Samsung just wrapped up its first unpacked event of the year and it happened weeks earlier than anybody could have expected, but no reason to complain because that means we have the galaxy s21 series.
Let's get into everything samsung announced and my first impressions of the phones. Samsung did the right thing right off the top. They cut the prices on the s20 line by two hundred dollars. That means we go to eight hundred dollars for the base model up to a thousand for the s21 plus and 1200 for the s21 ultra, the entire line has a new design. I think it looks great,. It comes in a bunch of new colors. Interestingly, the cheapest s21 comes in the most colors. You have four to choose from really pop, and this is the biggest design change that we've seen from samsung in a few years. But here's one thing that people are going to be talking about. The s21 has a plastic back, just like the galaxy note 20 and the s20 fe. It is plastic. And yes, you can tell it's plastic without anybody telling you if you set it next to an s21 plus or s21 ultra, you can tell that those higher end models are glass bit of a bummer, but you might also just put a case on it and you Won't care the s21 and s21 plus are really diverging from the ultra line as well. It's a bigger gap than last year.
The lower two models have flat displays. Now I actually prefer a flat display, i'm not going to be lamenting the fact that it doesn't have the curves and you don't have to deal with all that, but some people will think it's a bit of a cost, cutting what you may notice on the display. Otherwise is that there are different panels in the lower end models. The lower end models have variable refresh rates just from 48 to 120 hertz, whereas the s21 ultra is 10 to 120 hertz. Just like the galaxy note, 20 ultra in those lower end models as well. You're getting lower end specs, you get 8 gigabytes of ram in the lower two, but you get 12 or 16 in the ultra and you also don't get an option to go up to 512 gigs of storage and that's important because the sd card slot is gone From all three phones that hurts a little bit, especially in the more expensive ultra.
Elsewhere in the s21 and s21 plus, it's not that surprising that the cameras haven't really changed. The main camera is still a 12 megapixel. It's gonna take great photos, but no upgrade there. The ultra wide, also 12 megapixels, no upgrade there, the telephoto or what they want to call a telephoto less than a 2x optical zoom is a little bit different. You have a 64 megapixel camera there and it allows you to do more of that zooming that samsung is really pushing, but that's just not that impressive, where it really is impressive. S21 ultra 108 megapixel camera is still the same coming from last generation, but they've tweaked. The processing and the sensor itself, the big talk here: dual telephoto cameras, there's an optical 3x zoom and also an optical 10x zoom they're, both 10 megapixels, and they both have ois, which is really important, especially for that 10x zoom. Now I don't think that the 100x space zoom that Samsung was trying to push all the way back. Last generation is still going to come to fruition here, you're doing a lot of digital zooming, but this is really impressive from a technological standpoint to be able to have the dual zooms - and this is so much better than doing additional depth sensing or any kind of Crazy secondary camera just give me the zoom and i'm happy.
Elsewhere across the lineup It's a lot of the same from what we've expected from samsung. There's a lot of s20 features that are all included here. It has Android 11 and one ui three, of course, but we've all seen that upgraded and updated on prior phones. The only things they're really talking about here is the fact that the entire lineup gets new camera processing, new software crunching the numbers behind the scenes, even though the lenses and the sensors haven't really changed that much there's also a new single take mode new portrait mode. All of those little things that i don't really know how they're going to work out yet, but we'll see in our full review, which will be coming up very very soon. The other big headline here, of course, is that the s pen has shown up in the galaxy s line. But it's only in the s21 ultra and no, it doesn't go inside the phone and it doesn't come with the phone. Unlike the Galaxy Note, you have to buy a separate case and a separate s pen in order to use the s pen on that larger phone.
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