GALAXY S21 ULTRA: Unboxing and First Look! By Droid Life

Hey everybody, what is up Tim here back again for droid life? Long time, no see hope everyone is having a good start to 2021 and, as you can see, we've got something special to kick off the new year. We've got the galaxy s21 ultra from Samsung. Finally in-house it. You know it took us a while we weren't on the list. You know, but that's okay, we're not going to hold it against anybody. Uh we've got it along with everyone else, who's getting their phones in today, so very cool.

We're going to unbox this thing: galaxy, s21 ultra. Of course this is the one with all the specs and with all the specs. That means it has all the price tags uh starting at 11.99 a bit. You know for that price, you're getting quite a bit. So let's go ahead, we're going to go over all the specs.

All that good stuff give you kind of our first look and impressions here, because this is our first time seeing the device. So let's just get right into it. This is our galaxy s21 ultra unboxing, all right, so I haven't even gone ahead and cut it open. So we're going to do that now, um. You know I remember doing an unboxing somewhat recently and telling myself that I needed to sharpen my blade- and I haven't done that, but thankfully it's still sharp enough to get through some tape.

So here we go galaxy s21 ultra and, as you can see, you know real quick. I guess before we dive right in. Let's take a look. The box itself is a lot thinner than we're used to seeing, and that is because Samsung is not including a charging adapter for this device, so no no plug. I think you can purchase one separately for like 20 bucks or something like that.

I don't think it's too bad. So really, there's not all that much to see in the box. But here is the device itself. I went with the phantom black color. As you can see.

It looks very nice as long as I can get it to focus on something. That's one thing you know photographing darker devices. It is a bit more difficult, but that's: okay, massive camera module on the back side, we're going to go ahead and start peeling all that tape. Oh yes, wow! That's intense! Let's put that right. There we've got more black tape, and it's just letting you know real quick.

Don't stick your sim tool on! Oh, in that freaking, then that microphone right here definitely stick it in the sim tray slot. You know that's just bad design right there. They probably could have done that themselves and I have to worry about people doing that. That is a microphone that is your little sim tray. Oh, look at that.

That is matte! Oh, baby! You know I almost went silver now that I see this thing, I'm really glad I didn't matte black everybody welcome 2021! This is sweet! Oh, that feels good. All right, so we've got things peeled all right, we'll look at the device here in a second! For now, let me um I'll boot it up, and I'll set it here to the side, so everyone can see it boot, all right! So that's booting and while that's booting we're going to take a look, what else is in the box here but, like I said, there's not much uh. Actually, there's huh freaking, nothing. We got an empty box here. We've got sim tool here now we at least got to have a data: cable, black data, cable assuming USB c to USB.

Yes, it is fantastic and there's your quick start guide, etc. There's nothing else! You need to see. So you know that makes the whole unboxing experience for your 1200 phone kind of boring, but at the same time you know we're we're lowering the cost uh we're saving the planet or at least we're trying to uh. Oh, boy. You know what these never go back, the same way they went in, so anyway we're just going to set that over there um so that booted up nice and quick, of course, we're running android 11.

Here I was hoping. Maybe we could up the brightness, but that's okay, that's totally legible for everybody. So, let's run down the specs real, quick, massive 6.8 inch infinity. Oh, AMOLED display resolution of 3200 by 1440 quad, HD plus uh 515 pixels per inch and with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120 hertz. I think it can go down all the way to 10 hertz to 120 hertz, depending on what it is you're doing with the device.

So if you're gaming more hurts, if you're just reading something 10 hertz, I suppose we'll see how that works out and see how it benefits the battery uh, HDR, 10 plus display with gorilla glass 7. So overall should be a pretty darn good, viewing experience pretty sure, Samsung upped the overall brightness output of the device, as well so kind of looking forward to that in the old day time. If Portland Oregon could ever see some sun again, that would be cool. We just had snowed the other day, and now I'm rambling storage uh starting at 128 gigs, all the way up to 512 gigs of storage, depending on which uh model you get uh you've got two choices for ram. You've got 12 gigs, which is the base and then all the way up to 16 gig uh 16 gigs of ram.

Both are LP ddr5 ram, so good speeds uh on the back side. Yeah. As you can see, this thing has a couple of cameras. I think it's got four in total all right, one, two, three four plus with your: oh, oh god, over folks, we've accessed accessibility, mode um. So we've got four cameras on the back side.

Here. You've got a 108 megapixel wide angle, lens uh that has optical image. Stabilization is, as well as PDF, which is phase detection, autofocus. You've got a 12 megapixel ultra-wide camera with dual pixel autofocus, which is Samsung sort of autofocus, name for its technology, uh, pretty darn good at focusing on subjects fast and then being able to press that shutter speed, you're gonna, be blasting photos and no problem, and then two canon two one, two ten megapixel telephoto lenses each have sort of like a variable um. What is that uh um cam space on the word right now, but we have uh optical zoom, uh, uh, varying optical zoom levels on each lens, uh and so the phone they have brought it back.

Space zoom is back up to a hundred times uh space zoom, which is that mix of optical and digital zoom. So if you and you know the phone does have pretty good stabilization characteristics um. So there was a note phone back in the day, I think was a no far was it the galaxy s20 ultra that had space zoom either way space zoom is back, not sure anyone missed it, but it's back regardless and of course, you have laser autofocus center to help you stabilize all of your zooming shots. Uh 40, megapixel front camera right here that little cutout, hence the infinite o display uh other specs 5000 large 5 000 William hour battery with fast charging wireless power share. So you can charge your buds pro on the back side here.

Any buds live buds, plus regular old Galaxy Buds. Maybe I don't know, do those have wireless charging? I don't know uh for connectivity, Wi-Fi 6e. So all the speeds Wi-Fi 6e got Bluetooth, 5 and NFC. Uh Samsung does not list MST. You know I forget if we determine whether this phone has MST or not, but I know that when you're using Samsung pay you're going to be using NFC from now on, I think that's how it is for all three of the new s21 models.

Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure uh one of the big things with the ultra and not the s21 and s21 plus, is that the s21 ultra supports the s pen. I, of course did not get the s pen, because I don't personally use the s pen. I opted for the galaxy Galaxy Buds pro for that instant credit. That Samsung was offering so I'll. Let you know how those are uh, but, yes, s, pen, support for all us pen.

Lovers. You've got stereo speakers here. Let's take a little tour stereo speakers right here on the left side, you've got your uh sim tray, uh, no expandable storage. Sorry USB! You've got your noise cancellation mic. That's not your sim tray insertion slot! Don't stick your tool in there.

Samsung already said: don't do that. You've got speakers right here on the right side. We've got power button volume rocker on the top, we've got more uh, noise, cancellation, mics or just mics in general, and then on. The left side is clean. Nothing here again, the back side uh that matte black.

This is a very good-looking device. Massive uh camera module here, but you know it doesn't: stick up off the device all too much kind of hard to get an angle on that black, but Samsung logo down here manufactured in Korea with your IMEI number and then look at that large display. This is a good-looking device. You know the curve display. Isn't too bad but boy, it's a honker.

This is a big device uh so, like I said, USB stereo speakers, ultrasonic, fingerprint reader right here in the middle. I believe it's the new Qualcomm sort of 3d whatchamafudge. I forget like the full name of it, but it's supposed to be larger and faster. So that's good ip68, water and dust resistance, and it comes in silver and black. So all those specs start at 11.99 and again that 11.99 model you're getting the 12 gigs of ram plus 128 gigs of storage. That's the one I got, because I wasn't looking to spend freaking close to fifteen hundred dollars for a new phone.

So thank you Samsung again, uh shout out Samsung. So there is the device. Those are all the specs, I'm going to dive real quick into the software. I'm going to get through all this and I will be right back with you all right. We are back all booted up here real quickly.

I wanted to show you how quick this uh fingerprint reader is. I was actually kind of uh. Pleasantly surprised, book, not not too shabby just got my thumb in there. Maybe I'll add a few more, but that's a story for another video. Don't worry, don't worry, we will be bringing you all the first 10 things to do tips and tricks all that usual stuff that we do here on the droid life channel, so diving real, real uh real quickly into this uh.

Let's talk about android 11. , so we've got android 11 here on the s21, ultra all s21 models uh with Samsung's one UI 3.1 running on top of that and just to confirm we can go down about phone software information, and we can see one UI 3.1 android version 11, and we are running. I was going to say: oh, I think the security number's back here serial number, no battery information. I was looking for the or am I just missing it. Um.

Oh, all the way down here at the bottom: uh android security, patch level December 1, 2012, 2020. , so everything's, just always different on every device. So there's a few things I want to talk about um, oh and before then I completely spaced snapdragon, 888, processor, 660, arena, GPU, yeah, one there's a few things. I want to talk about diving into the software. There's always like many things that I do when I first boot up a Samsung device, but just because this is not the first 10 things to do, I'm just going to give you a few of them so real quickly.

First thing: we got we have to up this grid here and to do that, you just long press settings menu home screen grid. I do a five by five. I find this kind of, like my sweet spot, and now everything is smaller. The icons are smaller. I can fit more widgets or whatever on there.

It just looks a lot better to my eye, the five by five uh, but you can up it down and keep it where it was whatever another huge thing that is exclusive to one UI 3.1, or at least the android 11 updates. When you kind of zoom in on your home screen, you can now choose between Samsung, free and google discover this. This is amazing. Samsung took a huge step here, kind of going away from their own services and allowing to google to do this and allowing users uh to use Google discover is just such a nice touch. Thank you.

Thank you. Samsung from the bottom of my heart, uh, diving here into the settings menu. I want to go over all the display stuff. So, as you can see, I've already swapped, it comes out of the box with light mode or light UI. No, no, no.

No. We dark mode that instantly and then, of course you can set this. I think you can set timers yeah schedule. You can set schedules for it, but there's pretty much everything that I do right out of the box where a Samsung device is under the display settings. So you've got your motion smoothness! That's where you're going to find your screen refresh rate your adaptive all the way from up to 120 hertz.

So just leave it on that. Unless you want to stick to 60 to help your battery, I don't know uh you've got your screen mode, don't really screw with that screen resolution, so we HD, and they are allowing for who plus and the 120 hertz. So this is amazing. You've got the high resolution. You've got the high refresh rate.

This is big. This is big people um screen timeout. I always kind of set mine to five minutes, but you can set yours to whatever, but the big one I want to talk about. Is navigation bar? This is where you're going to get your swipe gestures, um, really kind of important for me just because I'm I'm not big on those physical buttons, any more um and there are different kind right. You've got Samsung's gestures, and you've got google's gestures.

If you go swipe from sides and bottom, that's your kind of go-to google gesture, and then you've got Samsung's own thing, which is still the know swipe from this part for that this part. For that like no, no! No! No, so I'm just going to you know now have the gestures here I'll be able to swipe if I'm inside of something I can just swipe out of it. Like that's what I appreciate and then, of course, you can screw with your sensitivity there as well. Um you've got hit hints for it a bunch of other things. Um.

If you go all the way down. Actually it's kind of nice uh. You can go access quickly, you're always on display. So that's something that we always set up so just from there, you can instantly set up the quick display the always-on display. So I obviously recommend that and then another one you know, Samsung gives you one thing they take another, I think.

Last year they started doing this, where they're reprogramming are trying to reprogram our brains and this power button. So if you long press on that, it's no longer your power menu, it's freaking Bixby, even though no one uses Bixby um. So what I do is you just hit on that? How to power off phone and scroll downside, key settings you're going to want to access those side, key settings press and hold for power off menu? We aren't trying to wake Bixby here. It's ridiculous double press to quick, launch the camera, or you can have it open an app whatever app you want. I just do a quick launch for the camera and then power off menu.

That way when I long press on my phone now, I can just access that and of course you can still access those side key settings from that ridiculous um. I know, I would love to know how many people are actually out there using Bixby hey if you use Bixby. Let me know in the comments- and we can- you know, argue about it, or I can reason with you into why Bixby's, not that great. You can tell me why Bixby is awesome anyway. That's all I want to show you for right now.

I do want to give you a little size comparison. So 6.8 inch display uh. What is this six something I forget right off: pixel, 5, galaxy, s21, ultra baby, Yoda phone and here's your size comparison quite a bit different. This is like the ultimate pocket phone. This is uh.

I'm going to be rocking my jinks jeans for this guy and then over here we've got a galaxy fold, two about the same height, oh s21, ultra a little taller. Obviously your zed fold. Two is a little thicker about two of these, but that's okay, uh! That's it for comparison, uh and that's it for our unboxing video. If you have any questions comments, let us know down in the section below, and we will try and field them and don't worry. Like I said, we've got plenty of content on the way we've got first 10 things to do.

We've got tips and tricks, I'm rocking the s21 ultra Ellen, on the other hand, went for the smaller galaxy s21. I think it's better for his hands. So there's that we are droid life again hope everyone is having a safe and healthy 2021. Stay well and we will catch you next time. Peace.

Source : Droid Life