Samsung Galaxy S21(Exynos): 24 Hours Later // S21 Impressions By GadgetsBoy

- How's it going everyone? It's Gadgetsboy and here's my, just over 24 hours experience with the Samsung Galaxy S21. just to let you know, this is not a review by the way, this is just my impressions, my experience with it and what I've learned in the last 24 hours or so, with the Samsung Galaxy S21, let's go. In terms of the design, I love how compact the S21 is and the colors looks fantastic as well, in terms of this particular ultraviolet, phantom violet version that we've got here, not ultraviolet. I love the flat screen as well, I love that it's flat, I'm not a big fan of curved edges, as I find them just a useless, it doesn't really offer me any extra functionalities. So I like that it's a flat display. One thing I would have loved though, is to have a flat, sort of rim around the edges, just like the iPhone 12 does, just so that I can sort of balance it like this.

I'm used to doing that with my iPhone 12, so it would have been amazing if they did that but I know that that's not a Samsung thing to do so that's absolutely fine. It's just me nitpicking there in that sense. I love the haze finishing, but unfortunately that haze finishing is meant to be, to prevent a lot of fingerprint magnets situation on this phone, but the more I use it, the more just attracts that fingerprint and for me, I don't see the advantage of that, but I still liked that matte sort of finish into it though, it feels nice. And this glastic back is what doesn't feel as cheap as I thought it would actually. The whole time it just feels natural, it feels normal in terms of the premium experience, in fact, if I didn't tell you that it's glastic back, or plastic back, you wouldn't even know, you'd think it's a glass, gorilla glass victus on there, just like S21 Ultra.

It hasn't scratched yet, in terms of all the micro scratches that you'd expect to be getting right now, it just seems very normal to me at the moment, like there's no issues there at all, which I quite like, so far, so good, but time will tell for the final review if we're gonna end up having something with loads of scratches and micro scratches. In terms of that, a screen protector that's installed on there already, looks really good in terms of scratches again, there's no like micro scratches all over it, it's not bubbling up just yet so I'm hoping that that will stay very firm on there for a long period of time, before I need to replace it with something else. But overall, in terms of design, it looks fantastic, it feels premium, I expected nothing less from Samsung here. There's no downgrade in that area at all and it feels very comfortable in the hand, the compact design, the curved, slight curvature on the back area feels really nice to hold in the hands for it, but I like the flat display on there as well. When it comes to the display quality as well, it looks fantastic, it's very bright, although this is full HD plus, so not to the 1440P from the last year's Samsung Galaxy S20, that's a bit of a bummer but if you start using it, it's fine, I mean, it looks okay, the brightness levels are really good, I barely go past the middle level when it comes to brightness, and it's also got adaptive brightness as well, so which helps with battery consumption and all that kind of stuff.

But I really loved the brightness level on this phone. I barely go past that middle level when it comes to brightness settings. If you go to my settings there, you can see I don't really go past that level at all because it just stays bright at all times in different lighting conditions here, especially in the UK. Where that relationship plus really hits home is when you start to edit photos that are 4K or if you're looking for wallpapers that are high resolution then you put it on here, you start to see the differences in terms of screen quality, especially if you've been using a previous galaxy S20, you would notice that difference in screen screen quality. So for me, it's a step backwards there but I think the trade off is the fact that you get a battery, a better battery life in terms of battery consumption with that display quality.

Based on my previous reviews, I know people always ask about speaker quality and I think the speakers on this are fantastic. It sounds really loud, and also there's no like crackling on all that kind of stuff but what else I love is the fact that it's not just in terms of playing music but it also sounds fantastic when you're using it as a loudspeaker for your phone calls as well, so for receiving, for making phone calls on loudspeaker, it works absolutely fine. So you can rely on it if you're gonna do Zoom on here, perhaps you can rely on the sound system, sound, the speaker sound system, you can rely on the speaker on the Samsung Galaxy S21. Onto performance in this region in the UK, we're getting the new Exynos 2100 processor, which is a five nanometer, on many levels is very similar to the Snapdragon 888, in terms of the core that they've used in there from ARM. They're very similar, although the Exynos 2100 is a slightly clocked higher.

In terms of comparing it to the Snapdragon version, I don't have a Snapdragon 888 version yet in the studio to compare to you guys, to show you guys what the differences are. But what I will tell you though, is processing power in this is very spot on, it's smooth, whatever you're doing, whether it's just general browsing, whether you're playing games, whether you're watching movies, multitasking, it just works really well, there's no complaints in that area at all. Where I do see some discrepancies, if I can get that word right, is the fact that when you're installing apps for example, it starts to get hot. And when you're gaming for a prolonged period of time, it gets hot, so that's something that's still, in my opinion they still haven't fixed there at all, but I feel like that temperature issue needs to get sorted there. Again, I haven't used the Snapdragon 888 version, so I couldn't really tell you if that gets hot as well, but for me, processing power, great, temperature, not so great.

And just to add this on, in terms of graphics power, the GPU in there, I think it works really well as well, gaming, there's no latency, no lag, nothing at all, it just works the way he should work. This brings me on to the next point which is the, probably the most surprising part for me or something to get excited about, if you're getting the Exynos version, it's battery life and battery life in this has been exceptional, in the sense that compared to last year's, Samsung Galaxy S20, this lasts me a whole day and then some, so for example, I'm on 41% now, I haven't charged it since, I actually placed it on charge last night for like an hour or so, but before that, it lasted me the whole day and I went to bed with 20% battery left inside this thing, and that's with adaptive refresh rate on, all day and I've been doing my regular stuff like playing games or watching movies on Disney Plus on here, I even did some like emails, text messaging, phone calls, all the usual stuff that I would use, I would normally do with my smartphone, I was doing everything on here, loads of social media consumption, I was doing that on here and I had no issues. Battery life was quite surprising for me. I was out and about in London just taking some sample photos, which we'll talk about next, and for me, it just worked, like I've got home thinking the battery would die, I carried an extra battery pack with me just in case the battery dies, but I didn't have to use it at all throughout the whole session, so that looks promising for me, but again, time will tell on the long run to see how that continues to handle battery life, battery consumption. Also that's a 4,000 milliamp hour battery inside of this thing, so I'm actually intrigued to see what the S21 Ultra would perform like, with a 5,000 milliamp hour battery, and its sort of performance.

Okay, onto the next bit, which is the camera quality, and there's a lot of surprises here as well. I'm not gonna be going for the camera specs in this, if you wanna check that out, do check out my unboxing video for that, but in terms of camera quality, one area that I definitely expect to see some improvement, is when it comes to photography and videos, yes you have all the extra features like director's view, single take, but if the lenses don't perform well and processing and all that kind of stuff, then what's the point, right? But anyway, the cameras performed really well, but only when you have good lighting. That's what I've noticed with this thing. So are some shots that I took around the apocalyptic Regent Street, London. Looks fantastic, as you can see there, it just captures it really well.

The dynamic range looks really good, it preserves the sky very well, even though it was a gloomy day, you can still see that it preserves it really well there, on all lenses. So that's on the standard lens and this is ultra-wide, again you can see there that it looks really fantastic, especially when you zoom in you can see all the letters in that actual litter there, it looks really good, which I was quite proud of actually. And sorry, that's this is the ultra wide I'm showing on the screen now, so this is ultra-wide and you can see the quality still looks fantastic on there. And then this is the standard here. And then if I go out, I'm going to the zoom.

You can see the zoom as well, just captures the details very well, the colors remain natural, dynamic range looks really good on there. So like I said, though, that it's, it's only fantastic for me so far when the lighting is great. When the lighting is not good, there's issues with it. Another area to look at is HDR, in terms of auto HDR. I noticed that with auto HDR, the light, it just looks too, it blows out the saturation too much.

So this is more obvious when you're shooting a subject in terms of skin tones. So for example here, you can see I've got auto HDR on, on my partner here, so if I go zoom in on the skin here, you can see that this now looks orange. She's not orange toned, but it's overblown that saturation that is starts to look too orangy for me, that it's not something that I would switch on, me personally, I wouldn't switch on auto HDR at all. I would select that for when I actually really need it, because this is over punching it for me, that's not something that I wanna see. Shoot in portrait mode though, it looks a fantastic again, even though this doesn't have a time-of-flight lens or anything like that, it still manages to discern the depth, to a certain extent and it looks great, so if we look at this photo here that I've taken again of my partner, you can see the differentiation between the hair and the hair strands, the braids and the background, the blur level.

Of course you can adjust the blur level, 'cause I know some people like it's too harsh, but I wanted to go harsh on this, so you can see the level of detail that you can get using portrait mode. It's also portrait mode in video by the way, for you guys who want to know. Where it really lacks though is when the shadows, if you can see there, it doesn't really blur out, underneath the hair around here, and that's because the shadows from the hair is blocking the light that's coming in, so the camera can't really discern what's going on there. And this year they still use telephoto and the main lens to actually make this happen, and there's some software tweaks in there that happens in the background for processing. And that happens there.

Well the skin tone looks great in portrait mode, so you're getting that studio quality in here. So again, Samsung calls it DSLR like photography, when it comes to studio, portrait mode, that kind of stuff. And I think it still looks very artificial, but for a phone for something that you're gonna be shooting out and about and shoot in portrait mode on your smartphone, I think this looks fantastic. If you're going to end up sharing this on social media as well, it looks really good. I know some people will be nitpicky and all that stuff but what do you do at the end of it? You share it on social media, and that's what you do with these photos.

You don't really print it. So for me, this looks more than good enough. I wish I could say the same though for the front facing camera, but the front facing camera here does not do it for me at all. The detail, if you look in this camera, in this shot I took on myself, this is good lighting scenario as well, so as you can see there, the D, the shot's okay, if I'm gonna be, if I'm going to be sharing this on social media, it's absolutely fine, don't get me wrong, but if you start to look into detail, it's missing all the tiny little details on my skin for example, and it looks slightly airbrushed out as well, It's just too much for me. It's something that I would see on like a Xiaomi phone for example, or any cheap Android device.

This is something that you would see in terms of front facing camera quality. So I hope that is something that Samsung can work on and improve the front facing camera as well, because actually in this generation of TikTokers and all that kind of stuff, front facing camera is just as important as having a good main camera as well. In terms of video quality, there's a mixed experience here. So this smartphone, the S21 series can shoot AK videos and they can shoot AK videos at 24 frames per seconds. And the look fantastic when you're shooting in AK videos, but where it lacks when shooting AK videos, if I can say any one more time, is that you lack stability, so the stability, video stability, you shake your hands when you shoot an AK, you have issues there as well but if you don't want to deal with that then you need to start shooting 4K, 60, 30 or even full HD videos.

And also what to bear in mind, is when you shoot in AK, it means you have, you're consuming more space on your smartphone, so you're gonna have to bear that in mind that you can't expand this using micro SD card, so you're better off just shooting 4K or full HD videos. Also, one more thing is, if you're shooting the AK videos anyway, I would assume you are a legit content creator, a filmmaker or something, so you'd definitely get yourself a gimbal, you wouldn't shoot un-held when shooting AK videos anyway. But it's also Hi-Res, so you'll be able to punch in and do some post-processing and stuff to fix some of those issues. Other things to bear in mind is AK videos would only let you zoom up to six times. Super steady mode is only available in full HD mode and you've got full HD 30 and 60 frames, which steady mode would work with.

It also seems that although Samsung promised 4K at 60 frames per seconds on all the lenses, it's, we're not, I'm not sure at the moment, if it's actually working on all the three lenses, did I say six lenses? Three lenses on this, on the S21, obviously more on the S21 Ultra, but they said you can shoot 4K at 60 but what I've found so far is as soon as you stick it to 4K-60, the 3X icon disappears, although you can still manually zoom at 3X, but it just sort of suggest that it's not using the optical zoom at that point. And it's now starting to use digital zoom, but you wanna use optical at all times on 4K-60, if I'm gonna be shooting in different focal length, if that makes sense. Obviously audio capture is also important when shooting videos, and audio capture in this sounded great, some clips that I recorded while I was out and about sounded really good, I'll put this in my final review, so I know you wanna see some samples right now, but I'll put all that together in my final review so you guys can actually hear that for yourselves. Macro or close up shots, also lacks some details as well, so if you look at his shots here, of this plant and flowers that I took a picture of, you can see that as soon as you go into the picture, you start to see the lack of detail in the shots as well. But just looking at it from distance, it looks good, which means if you're gonna share it on social media again, you're okay doing so, but otherwise, if you wanna do that with the intention of perhaps cropping in later on, then you need to bear that in mind that the quality is not that good.

I've also uploaded all these photos on my Flickr account which I'll leave links to in the description area, so you guys can check it all out. I haven't played with the photos, actually have a look yourself and judge for yourself as well, because preferences matter as well, you might like something that I don't like, but either way sure you come back to the comments section and do drop a comment about your experience and what you think of the photos. So that's it for my 24 hours or so with the Samsung Galaxy S21, guys let me know what you think in the comments below, if you still have any questions, do drop them there as well and I'll do my best to answer those questions. If there's anything you guys wanna see in my final review that you didn't see in this one, let me know as well, as I said before, this is not a review, just my first impressions again and some sort of, like experience of it in the last 24 hours or so, but in the meantime, if this is your first time on the channel, please do subscribe, it does help me out, smash that like button as well and share it. And if you haven't hit that bell notification already, make sure you do so you'd be one of the first people to know every time I upload a new video up on my channel.

Thanks for watching, I'll see you guys in the next one.

Source : GadgetsBoy