Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Impressions: The better S20 Ultra.

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                                                                                              Credit: Photographer: NinaWestervelt/Bl

Last year, Samsung started to manufacture an ultra model along with its mainline flagships within the S-series and Note series. But, the S20 ultra rather than having big numbers in it's spreadsheet didn't deliver as much as expected from an ultra phone. The S20 ultra had focusing issues on it's giant 108MP sensor and the features that was used to market the phone didn't have any functionality like the 100X zoom. Moreover, Samsung's Exynos controversy along with all the other issues and a mammoth price tag of $1400 made the ultra, the least sold flagship from Samsung in 2020.

Samsung resolved many of the issues with the Note 20 ultra, but it was not perfect as Samsung used the same Exynos 990 as the S20 ultra in the major markets and provided the improved Snapdragon 865+ in China, Korea and US. However, this year's S21 ultra is a redefined device that fixes almost all the issues that made the S20 ultra a big no.

First of all, the autofocus and focus hunting issues were solved by adding a laser autofocus module to the camera system and this time, the phone has two telephoto lenses with 3X and 10X optical zoom for sharp images at multiple zoom ranges. The 100X zoom has also been improved and the phone has a zoom lock feature which locks a frame when at high zoom ranges to avoid small handshakes. Altogether the S21 ultra is a camera beast and it is the phone that most other android phones as well as iPhones will be competing against this year.

                                                                                                         Credit: Getty Images for Samsung

Samsung still uses two chipsets based on the market but this year the Exynos 2100 should have equal or better performance than the Snapdragon 888. Both the SoCs are using the identical cores from ARM and the core configuration is also the same. But the Exynos 2100 has higher clock speeds on all the cores compares to the 888. This in theory should mean that the Exynos 2100 should have higher benchmark scores than the 888. Samsung also promises that the 2100 will have 35% less power drain and 40% higher GPU performance than last year's 990. The phone also supports the S-Pen making it the first phone in the S-series to do so.

The phone will ship without the included charger and AKG earphones this year but the starting price has been reduced from $1400 to $1200 making the phone more appealing. Samsung also provides certain goodies for free based on your region if you preorder the device. The full review of the device will be available at the end of the month along with the comparisons between the Exynos and Snapdragon models.


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