Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra long-term review

Performance, smoothness

We have a distinct feeling of deja vu saying this, but this latest flagship Samsung smartphone is the fastest and smoothest Samsung smartphone ever. That was true for the Note20 Ultra when it came out, before that it was true for the S20 Ultra, and today it's true for the S21 Ultra.

In case you've read our long-term reviews of those devices, you probably also know what's coming next, because this too is a case of deja vu. Despite being the fastest and smoothest Samsung ever, the Galaxy S21 Ultra is not the smoothest phone around.

At the moment, that's the Xiaomi Mi 11 (as detailed in its long-term review). And in truth, the S21 Ultra isn't very close to that one when it comes to the subjective perception of smoothness, it's much closer to last year's Snapdragon 865 devices, such as the Oppo Find X2 Pro for example. It doesn't match that one either, but it's very very close.

You need to live with a bunch of random stutters throughout the UI, which seems like a sort of unintentional staple feature of One UI, even after years of improvement. Yes, this is the fastest, most responsive, and smoothest that One UI has ever been, but that's still not enough to truly match some of the other skins out there - ColorOS, OxygenOS, even MIUI 12.5 on the Mi 11, and whatever Huawei is calling its Android fork these days.

Speed-wise, this is a 2021 flagship, so it smokes everything else under the sun, as it should. If we're talking sheer speed, it's probably tied for 'fastest phone ever long-term reviewed' with the Mi 11, despite the fact that our unit is using the Exynos 2100 and not the Snapdragon 888. In day to day use, you don't really feel any difference between these two in speed, but you will notice the smoothness delta if you have another device to compare to.

Then again, you probably don't have access to a bunch of competing phones as we do, and if you're coming to the S21 Ultra from a past Samsung, you will be impressed by both its performance and smoothness compared to any of its predecessors.

Battery life

With a 5,000 mAh cell inside, we were expecting to be amazed at the S21 Ultra's longevity, and... we haven't been. Don't get us wrong, battery life has been very good, but it seems like 2021's top chipsets do like to chug on those milliamp hours more than their 2020 predecessors (we say this as we've seen similar behavior from the Mi 11 which has the Snapdragon 888 inside).

After the last update which took the security patch level to June 2021, with our use case, we've always hit 5 hours of screen-on-time in a day, and we even managed 6 a few times. But that's it, and that's not really impressive from a 5,000 mAh battery. Or not impressive enough. Before the last update, things were slightly better, not that we understand why that would be. At least this gives us hope that a future update might slightly improve things again.

Battery life samples

Overall, we'd say for us this was definitely a one-day phone. We never had to top-up midday, the battery always lasted us until we went to bed, but we had to charge every night, otherwise we wouldn't have made it through even a few hours of the next day. Of course your mileage may vary based on how your specific use case differs from ours.

We have the phone off the charger from anywhere between 12-16 hours, during which time it's mostly connected to Wi-Fi, with an hour or two on 5G, Bluetooth is always on with an hour or two of music playback and an hour or two of phone calls, and location is always on with half an hour or so of navigation through Waze or Google Maps. If you find yourself out and about more than we have, then your screen-on-time will be lower, especially if you rely only on mobile data and don't have great signal.

Samsung's fast charge is becoming laughably slow in 2021, when a lot of competing brands offer zero to 100% times of 30 to 45 minutes. With a compatible 25W Samsung charger, you'll need an hour and around ten minutes to get to full, and that's almost two times slower than the competition. It's time for the Korean company to really up its charging game.

Of course, if you only top-up during the night like we did, this is a moot point, but if your lifestyle is more active and thus you do need to sometimes quickly charge during the day, the S21 Ultra is much less impressive than a lot of similarly priced devices that are out there. Thankfully support for wireless charging is in, but this too is very slow. It works well for charging up during the night, but won't do anything useful in a ten-minute pinch.

Biometrics

Oh, how far they've come! The first generation ultrasonic fingerprint sensors were theoretically supposed to be better than optical ones, but in real life most of the time had issues that made them less accurate and slower. The S21 Ultra has a second-generation ultrasonic sensor in its display, and this is hands-down the fastest and most accurate under-screen fingerprint scanner we've ever used. It really is night and day, the difference compared to past Samsungs, and it also smokes the optical competition at the moment.

It just works all the time, and after a bit of wading through menus to disable unnecessary animations, it's also incredibly fast. We'll say it again - it takes the cake. Not only is this the best under-display sensor we've ever used, but we're very close to calling it the best sensor period - including capacitive ones. We'll steer clear of that though because our opinion is influenced by the issues we've had with the new breed of side-mounted capacitive sensors (possibly connected to their pill shape), and such a statement wouldn't be reflective of our experiences with back-mounted or front-mounted ones from what now seems the distant past.

Biometrics settings

Face unlocking is present, but much less secure because it only uses the front camera. Its speed is decent unless you amp up the security in Settings in which case it gets painfully slow, so much so that while we have left it turned on for the duration of our time spent with the S21 Ultra, we've almost never been patient enough to wait long enough for it to do its thing, and have gone with the fingerprint sensor instead every time - with great results, as detailed above.