Samsung Galaxy S21 Impressions: New Year, New Price! By Marques Brownlee

All right, it is already that time of the year we really didn't miss a beat huh. We got new Samsung stuff, so Samsung just revealed the galaxy s21 and s21 plus, and I've got your first hands-on and some impressions of them right here. I also just dropped a separate video on the big dog. The galaxy s21 ultra definitely check that out if you're interested it's the flagship of their flagships and that video will be the first link below the like button, but for these two s21 and s21 plus here we have some very interesting new numbers, new specs and new prices. Now there are two new phones, I'm talking about here, like I said so, I figure I might as well talk about the differences between them. Usually it's basically two different phones that are just different sizes and that's it this time.

It's two different phones that are different sizes and also different materials. So the smaller s21 comes in at 6.2 inches, while the s21 plus comes in at 6.7, which is almost the same size as the ultra, and they look and feel pretty close, but individually like once. You hold them, you can really tell a difference and that also, of course, with the size difference means the space inside is different. So that's a different battery, 4 000 William hours on the s21 4800 on the s21, plus that's pretty impressive and then yes, materials. So the s21 plus has a matte finish over glass and the s21 has a matte finish over polycarbonate aka plastic, and so those two things are all that account for the difference in price.

But it is a 200 difference in price. Now the s21 starts at 7.99 this year, and so the s21 plus starts at 9.99. Now this plastic versus glass thing I found it a little strange at first that they would separate it like that. I figured they'd either make both plastic or both glass, but I guess because they are coming down in price to 7.99 with the galaxy s21. I can let it slide.

Plus plastic, like I've said before it has a weird reputation. It's not actually that bad, it just seems cheap in more expensive phones, but it's less likely to shatter you can mess with colors more and ultimately, they actually look very similar. You can just tell the s21 is a little lighter in your hand, so this is definitely something I'll dig into more in the full review, but yeah everything else here about This is the same and pretty new, mainly centered around this new contour cut design, where the camera cut out, as you can see, is all the way up in this ridge platform thing in the corner, like I said in the ultra video I kind of like it not gonna lie, I think it looks pretty futuristic, but it definitely stands out the most with this purple color here where the camera cutout is gold and then that gold wraps all the way around the sides and the rails of the phone, so it's kind of like a two-piece suit, it's looking kind of like a superhero costume or something I don't know. I wish there were more versions of color combos that you could choose from. Maybe red and black would have been cool too.

Maybe black and white black and yellow, but either way it's a unique look for sure I'll give them that it doesn't really resemble anything else. I've seen, and I'm into that, there's no copying, but on the inside we're going to start to see a lot of phones kind of like this one. So it's the snapdragon 888 chips in this region, or it'll be the new five nanometer Enos chip in other regions, and I definitely want to see if there are any big differences between them with this generation, but they are promising 20 to 35 percent, faster performance on CPU and graphics respectively. There are eight gigs of ram in each like, I said, and either 128 or 256 gigs of storage. This time is not expandable.

Now that is a bummer not just because you are now limited to 256 gigs of storage, but it's also another removed feature from last year. Technically we had expandable storage in a micro SD card slot. Now it's gone, we had glass. Now, it's plastic. The triple camera situation on the back is pretty standard.

They share the same 12 megapixel primary camera, 12 megapixel ultra-wide and 64 megapixel 3x telephoto camera that will zoom all the way into 30x space zoom. If you want not quite the 100x of the ultra, but it does appear to be much more stable than before and Samsung says: it'll focus faster and then the displays up front got an interesting update this year. I'm not going to call them upgrade because again they did technically lose another feature. So this year the displays are now adaptive refresh rates, so they will refresh between 48 hertz and 120 hertz, depending on what's on the screen, and that should save you some battery, instead of just being locked at 120 most of the time, but also the displays are now 1080p. So they used to be 1440p for a couple of years in a row of Samsung flagships now, they're 1080p now I know they dropped the price, but now you're, talking plastic you're, talking no expandable storage, you're talking 1080p instead of 1440p, and again it's not that big of a deal, because a lot of people like me were using their phones at 120 hertz in 1080p already anyway.

So it's in theory, not something we should notice or care that much about it's already around 400 dpi for that resolution on that size of the screen anyway. But it's just a little thing: you don't like getting less than last year, so it's technically an update, but I'm not going to call that an upgrade until I test it more than the rest of the changes are pretty minor, but all pretty positive, at least in my opinion, so there's a 1.77 times larger and hopefully also faster fingerprint reader. Underneath the glass there's a couple. New software features built into the camera like a more advanced director's mode for video and the recording audio from multiple sources, and things like that. That's all good stuff, but yeah.

It's really mainly just a spec bump in a new design, with a couple tweaks that allow them to lower the price down to 7.99, and I do like that lowered price. I think that is a good move, but it's just going to depend on how you feel about the stuff they cut out. But now you pretty much know everything you need to know about the newly announced galaxy s21s. Clearly the ultra has a lot more going on. So again, if you haven't seen that video, it's also live check it out.

But let me know what you think is this the change you want to see and does that lower starting price? Make you happy and maybe there's a fan edition later this year- we'll see either way thanks for watching I'll catch, you guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee