Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra long-term review

Display quality

This year, Samsung finally managed to catch up to the competition and lets you enable both 120 Hz refresh rate and the screen's QHD+ top resolution. That's a huge win for pixel peepers everywhere. Speaking of refresh rate, since this is an LTPO panel, it can dynamically be set to as low as 1 Hz in a bid for more efficiency (read: battery savings). How this has worked out in real life we'll leave for the battery section, but for now let's just say LTPO feels like it was clearly overhyped.

The S21 Ultra's screen is barely - and we mean barely - smaller than its predecessor's. The thing is, though, unless you have both side by side - and a measuring tape around - we're willing to wager you won't be able to tell the difference. We've used both phones and at no point did we feel like the 0.1" less real estate on the S21 Ultra impacted the user experience in any way. This is still a great phone for those who love big screens on their handsets, so don't let that tiny spec tidbit confuse you - it's not an issue in any way, at all.

Quality-wise, this is one of the best screens on the market right now, if not the best. Colors can get amazingly accurate with the right settings, brightness shoots through the roof on sunny days, and at night you can read without your retinas getting seared (although we would've liked the panel to be able to get even dimmer, but not by much). For long-term reviews we try to stick with the defaults as much as we can, so we went with the Vivid screen mode, but then took the white balance slider all the way to the warmest setting to counteract those bluish whites we dislike.

Unlike almost every other part of One UI, the Screen mode setting menu has been simplified in the past few years and we appreciate that it's not a jumble of confusing options anymore. And yet - weirdly enough there's no setting for automatic adjustment of colors based on the ambient light, but there is an "Adaptive" setting for the Eye comfort shield (Samsung's name for the blue light filter), which apparently adjusts the colors based on time of day.

Display settings

We chose to forgo this, and thankfully you can use Eye comfort shield in the traditional way too, with a confusingly named "Custom" setting which then allows you to pick the color temperature of the effect as well as whether you want it always on or to follow a set schedule.

The auto-brightness curve, continuing a welcome trend we've seen in flagships in 2020 and 2021, is near perfect for our taste. We very rarely had to manually adjust the slider, and even if you may find you need to - the setting is then remembered for the next time the phone encounters the same amount of ambient light. Outdoors this is probably the most legible screen we've ever seen. No matter the conditions, no matter how bright the sun or how directly it falls onto the display, you'll still be able to see what's on it.

Needless to say, we've used the S21 Ultra with the refresh rate ("Motion smoothness" in Samsung parlance) set to Adaptive the entire time, since the 120 Hz maximum refresh rate has a huge impact on how smooth the device feels to use. We also stuck with the maximum 1440x3200 resolution, because why pay for such a high resolution and then not use it?

Screen curves

Maybe it's just our eyes, but it seems like every year Samsung curves its flagships' screens a bit less, and we can't help but have the same feeling now. Perhaps this impression is not technically accurate, but it feels like the S21 Ultra's display is just barely curved on the sides, and haters of screen curves will definitely like that, while this reviewer doesn't. Samsung started the whole curved screen trend and has been slowly moving away from it almost ever since, which doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Anyway, the S21 Ultra's display is curved so little that there's barely any glare on the curves, but if you were thinking this would also make accidental touches a thing of the past...no. Sorry to disappoint, but Samsung is still very bad at this - the worst, in fact. A lot of its competitors use more curved screens and have zero accidental touch issues, whereas the S21 Ultra does get a lot of them. Like dozens of times a day, we'd run into an accidental touch while holding the phone.

However, there's a huge caveat here, one which we think is worth mentioning. The moment you slap a case on the phone, any case really, this problem goes away completely. And since we assume most people paying this much for a handset would want to protect it anyway, it might very well be that out there in the real world most people who own an S21 Ultra have a case on it and thus have no accidental touch issues whatsoever.

That doesn't make the whole fiasco less embarrassing for a company this big, though. Samsung Display makes most of the curved AMOLEDs out there, and Samsung Electronics is pretty much the only company that still hasn't figured out how to ignore accidental touches in its software. That's funny and sad at the same time. But, like we said above, this may not actually impact your day-to-day use of the phone unless you go naked with it, as they say.

Always-on-Display

Samsung's AOD implementation has traditionally been one of the most customizable out there, and this hasn't changed for the S21 Ultra. First, it can actually be always-on, unlike in some random cases out there where you get a weird hybrid that only stays on for a bit and then requires you to move or touch the phone to come back.

Second, there are a lot of designs to pick from, you can have text on it, the whole nine yards basically. Where MIUI goes further is in the Super Wallpaper feature which integrates the AOD with the lock screen and the home screen in a way that's still unique in the mobile world, and we wish competitors would get 'inspired' by that sooner rather than later. But, in a world in which MIUI's Super Wallpapers don't exist, Samsung's AOD implementation is top notch - and, unsurprisingly, schedulable too.