Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Hands-On: Samsung Has Finally Done A Right 'Ultra' Phone

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra serves as Samsung’s statement of what the best Android phone is like. It features five cameras, including a 108MP and two telephoto snappers, support for the S Pen, and RAM of 16GB.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Price And Release Date

After the unveiling ceremony on January 14, Samsung will release the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra on January 29, 2021. Pre-orders are now live.

The phone is expensive compared to how budget-friendly the S21 is, but it’s still cheaper than the S20 Ultra at launch.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra price in India is Rs. 105,999 for the variant with RAM of 12GB and onboard storage of 128GB. Users can bump them up to either 512GB or 256GB of storage with 16GB of RAM. However, the price for these upgrades is still unclear.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Display And Design

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra sports a matte finish in two colors Phantom White and Phantom Black. The look is a real leap from last year’s S20 Ultra which exudes a plastic look.

The Ultra is a big phone with a 6.8-inch edge-to-edge screen. The notch that houses the 40MP front camera is so small that it seems barely there when you watch videos.

The phone can be unlocked with the in-display fingerprint scanner which, according to Samsung, is bigger, hence easier to hit, and faster.

At 1,500 nits, the phone’s display is extremely bright, making it perfectly legible under direct sunlight. Other high-end phones, like the iPhone 12, cap at 1,200 nits.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is compatible with the S Pen and the best way to keep the two together is to buy Samsung’s folio case.

The stylus allows for all kinds of handy Air Command options that help you perform tasks without touching the phone’s screen.

Another lineup that can work with the S Pen is the Note series and we may expect to see the Note 21 Ultra in the next few years if Samsung sticks to its August time frame.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Camera And Battery

Since this is a hands-on piece, we were unable to go into detail about the battery life or the cameras of the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The phone has five cameras with a 108MP, a 12MP ultra-wide, and two 10MP telephotos snappers.

While the ultra-wide camera appears unchanged compared to its counterpart on the S20 Ultra, both the telephoto cameras and the 108MP snapper can take larger pixels than the S20 Ultra.

One of the highlights of the photography department is the LAPDAF but we will have to wait to see how this feature performs in real life.

PDAF causes a slew of issues on the S20 Ultra as it renders the 100x zoom capacity and the 108MP camera useless, returning a bunch of out-of-focus and blurry pictures.

Last year’s 100x ‘Space Zoom’ is still there and this year, Samsung wants to make something useful out of it. But now is too soon to say anything.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra features a setting called tripod lock that can help steady the viewfinder. You have to wait for around a second for the phone to lock the subject but it’s worth the time as the shakiness will be reduced tremendously.

On the other side, the 40MP selfie camera of the S20 Ultra also makes a return with some new features. What you have never since before now is the Director’s View mode and slo-mo mode under the name Single Take 2.0.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Performance And Software

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra specs, in most cases, are overkill. The choice of either 16GB or 12GB of RAM is more than enough even for some laptops and since there is no microSD card slot, the 128GB of onboard storage seems very limited. The only way you can extend the storage is to go for the 512GB or 256GB variant, for a lot of money of course.

Under the hood, depending on where you are, you will have either Exynos 2100 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset. So it’s exciting to see if the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra can compete with Apple’s iPhones.

The phone runs on One UI 3.1 on top of Android 11. However, even if Google releases Android 13 this year, users of the phone will have to wait until next year to get it.

>>> Samsung Galaxy S21 Series To Go On Sale In India On January 29, Price Starts From Rs 69,999