It’s a similar story with the Galaxy S21’s ultrawide camera. Take a look at the centre of the frame and the detail capture isn’t bad at all but as soon as your eyes drift towards the edge you begin to spot the telltale signs of a softening as well as the odd bit of chromatic aberration. As mentioned, Samsung has done this to help keep the price of the new phone down, and unless you’ve used a phone with a QHD resolution we don’t believe you’ll be able to easily tell the difference– we found that all the videos we watched on the S21 looked suitably high-quality on the Full HD+ panel.

Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G Smartphone SIM Free Android Mobile

The S21 runs Android 11 out of the box with Samsung’s One UI 3.0 skin, which is among our favorite software interfaces. The phone has since been updated to Android 12, and it will be getting Android 13 when that's available too. The design is where Samsung has made the most obviously noticeable changes over the S20 (which we crowned 2020’s best smartphone), overhauling the materials used, the colors, and the overall look of the device. The Galaxy S21 camera hardware hasn’t changed from the previous year’s phone, as Samsung’s big sensor upgrade happened between the Galaxy S10 and S20 generation. With the S21 it’s all about the software, and Samsung finding a way to slim down the camera module. All in all, the Samsung Galaxy S21 feels like a premium device, although it’s unlikely to feel as top-end as the Samsung Galaxy S20 if you own that handset, or the Galaxy S21 Ultra.Glasstic is the company’s own name for the material, which as the name suggests is somewhere between plastic and glass. It doesn’t feel as premium as a glass rear, but the matte finish also means it doesn’t feel like cheap plastic either. Reverse wireless charging is also supported, so you can use your phone’s power to top up devices such as Qi-compatible wireless headphones, but we found that to be slow, and it’s a feature you’d likely only want to use in emergencies. The company is instead just offering internal storage, and again this seems to be a cost-saving measure from Samsung, but it’s likely to disappoint anyone who wants the most affordable handset but needs a lot of storage. One thing missing is compatibility with Samsung’s 45W chargers that worked with the S20 series. Samsung told TechRadar that it’s made optimizations to the 25W charging capabilities of its new phones, so 45W charging wasn’t that significant a benefit.

SIM Free Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G 128GB Phone - Graphite

How does this translate in terms of performance? The good news is that the Samsung Galaxy S21 is the fastest Samsung smartphone to date, with 50% faster multi-core processing speeds when compared against last year’s Galaxy S20 in the Geekbench 5 benchmark. It lags slightly behind Apple’s A14 Bionic chip (I was unable to run our usual benchmarking tools with the Huawei Kirin 9000) but there’s no shame in that.Could all this raw power negatively affect battery life? So far, I haven’t noticed any issues. In our video rundown test, which plays a looped video at a standard screen brightness of 170cd/m2 with flight mode engaged, the Samsung Galaxy S21 lasted 18hrs 56mins before requiring a top-up. Recharging the S21 is easy, using the company’s 25W fast-charging tech via the phone’s USB-C port. It’s also compatible with Qi wireless charging, and we found that worked well during our testing. We generally found that the phone would comfortably last a full day, but on one occasion, when we were making more use of the phone’s GPS signal and other power-hungry features we found the device ran out of steam by around 10pm. What’s more, it’s made from Gorilla® Glass Victus® for a tough display that’ll shrug off drops and scrapes like they’re nothing. Love to dabble in photography? Then you’ll be over the moon with the 64MP triple lens rear camera, which snaps superb shots you’ll be proud to show off. Or, if you fancy filming, you can capture footage in absolutely stunning 8K quality. You’ll be on the red carpet in no time.