Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra long-term review

Conclusion

Unlike what usually happens in the movie world, Samsung's sequels are generally much improved from its first efforts, and the S21 Ultra is yet another prime example of that. Compared to the S20 Ultra, it's better in every way, and it hasn't just added things the original phone didn't have (like a main camera that can properly focus all the time), but it's also remedied practically all of the issues we found in the S20 Ultra - with one slight exception, smoothness, which we'll get to in a bit.

So once again, it pays to not be an early adopter for Samsung's various experiments, and this applies to the Ultra phones too. The Note20 Ultra was already improved compared to the S20 Ultra last year, but we're counting the S21 Ultra as the direct sequel - and it too is surprisingly great overall (the surprise comes from the comparison with its predecessor, not anything else).

The Galaxy S21 Ultra has one of the fastest chips on the market right now, which delivers outstanding performance no matter what you throw at it. The phone also comes with probably the best camera system all-around, and what is in this reviewer's subjective opinion the best zoom system you can find at the moment on any device. It's not just the quality of the zoom shots, but also the flexibility you get by having two zoom cameras on the back. These combine to give you a very consistent zooming experience that deserves a lot of praise.

The main camera and the ultrawide are also very good, although we could probably find a better alternative for either one of them inside a different high-end flagship phone. But none of the S21 Ultra's competitors can deliver a similar camera set so if photography is important in your purchase decision, and utmost framing flexibility is a must, this is probably the one to get. That is, of course, if you enjoy "that Samsung look" that your photos will all have, with the pumped up color saturation and contrast and sharpness. Most people seem to appreciate the results, even if they aren't very accurately representing the reality of each shot - and you can include us on the list. If accuracy is everything to you, then you should probably look away.

Moving on, the S21 Ultra comes with what is either the best or definitely one of the best screens ever found in a phone, the best stereo speakers we've ever heard, the best in-display fingerprint sensor we've ever used, and one of the best vibration motors out there right now.

That doesn't mean the S21 Ultra is a perfect phone, though. Battery life, for starters, is very good, but not great or amazing, and that's slightly disappointing considering there's ample capacity to work with. Charging is slow too by today's flagship standards, and Samsung has been lagging a lot in this regard lately.

While performance is great, smoothness suffers. Don't get us wrong, this is the smoothest Samsung ever, but that's still not enough to take the smoothness crown away from the Xiaomi Mi 11, and to be honest, it's very close but not matching last year's smoothness champ, the Oppo Find X2 Pro. This has been a consistent issue with Samsung flagships, and we continue to hope that the company will address it at some point. All this said, if you're switching to the S21 Ultra from another Samsung, this is an entirely moot point, as you will feel that smoothness has improved, even compared to last year's Note20 Ultra or S20 Ultra.

Samsung is a champ at issuing monthly security updates for its flagships, and this has been true for the S21 Ultra as well, with a slight hiccup in June and July - the former month's update got delayed by a few weeks but still arrived in June, while we haven't received the July update on our review unit yet, but we're sure it will make it by the end of the month. We point this out to commend Samsung for how far it's come, as most of this phone's competitors are nowhere near as fast to get these updates out.

When it comes to new Android versions, Samsung has made strides in the past few years, and it's faster now than it's ever been, while still not being among the fastest, but, in fairness, it's fine. Outside of tech geeks, not a lot of people follow the annual Android release cycle, and so we're willing to wager that not a lot of S21 Ultra buyers would feel disappointed that they had to wait a few months for the next big iteration of the OS. Samsung could do better here, but it's also true that there are a lot of companies that are much worse at this.

All of this brings us to software. Suppose you can live with One UI's Settings complexity and don't mind having to change a few defaults in order to have a decent user experience. In that case, you may even grow to like the fact that this is the skin that literally has an option for every single thing you can think of, and a million things you wouldn't possibly think of in a million years. We have in the past mentioned that this can lead to decision fatigue, and it still can, but it's also true that there are people out there who very much enjoy having a lot of knobs to turn in whichever direction they please.

We would have liked for all of the default settings to be user-friendly, but some still aren't - long-pressing the power button brings up Bixby and not the power off menu; you can't see notifications on the lock screen, only the apps' icons. Depending on how much you care for the "it just works" mantra, these may seem like minor niggles to set once and then forget about, or, at the other extreme, you may find yourself annoyed with the philosophy behind such choices - which seems to be "let the user figure it out, why bother thinking about what works best if there's a setting anyone can change".

One UI is also not entirely stutter-free - stutters have been reduced compared to past Samsung flagships, but they're still there - and here once again you'll have to decide if the S21 Ultra's many upsides can mitigate these downsides for you personally, factoring in the price as well. We really hope a day will come when we'll praise One UI for how smooth and stutter-free it is, but that day is not today. Again, don't get us wrong - this is the best it's ever been, but it still has a step or two to take to become perfect at this.

Finally, and again, this is a personal consideration thing, the S21 Ultra is big, thick, heavy, and notably top-heavy. This combo means using it may not be a joyous experience for you, in the literal sense of what it feels to hold, especially for more than a few minutes at a time. We have mentioned before that we think 200g is about the sweet spot in terms of weight for this device size, and the S21 Ultra is way above that. We would probably forgive that were it not for the top-heaviness, which really makes you constantly try to compensate for it by holding the phone a bit higher than feels natural.

This may be a non-issue for you, yet it has been a small but persistent niggle in our day-to-day experience. Ditto the accidental touch problem which Samsung hilariously still hasn't been able to fix even though at this point most of its competitors have, even on screens that have much more dramatic curves than the S21 Ultra's barely-there radius.

Using a case makes this issue disappear entirely, but a case adds even more weight and some width, which makes the phone a bit less easy to hold - and it wasn't easy to begin with.

So, in the end, it's a mixed package like any other phone ever made, but in our subjective opinion, the scales tilt heavily towards the good parts here. This is, like every other flagship from the South Korean company before it, the best Samsung ever. And in this case, by a bigger margin than usual.

It has a lot of 'bests', including the screen, speakers, zoom cameras, security update schedule, and raw performance, and not a lot of 'mehs' - battery life is good but not outstanding, the software is complicated and messy, the screen curves still create accidental touches without a case, it's big and heavy and honestly a bit dull-looking (although the finish of the back feels great to the touch).

If you love the ups and can live with the downs, this is a very easy phone to recommend, with one caveat. Even today, it hovers around €1,000 in Europe, and that's a lot of money. Before spending it, make sure you actually need all the bells and whistles you're getting here (like the camera system, for example), because otherwise, you may find similarly-performing devices for (much) less.