The new Samsung S21 FE inherits a lot from the existing S21 series, which was released quite exactly a year ago, but above all with an important difference. One of the success factors with the predecessor was that it was powered by Qualcomm’s top chip and again this time it is a Snapdragon that sits under the shell of the S21 FE. However, this is not about the very latest chip, but about last year’s top chip Snapdragon 888. Not the fastest that can be obtained, but still fast.
The phone is of course delivered with Android 12, which means that it gets to take part in the news that Samsung introduced with that update. This means, for example, that in the gallery app you can edit out unwanted objects in the background of photos you have taken with the cameras. When it comes to photography, the S21 FE gives you triple cameras on the back with 3 times optical zoom and main camera and wide angle both at 12 megapixels.
They are complemented by a 32-megapixel selfie camera that sits in a small centered camera hole at the top of the screen. As in the S21 Plus, Samsung allows us to zoom out to 30 times magnification with what they call Space zoom, which thus combines optical and digital zoom and in high zoom, the phone should help stabilize the image so that unintentional handshakes do not make the image unnecessarily blurry. Other photo functions include the ability to use both front and rear cameras at the same time and thus film both the subject and your reactions, either with your face in a small box at the edge or in a split view where you and the subject get the same amount of space.
It’s interesting to see where this phone fits in with Samsung’s existing phones. The predecessor was successful in providing clear things that many lacked in the flagship family, especially Snapdragon instead of Samsung’s own Exynos processor we have been referred to in the European market. In addition, it also had support for wireless charging and reverse wireless charging and was water resistant according to IP68 standard. It simply offered most things without being as expensive as the flagships.
No wonder Samsung is trying to repeat the success, but today the situation is partly different. With its price tag of 8200 or 9000 kronor, depending on the amount of storage and memory you choose, the S21 FE is not an obviously better choice than the S21 Plus, which is the phone that is most similar to the newcomer. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE is not even necessarily a better buy than its predecessor, which was released a year and a half ago. An important reason for this is that the predecessor has had time to drop properly in price, but beyond that, the differences compared to previous mobiles are few. The hope in processor generation is the clearest.
The screen of the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE is 6.4 inches large, an oled with support for 120 hertz refresh rate. The fingerprint sensor is integrated in the screen and is optical. In its more expensive phones, Samsung instead uses ultrasound for the fingerprint sensor, which generally makes that finger reading faster than the one we find in the S21 FE.
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE is released in the colors white, black, green (olive) and purple (lavender) and in Sweden the phone costs SEK 8,200, then with 6 GB of working memory and 128 GB of storage. The model, which instead has 8 GB of working memory and 256 GB of storage, costs SEK 9,000. S21 FE will be released in Swedish stores during the second week of this year, 10 – 15 January.
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