itbeing okay, but it's definitely not the fastest, and the widest charging is only 15 watts as well, which also isn't the fastest moving on to our audio now so dual loudspeakers one down here, one in the earpieces I mentioned at the start. When we looked at the design of this now, there is no 3.5 millimeter out on this, and it's gone that's gone forever, I think with Samsung. Sadly, now you can use a type-c adapter to 3.5 millimeter. It sounds fine, it's actually very, very good.

The audio quality or Bluetooth earbuds, like these here, there's some sabra elite, 75 t's, one of my favorites there, these little speakers I'll give you something at 100 volume, sound, very, very good, they're, rich they've got a bit of base to them, and they don't distort at 100 volume. Here's that sample now. So how was our gaming performance? It is very good, as you'd expect flagship here and the Enos 2100 very, very good, very smooth performance on maximum settings with Call of Duty right here now. I'm inning well towards the end of this game. Right here got five kills already, and we'll see how I go, but I want to check on the thermal, so I'm going to play for another round or two rounds more to check and see just how warm is this phone going to get? Will it run into any throttling? Will the screen go dim or anything like that and looking at these temperatures, so we're getting up to there's a bit of a hot patch there on the front of the screen? That's almost 40 degrees, that's not bad at all after one hour of gaming, and we can see where the chipset is located here right on the back and that is getting up to 38 degrees.

Now ambient temperatures in this room are approximately 20 to 23 degrees, all up the thermals on the s21 ultra here, the Enos version are perfect. So, looking out our rare video quality now, if you're watching this particular review on a phone or 1080p, you probably won't notice much of what I'm talking about here, but I'm truly disappointed in the video quality. This is the well the floor at the moment, and Samsung needs to address this. So we have a low bit rate. It's only 38 megabits per second.

Instead of the typical 4850, we normally get with 4k footage that is great having the zoom camera. So this is the three times you notice that there's now a bit of trimmer coming through with that, and then we have our 10 times, which is very, very shaky. It does not seem to have any electronic image stabilization being applied to it or even optical image. Stabilization doesn't seem so good with that, but it is the videos grain that it has to it, probably because of the low bit rate. If you watch this on a 4k TV, an OLED that I have at home and even a 4k monitor, you will see some grain to it.

It doesn't look quite as sharp, and this is noticeable more with the main camera. I find that they're simply over doing it over sharpening, as well with the zoom photos, so overall a little disappointing and even this electronic image stabilization in a recent comparison, I did up against the mate 40 pro and the 10 ultra. It actually lost out to last generation mobile. So that's where they need to address this Samsung and improve on the Enos model, the video performance and quality, because it simply doesnot fit the price tag. I'm truly disappointed with it.

So with a front facing camera, it is 40 megapixels this one here, 4k 60 is the maximum, and I just 4k 30 at the moment right here, and I find it. It is good, very good quality, very good, audio quality. It probably sounds a little muffled too, because I've got my mask on. We have to work by law here, but what happens a lot- and this has happened on a lot of the Samsung phones previous generations as well- that we sometimes have problems with the autofocus front-facing camera. So I might not be in focus correctly and if I move it over here the background, it's a little slow to react.

We can see, then it does get a lock onto the background, which is great, and now it should lock onto my face. But sometimes I have noticed that the focus can pulse and not be perfect to override this. You can, of course, tap on your face and then hold, and that is going to lock, then the exposure and should hopefully lock the focus just that sometimes it will flutter go in and out which has been a problem with the phase detection, autofocus front-facing cameras, okay, so, as you saw from the stills very good daytime stills, but the 10 times zoom camera over sharpening, there's um artifacts in there and just general noise, not really that great, not kind of good performance. Really, I think they need to optimize these cameras. So much now, where it really completely falls flat.

For me, is the video performance. It is just to state outright bluntly for me, the Enos version here, not at flagship level. I did a camera comparison with the mate 40 pro, as I mentioned, and the s21 ultra, and also the m10 ultra. This lost out in video quality, poor stabilization, poor bit rate dropped frames, noise and video grain. Looking washed out contrast issues, color issues, everything the list goes on and on and on so Samsung has a huge job for this European model, at least the Enos.

As far as I can see to really improve the camera software, because it's a huge let down, and it's a problem at the current state, this phone is, is for me to actually keep it or recommend it for those cameras that is, for the rest of the phone is fantastic. Well, the battery life is average, okay, so for a 120, hertz screen and then the high resolution, it's always going to have a huge impact on the battery life, so it's average battery life. It's not amazing, even though it's a 5, 000 William hour battery is quite large. The Enos does not have any thermal throttling or thermal issues that I can see gaming on it for one hour. Thermals are very, very good, so it's just that Samsung please.

If they watch this video, which they probably will never do, update the firmware, update the camera software, and then I could actually say yeah it's an alright phone, but it is of course, very, very expensive. No charger included is stupid. Why do they have to follow apple? It's not about saving the environment. It's about saving their money, increasing their profits. They can now ship twice as many units because the box is half the size and then, of course, a lot of people will go out and buy that 25 watt fast charger that this needs no 3.5, millimeter, headphone jack either and no micro SD card support. I wish we had that, especially considering this only has a hundred and one gigabyte's free when you first get it.

So. Thank you so much for watching this review here of the s21.

Source : TechTablets