2021: A good year for Galaxy S lineup of smartphones
Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus.
The latest lineup of Galaxy S21 phones nicely follows the year in its naming convention. Hopefully, they stick with this for next year's S22.
Iâve been testing the Galaxy S21 Plus, which would have been the flagship a couple of yearâs ago, but now has to play second child to the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
The S21 Plus is my favourite Galaxy device in a while in terms of design. I love the clean uninterrupted lines of the triple camera module over the Ultraâs quad âFâ shaped camera setup.
In the top left corner on the back is the triple camera array which stands out, not only due to the deep camera bump but also thanks to the marriage of polished and matte finishes. On my Phantom Violet review unit, the raised camera module is a pale gold colour with three circles for the camera lenses and rounded corner on the bottom right to match the top left corner. This gold colour continues around the edges with a flow and style which work wonderfully with the mixture of textures and premium materials.
The rounded corners and bevelled edges make the S21 Plus comfortable to hold, as long as you donât have small hands. The front glass is slightly chamfered around the edge but is otherwise flat.
The power/Bixby buttons are on the right with no buttons on the left. The bottom edge has a speaker, USB-C port, SIM tray and hole for the mic. You have to be careful not to push the SIM ejector tool into the mic hole because theyâre very close to each other. Thankfully, thereâs also a speaker on the top of the device for stereo sound.
The smudge-proof frosted glass back features wireless charging and wireless Powershare for charging other devices.
The front selfie camera sits top and centre with a tiny punch-hole cutout to allow it peek through. Centred a quarter of the way up from the bottom of the screen is the newly improved ultrasonic in-display fingerprint reader. This is now larger and although slightly better than last years model, itâs still not as fast or reliable as a standard reader. You can also use face unlock, which is faster, but less secure.
The S21 Plus has a Full HD+ display instead of the 2K display found on the Ultra. Some will argue that 2K displays are sharper, but even side-by-side I canât tell the difference. In everyday use, it doesnât make a difference other than sapping more milliamps from your battery. Samsung has always set their 2K displays to Full HD+ by default for this reason and many users were none the wiser.
As youâd expect from a Samsung flagship, the 6.7-inch display is excellent. It supports adaptive refresh rates from 48Hz up to 120Hz, although you canât set it to a fixed 120Hz. You can set it to 60Hz, which Samsungs says will give you longer battery life.
Unlike the S21 Ultra, the S21 Plus doesnât come with S Pen support, which seems like an afterthought anyway.
In a nutshell and for those who donât care about specs, the S21 Plus is blisteringly fast. This year we get the Exynos 2100, Samsungs first 5nm processor in an S series phone and the Mali-G78 GPU. On a side note, despite this currently being one of the fastest Android phones, using Geekbench the S21 Plus had a score of 1080 (single-core), 3432 (multi-core) compared to the iPhone 12 Pro Maxâs score of 1591 (single-core), 4168 (multi-core). Apparently, Android CPUs still have some catching up to do.
My review unit came with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage which I think is the sweet spot unless you like to capture a lot of video at 4K or even 8K.
In the same way, Samsung followed Apple by ditching the headphone jack, the S21 does not include a charger. To be fair, it does say it on the box âMains adapter sold separatelyâ. It does come with a USB-C to USB-C cable and a SIM ejector tool.
My average screen-on time from the 4,800mAh battery was good, but I only had the device for a couple of weeks, which isnât enough time to give a definitive assessment on performance.
The Galaxy S21 Plus supports 5G, but unfortunately, I wasnât able to test it due to current restrictions. At this stage, 5G is a given for a flagship phone and although itâs still not pervasive or even necessary, itâs good to know your investment is in some way future-proof.
The Galaxy S21 Plus features a 12MP f/2.2 wide lens, a 12MP f/1.8 ultra-wide and a 3x hybrid 64MP f/2.0 (12MP by default with pixel binning). These are the same camera specs as last years S20 although improvements in AI and software optimisations do make a difference.
I love the S21 camera app, which is jam-packed with features and options. If you prefer a more point-and-shoot experience, you can hide all the extra features too and by default, you only get the bare minimum for a clean and intuitive interface.
Samsung continues to improve many of its camera features including Night and Pro modes. Night mode works far better overall with results that equal or even better the latest iPhone and Google phones.
The new Pro mode now features the ability to capture 12-bit RAW. You can also save photos in the HEIF (high-efficiency image format) image format, which has better quality than JPEG and smaller file sizes.
There a new Directorâs View mode, which enables video capture from multiple cameras simultaneously (useful for vloggers). Although you can record video up to 8K youâll run out of available space quickly and thereâs no option to add extra storage via microSD like you can on the S20. Recording in 8K also has a lot of limitations since youâre limited to 24fps, the telephoto lens and image quality really isnât noticeably better than 4K. A two-minute 8K video took up 1.13GB of space while a 4K 60fps video was 1GB.
Video stabilisation is excellent overall, but I did notice stuttering at times when panning. Autofocus is fast and smooth and I love the natural background blur you get while focusing on close foreground subjects in part thanks to the large image sensor.
The 10MP front camera produces improved selfies with less beautification by default, more natural skin tones and good detail.
The Galaxy S21 Plus is my favourite Samsung flagship in a while thanks to the refresh in design, lightning-fast performance, good cameras and excellent screen and stereo speakers. I donât think the Ultra offers enough compelling reasons to choose it over the Plus unless you want the extra zoom reach and donât mind spending over âŹ200 more.
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