Even though now it’s 2022, and we’re probably a month away from the new Galaxy S22, we still have a new Samsung S21. I have been testing this phone for about a year, and I really feel like this is a super safe bet of a phone. It’s very tame, doesn’t really make any mistakes, maybe even a little bit boring, but this is something many people are going to like.
So this is the second Fan Edition now that we’ve seen, so we’re kind of learning the formula of how Samsung likes to do this, and basically, it’s kind of the same way Apple’s been doing the SE and a lot of other phones manufacturers do this. Still, it’s a lot of one-year-old parts that get put back together and in a cheaper phone. I dare say the biggest repeated part of that formula is the price. So they’re launching with this phone at $699.
The Samsung S20 Fan Edition won the Phone of the Year Award back in 2020; it won a trophy and everything for launching at that price and standing out!! But now, well, the landscape has changed a lot since then. There’s a lot more competition at this medium flagship tier price, and so this phone isn’t as much of a standout win as it was a year ago.
I think you’ll see what I mean. So inside, it’s the high-end stuff. Not an over-the-top bleeding edge, but right at the flagship level.
Technical Specifications Galaxy S21 FE
- Snapdragon 888 and either six or eight gigs of RAM.
- A 4500 milliamp-hour battery.
- Triple cameras and upfront featured is a 6.4-inch 1080p.
- A selfie camera cutout at the top-middle for the 32-megapixel selfie camera.
- 120 hertz AMOLED display.
Reviewing every detail of Samsung S21 FE
- Screen:
The screen this phone have is actually an excellent screen. It’s flat for one, I like that. It has thin, even bezels with a slightly thicker chin, and then it has a fingerprint reader down low at the bottom underneath the display. They’re just still so damn good at screens that this is right up among the best, brightest ones you’ll find in phones in this class. It has a 240-hertz touch sample rate, and it’s super responsive. This screen is the flagship for sure, and the design is just super safe. It obviously looks just like the regular S21, but this is a new matte dark gray look with the camera module again pushed right up to the corner and curving over the side of the phone.
- Charger:
It’s got IP68 water resistance, 15-watt wireless charging, and even reverse wireless charging. All pretty much flagship stuff. But from this exact moment on, you can see the Fan Edition formula kick in. Or, in other words, where they start to cut a few corners and drop a few things down to save that price, and so the real question will be, do you care about those sort of minor tweaks?
- Design:
As you are able to see in the design, the phone has a plastic back. Also, Samsung didn’t quite fully commit to matte black, so it’s this dark gray that unfortunately picks up a bit more fingerprints than I would like, and there’s also these metal rails all the way around, which is more durable and less likely to crack when you drop it. It explains these little cutouts on either side for your antenna pass-through for millimeter-wave.
The regular S21 was also plastic with metal rails, but the Fan Edition cuts that back even a little bit further where the camera cutout isn’t actually a part of the rail anymore. So there’s a seam between that. So you can see here that the regular S21 metal rail includes the camera bump. Here on this new Fan Edition, that’s an all-plastic back. So I still like the camera bump design. This is probably the least impressive version of it. However, if you put the phone in a case, you might not even notice any of this stuff, but that is a real difference.
There are even more minor things. Even though it has a larger battery than the S21, it’s super light; in fact, when I first took it out of the box, it felt kinda like one of those fake dummy phones where it’s huge but doesn’t have much weight. But maybe that’s because I’m coming from phones with more metal and glass.
- Fingerprint Reader:
I also noticed that the fingerprint reader underneath the display is right around the same spot as the regular S21; still, it’s an optical fingerprint reader instead of the ultrasonic ones on the rest of the S21 line. So you can see it shining the light on your finger before unlocking. Now, again, this is minor, and this one still does seem to be pretty quick. I registered both my thumbs, and it’s definitely still faster than the Pixel 6’s optical fingerprint reader. However, it might not work with some moisture on my hand or some wear and tear on the screen, as well as the ultrasonic ones in Samsung’s more expensive phones.
- Speaker:
There’s a single speaker at the bottom, which is part of a stereo system with the earpiece speaker, but it’s definitely still pretty easy to block this one, and you’ll notice when it’s blocked, even though the earpiece is still putting out sound. Overall, the haptics is a small step down from the other flagships, the S21s, the Pixels, and even the OnePlus 9 Pros of the world, not quite as tight and precise.
- Cameras:
The triple cameras back here, you got one 12-megapixel primary, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and an 8-megapixel 3x telephoto, and they are very solid.
You’ve got OIS on that main camera. It puts out sharp images with a shallow depth of field. Great dependable shots in good light, as you’d expect. Sometimes a bit noisy or blurry in low light, but seriously not bad. I’d give this easily a B+ camera, hanging with a lot of flagships but not really beating any.
Also, on a sustainability note, there was no charger in the box which really bugged me!!
Is Samsung S21 a good option to buy?
Maybe the most important fact here is that this S21 series will be outdated or old the second the S22 series comes out, which is right around the corner, and they typically also drop the prices of the S21 series when the S22 series comes out. The small box basically just comes with the phone, a cable, and some paperwork. So I guess that’s even more flagship experience stuff if you wanna look at it that way, but certainly nothing better.
So the real question with the Fan Edition is, do any of these little shortcomings take away from the flagship experience that it’s getting you?
Do they matter to you? Like the little extra bit of plastic on the back, does it make a big difference? Not really.
Does the optical fingerprint reader on the front versus the ultrasonic mean anything to most people? No.
Does the 8-megapixel telephoto camera on the back versus the previous 64-megapixel with a bigger max zoom actually matter?
9 out of 10 people probably won’t notice.
And so honestly, this would all be totally fine with me in this phone if the S21 wasn’t literally just sitting at $699 for most of the past few months, and right now, refurbished ones are going for $599 on Amazon.
So that’s the crazy part of this phone’s existence now in 2022. It’s like the S21 Fan Edition was lighting the market on fire with basically giving us all this flagship stuff for like $300 less than expected, but now in this new landscape, you’ve gotta fit somewhere between Pixel 6, which is an incredibly good value at $599 with an arguably better camera and software experience, and then the higher-up phones, some of which are even in Samsung’s own lineup.
So the fact that this FE is so similar to the S21 but is launching so close to the S22 that’s the swing and a miss, in my opinion.
How about the price?
I really think this phone would have obviously killed that $549 or even %599 or something like that, but it didn’t. This launch price and timing are what blend it in with the rest of the market, and this has happened to Samsung before with the Note20. You might remember, it was the recipient of the Bust of the Year trophy because it was just a phone that just priced itself out of where it was supposed to land in the market, and it was actually not a bad phone at all.
Similarly, this is not a bad phone at all, and I think many people who buy it with blinders on are going to really like this phone.
But if you take your blinders off, there’s a lot more around in this landscape around this price which is a much more interesting decision.
To Sum Up…
So outstanding performance, familiar software, really nice cameras, a battery upgrade, and, of course, Samsung’s awesome display. This is a great phone. But, you know, at this price, people are gonna be cross-shopping. They might wanna take a risk on a Pixel or on a OnePlus 9 or, I don’t know, an iPhone SE for that matter.
There’s a whole bunch more happening in this region. The ball’s in your court. What do you think of the S21 Fan Edition? Let me know.
