When it comes to smartphone naming, Sony should probably learn a few things from Samsung. Keeping S series flagship's name in sync with launch year itself (2021) is such a good idea. In a world of same boring smartphone design, S21 is a much appreciated step forward for a fresh design. Samsung S21 embraces camera bump arising as a result of increasing size of camera sensors. It is now made of metal and flows out naturally from metal sides. Apart from giving phone a fresh two tone finish, this also drastically improves strength of external structure surrounding camera lens.
S21 Ultra is in it's class of it's own and considering it is 200 dollars more expensive than S21 Plus, it makes for a certainly better looking deal. S21 plus on the other hand being just a larger variant of S21 in terms of display and battery size is a complete 200 dollars expensive than S21. Despite having premium glass back built (not necessarily better for butterfingers) S21 Plus is one of those variants whose presence is just to flip your purchase decision to either S21 or S21 Ultra. All this may change from few months of launch if Samsung decides to cut down on selling price of some model, mostly due to demand patterns.
Coming in at a starting price tag of $799, S21 is the most exciting one of the bunch. Though it is supposed to be S20's successor, it feels more like of an excellent upgrade over S20FE. This is due to a better camera hardware setup and a generational processor upgrade with similar starting price and build material of S20FE. One other interesting point to note is this year's launch timeline of S series, which is about 3 months before usual. This can be attributed to be in the race of being among first few phones with Qualcomm's latest top of the line Snapdragon 888 processor. This can also be simply due to the fact that Samsung realizing growing demand since people interacted with their phones more than ever in lock-downs of 2020 and realized a need to upgrade or holding back on unnecessary spending in uncertain times of pandemic.
As usual, last year's S20 international variant (outside US and Japan) had Samsung's home-grown flagship Exynos chip powering it. Exynos variant was quite inferior to Snapdragon processor variant in many departments like peak computing power, thermal performance and battery life. Tech community and Samsung fans finally decided that this long time ongoing discrimination from Samsung is enough. There were social media campaigns by tech community asking Samsung to stop releasing and selling inferior Exynos variant. As this topic was covered by various online media outlets and famous tech Youtubers, it got attention of many resulting in deterioration in brand image. Samsung definitely took this feedback from their fans on a positive note and learned from their previous mistakes to launch Exynos 2100 powered S21 series. Exynos 2100 was not only just a big upgrade over last year's Exynos 900 but also was able to bridge gap between it and Snapdragon 888 to an extent where it feels a big step forward in right direction.
