Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Impressions: Redemption Time! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here and welcome to your first look and hands on with the galaxy s 21 ultra, so right off the top of the year Samsung's coming out swinging now I also have a video about the s21 and s21 plus dropping at the same time here, so that'll, be the first link below the like button check it out if you're interested, but this is the big dog. So we kind of know what to expect at this point from Samsung's new ultra-high end phones, right so s21 ultra will start at 1200 bucks, so it should be the best of what they can offer, but just to look back for a second at s20 ultra, this phone last year was kind of a whiff I mean it still did. Have a lot of the high end, ultra numbers that you look for, but because of the focus issues with the camera, it was just never something you quite recommended. It got past on a lot for the money, so the s21 ultra looks to get them back to the best of everything world, with a lot of next-gen parts and pieces. Now, right off the bat first thing you notice is the biggest change which is they've, packed everything in this new design. So we might as well just start with that.

So I got to handle these in the matte black and this sort of silver color. So it looks just like the leaks and the rumors we're expecting, and I think I like it now. I don't know if I love it, I'm still on the train that sort of horizontal camera bump like nexus 6p was actually kind of peak, but the more I look at this contour cut design the more futuristic it looks to me. It kind of looks like someone was making a thicker phone with the huge cameras and then just melted it down to a thinner body for the rest of the phone, it's kind of hard to explain it. Basically, it looks like Harvey dent like two faces, but on the smaller models it actually has a cool color contrast model with the side rails.

But I'll talk more about that in that video on the ultra. It's all matte across the entire back, which I love and then shiny on the sides. So speaking of those cameras, we've got four here on the back of the ultra. It's a new second gen 108 megapixel main camera, with is at f, 1.8, very curious to see how that'll shoot then you've got a 12, megapixel ultrawide, which should be pretty sweet at 120 degrees and then two telephoto cameras. You've got two a 3x telephoto and a 10x periscope lens.

So this is an interesting zoom situation. I was playing with the phone trying to imagine why they would do it like this. I think Samsung's probably done the math on well, most people either zoom in a little or like all the way, and so I guess, if they're just getting a 3x and then the 10x will facilitate the space zoom that goes really far. My curiosity is how will it do in between 3x and 10x we'll have to see? But if you go in the camera app, it looks very familiar: it's the Samsung stuff. All these zoom buttons are still here, but now you can see you can go all the way from that 3x to 10x, and it's doing digital zoom in between those two numbers, then from 10x on it's coming from the periscope lens and space zoom is still here, so you can go all the way to 100 on the ultra, and it's right off the bat actually looking much more stable than the last gen, which is actually pretty nice.

There's also some improvements to the higher end modes, like a director's view for more control over live switching between the cameras and recording from multiple cameras at once, and there's also multi-device recording from both the phone's mics and your headphone mics at the same time and then improved single, take mode so cool stuff. Here we all know the ultra and Samsung's lineup is supposed to have the top of the line cameras, and this is the best they can offer. And you can. You can even see the laser autofocus here. So I'm almost surprised.

I didn't toss in a macro camera to sort of fill up the space and make an even grid, but hey it's a periscope lens, taking up that space instead begging to be tested, so yeah lots of new camera parts it'll be interesting to see how these perform definitely make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't already to be among the first to see the review when it comes out, we can test these things, but enough about the back of the phone. Let's talk about the front, so it's a big phone. Of course, it's the ultra and that allows for a huge 6.8 inch, quad, HD, OLED display, and this time it's quad HD at 120 hertz. So you can see here in the settings. It's at the 1440p resolution and motion.

Smoothness is also set to adaptive up to 120 hertz. So that's sweet, but also this new adaptive refresh rate on the ultra is new, and it'll automatically constantly be switching all the way up and down between 10 hertz and 120 hertz. So that should help save a lot of battery in this adaptive mode. It'll be fascinating to test to see how responsive it is and to see how much battery it saves. So you imagine when you're not really doing anything on the display, nothing's moving it throttles all the way down to 10 hertz, I'm curious, if that can bring it to the same battery life or close to the regular 60 hertz mode.

I'm not too worried about overall battery life. The phone does still have a 5 000 William hour battery, so uh not concerned about being bad. I'm just more curious if it can be amazing. I also love that the display is nearly flat. It is slightly rounded at the very edges, but not nearly as much as I've seen it in other phones, which makes me happy, and there is the small cutout at the top for the ridiculous 40 megapixel selfie camera, and they also dropped Qualcomm's new, much larger and hopefully faster in display fingerprint sensor back there.

It's 1.77 times larger than the last gen, and I'm hoping less finicky too, and the display's max brightness is now up to 25 percent brighter up to 1500 nits and there's a new AI based blue light shield option for better viewing comfort, if you're into that, but yeah. Everything else you're looking at here is right in line with what you'd expect from the 2021 Samsung flagship, great build quality, it's ip68 water resistant, the newest internals, of course, with the five nanometer snapdragon triple eight in this region, it'll be the five nanometer Enos chip in other regions, which will be interesting again to test to see how it fares with battery 15 watt wireless charging, there's reverse wireless charging too great buttons, tiny bezels. The whole thing one interesting spec, though that is missing. There is no expandable storage anymore, so the micro SD card is basically going extinct. Now Samsung was some of the last ones to do in their flagships, so there are only three specs for total storage on this phone, 128 256 or 512 gigs, and then so, unlike the smaller s21 and s21 plus there are different amounts of ram on these versions, so those all will have eight gigs of ram on the ultra.

You start at 12 gigs of ram for the 128 and 256, and if you go with the tip-top half a terabyte max spec that'll have 16 gigs of ram, so you're trading, your expandable storage, for a lot of ram. I guess also speaking of things that are gone, no headphones or charger in the box confirmed like I've warned you. This is gonna start happening very quickly across the industry. iPhone 12 was a huge domino to fall so now don't expect a power, brick and a flagship phone from here on out. But last thing: let's talk about the s pen.

It was added to the s21 ultra s, pen support now. Okay, a lot of people saw this in the rumors leading up to this and thought. Oh, that probably means the Galaxy Note. Is on its way out? Maybe they'll kill it soon. I don't think so.

I when I this is just coming from my like hour of playing with the phone. The stylus on the s21 ultra feels like a very optional add-on accessory where, on the Galaxy Note well, it's still an integral part of the note experience, and it's just they're in very different worlds. So, first, like I said it's an optional 40 accessory. So if you want to buy an s pen for your s21, ultra it'll cost you, and then it's actually compatible with other s, pens of the past. So if you have one already, you can carry that too, but the whole experience is passive, so the whole low, latency, writing and drawing experience is all the same.

But there's no Bluetooth or gesture controls like you would have on the note and then, of course, there's a whole. How do you carry it question since there's no silo built into the phone, so that's another optional accessory, so you can get a stylus and a case for now 70 extra dollars and the phone sort of just clicks into this rubber slot in the side of the case, which is fine, I guess, but it's its definitely a very optional accessory, and so, if you're going to go through all of that and spend extra money to have a stylus on your high-end Samsung phone, I feel like the obvious choice is to buy a note where it slots in perfectly and neatly every time charges has. The active experience has more features and, of course there will be a note 21 ultra. I guess it's not an of course thing. I'm predicting there will be a note, 21 ultra, that people wanting a stylish consider later this year, so I don't think the note's going anywhere, but that's basically it for the new s21 ultra.

What do you think is this enough of a redemption? I mean you get the huge numbers again. You get a lot of next-gen pieces. It seems to be going in the right direction. There is, of course, the s21 and s21 plus launching alongside it on January 29th, but if you're going to spend the big bucks, this is what you're going to get, and they've also launched smart tags and Galaxy Buds pro so Samsung's clearly popping off right at the beginning of the year. But let me know what you think is this the one you guys would pick, or would you go for one of the other s21 models? Let me know thanks for watching I'll catch, you guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee