Starting with the “elephant in the room”, the Galaxy S21 Ultra lost even the transformer and the headphones, but Samsung even offered the earphones Galaxy Buds Pro (from € 239.99) to anyone who made the reservation during the pre-sale period. Regarding the equipment itself, it is gigantic, both in size and in weight.
Aided by the matt black finish, the design of this S21 Ultra makes it one of the most beautiful smartphones that Samsung launched in recent years, with elements such as the integration of the rear camera module, which was framed with the structure of the equipment itself.
At the front is a 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED X2 display that finally has a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz with QHD + resolution (3200 x 1440). This screen has a maximum brightness of 1500 nits and a built-in ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, 1.7x larger (and more accurate) than previous versions.
Performance
If, last year, we were disappointed with the Exynos 990 of the Galaxy S20 Ultra and Note20 Ultra, this year the opposite happens: Samsung surprised us with an Exynos 2100 that abandons the architecture of Mongoose cores and adopts Cortex cores. This ensured a significant increase in performance, especially in terms of processor and energy efficiency, which means that the Galaxy S21 Ultra has better results than the version equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. Only the GPU, a Mali-G78, is worth it. MP14, continue to fall short of Adreno’s performance, included in the Snapdragon version of this smartphone.
Even so, and as the results can confirm, we are in fact facing a real top of the range, which did not happen with the Galaxy launched in 2020. The rest of the configuration uses 12 GB of RAM and 128 or 256 GB of storage, UFS 3.1, with a top version with 16 GB and 512 GB, respectively.
Unfortunately, Samsung chose to exclude the possibility of expansion with MicroSD cards, which is a more contestable measure than the lack of a charger. The 5000 mAh battery, on the other hand, has the ideal capacity to be able to use the screen with a resolution of 120 Hz. It is capable of charging at a relatively fast speed, up to a maximum of 25 W, a value that starts to fall short of what it marks rivals already offer.
Top chambers
With regard to cameras, Samsung again resorted to a 108 MP sensor in the main camera (this time the new Isocell HM3) that can capture images with 12-bit color, offers a much higher dynamic range and uses a new camera system. Nonapixel, which combines the information of nine pixels into one, thus guaranteeing images in greater detail, especially in low light situations.
In addition, we have a 12 MP sensor for the ultra wide-angle camera and two 10 MP sensors for the zoom system – one guarantees a 3x optical zoom and the other 10x. Thanks to Space Zoom technology, there is still the possibility of doing up to 100x of hybrid zoom, with greater stability, less noise and greater detail than the results obtained by the solution used in the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
In fact, stabilization is really the element that most highlights, since both in the S20 Ultra, as in the Note20 Ultra, using a zoom above 10x made it very difficult to obtain a stable image, something that we can easily achieve with the new S21 Ultra.
In terms of video, this equipment is excellent: the main sensor captures 8K video at 30 fps and the rest can do 4K at 60 fps. The introduction of new video modes, such as ‘Director’ and ‘Vlogger’, among others, can make a difference in capturing content to share on social networks.
Distributor: Samsung
Site: samsung.com/pt
Price: €1279,90
Benchmark:
- 3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited: 87 291
- Antutu Benchmark:621 955
- PCMark Work 2.0: 14 845
- PCMark Work 2.0 Battery: 823 minutes
Datasheet
Processor: Exynos 2100 (2,9 GHz Cortex-X1 + 3 x 2,8 GHz Cortex-A78+ 4 x 2,2 GHz Cortex-A55)
Memory: 12 GB
Storage: 128 GB
Cameras: 108 MP f / 1.8 + 12 MP f / 2.2 + 10 MP f / 2.4 + 10 MP f / 4.9 (traseira); 40 MP f / 2.2 (frontal)
Screen: 6,8” Dynamic AMOLED 2X 120 Hz HDR10+ (3200 x 1440) 515 ppi
Drums: 5000 mAh
Dimensions (mm): 165,1 x 75,6 x 8,9 mm
Weight: 227 gr