For someone staring the full $1200 right in the eyes? Not so much.
For those people - for the annual Samsung upgraders - the S21 Ultra is a totally decent reason to make the move. Just look at its trade-in values for the Galaxy S20 family this year - they were ludicrously generous, with the smallest phone in the S21 family costing just $100 if you upgraded from a Galaxy S20. That's been the truth for years now, and Samsung just makes it clearer and clearer with each generation. But the less-spoken truth is that only suckers pay full price for a Samsung phone that doesn't fold. The less-spoken truth is that only suckers pay full price for a Samsung phone that doesn't fold. Personally, I like the new aesthetic introduced with One UI 3, and the addition of the Google Discover feed to Samsung's stock launcher has focused my previously wandering eye - there's no real reason for me to look to a third party one anymore. In 2021, it's pretty trivial to "Googlify" Galaxy phones to the point where Samsung's software largely falls into the background, and while I find the animations and gestures a bit awkward for navigating in One UI, it's a fine place to be. I generally split the difference: disabling or uninstalling unused or unwanted apps, and replacing many others (calculator, calendar, keyboard, gallery, browser, dialer, file browser, SMS, and notes) with their Google counterparts. Ridding yourself of - or at least mitigating - these issues is relatively easy, and Samsung's phones can even be made to feel quite Pixel-y if you're willing to get more aggressive with your customizations. In 2021, it's pretty trivial to "Googlify" Galaxy phones.įortunately, living with Samsung's software is not an all-in or all-out proposition.
The phone unlocks on the first try for me well over 95% of the time in my experience, and the S21 Ultra resolves all my previous complaints about Samsung's ultrasonic scanners. I don't think the speed claims are going to be noticeable to anyone (the longest part of the process is positioning your finger and waiting for the scanner to wake up), but failed reads are largely a thing of the past. Finally, let's discuss the fingerprtint scanner: Samsung claims it's 70% larger and significantly faster than the previous generation. I've heard anecdotally this is because Samsung moved the actuator responsible for haptic feedback to the top of the phone for packaging reasons, though I'm unsure if this is actually true (I'll be waiting for the iFixit teardown). The S21 Ultra's speaker is quite loud but shrill and muddy at high volumes, and haptic feedback feels kind of faint. While I generally find Samsung's hardware to be about as close to Apple quality as you can get in the Android world, I do think they continue to do a medciore job with their phones' speakers and haptic feedback. The S21 Ultra resolves all my previous complaints about Samsung's ultrasonic scanners.
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