The 40-megapixel selfie camera pokes through a small hole in the top of the screen, just below the hidden earpiece speaker. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian All the usual top-quality elements are there. The screen is stunning, performance is good, battery life is excellent and the software is the latest available. But it is the much improved fingerprint scanner that makes the biggest difference to day-to-day usage – it’s fast, accurate and responsive in a way Samsung’s previous efforts just weren’t.

Samsung’s camera app is one of the better ones available and now does more automatically, switching to macro or night modes depending on the scene. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian The long-awaited verdict to having both? Meh – it’s the best of both worlds, sure, but you won’t see much of a difference between 1080p and Quad HD on a display of this size, and Quad HD will drain your battery faster.A choice you don’t have to make, however, is whether or not to pay extra for a 5G model. All three phones come with 5G at no additional cost this year and the Galaxy S21 Ultra even supports Wi-Fi 6E connections (the first smartphone to do so), although the number of people likely to have a new 6GHz router at home is vanishingly small right now. Both the 3x and 10x cameras produce really good, crisp images even in the relatively dim light of stormy weather. The 3x camera is ideal for zooming in on people and other objects a few metres away, while the 10x magnification enables you to meaningfully close the distance to subjects significantly further away. Battery life is also strong. The phone easily outlasts a full day of heavy usage. I get in excess of 35 hours between charges – 7am on day 1 until 6pm on day 2 – with my general usage, which includes more than 5.5 hours of screen-on time split between chat apps, Chrome, Gmail, Evernote, the Guardian, Spotify and many others, shooting about 15 photos and spending about three hours on 5G, the rest on wifi.

Samsung provides at least three years of major software updates, which matches the best of Android rivals but lags behind Apple’s five years of iOS updates. modelami przy ustawieniu domyślnym z wykorzystaniem sieci 5G Sub6 (NIE testowane w sieci 5G mmWave). Rzeczywista żywotność baterii zależy od środowiska Wyrażenie zgody jest dobrowolne. Wycofanie zgody nie zabrania serwisowi Ceneo.pl przetwarzania dotychczas zebranych danych. Szacowane działanie dla typowego użytkownika. Niezależnie oceniane przez Strategy Analytics w okresie 07.12 – 18.12.2020 r. w USA i Wielkiej Brytanii z przedpremierowymiThe Galaxy S21 Ultra has the biggest screen of the three new S21 phones, stretching out across 6.8in. It’s one of Samsung’s “Dynamic AMOLED 2x” panels and it now supports 120Hz at the native WQHD+ resolution (1,440 x 3,200) of the panel. It should come as no surprise that the quality of the images that the Galaxy S21 Ultra is capable of capturing are nothing short of exceptional. As with other high-megapixel-count flagships, the S21 Ultra doesn’t capture 108MP images by default – although this can be enabled in the settings – instead taking 12MP pictures in the auto mode.