The launch of the Samsung M series back in 2019 helped the company establish a firm foothold in the entry-level segment in the Indian market. With 2020 on the horizon, Samsung hopes to ramp up its effort in a bid to bolster sales and compete against brands like Xiaomi, Realme and Nokia amongst others.
The Galaxy M line-up has flourished with its peculiar style of offering good quality smartphones with impressive specs at a low-cost. The Galaxy M21 hopes to build on this ideology and go that extra mile to attract a lot more audience. Today we have a chance to see if the new M21 has what it takes to be a good smartphone.
Design and Display
Right off the back, Users will be taken aback with the beautiful 6.4-inch sAMOLED display with FHD+ resolution and Gorilla Glass 3 protection. This panel is highly immersive with good side angles and adequate outdoor visibility. The M21 accounts to a superb binge-watching setup given its WideVine L1 certification which provides a cinematic experience as intended by the content creators.
The build quality is, on the other hand, stays similar to the one before with smooth rounded corners made out of plastic polycarbonate shell. The back too remains the same with a triple camera setup on the side and a squarish fingerprint sensor on the centre.
Processor
The Galaxy M21 uses a Samsung made Exynos 9611 processor that features 4 cores clocked at 1.7GHz and 4 cores clocked at 2.3GHz. It also comes with a faster 4/6 GB RAM and 64/128 GB of onboard storage which can be expanded to 512GB with the additional expansion slot on the side. This setup is decent for daily use as the chipset is capable of handling everyday tasks such as messaging, social media, casual games and general interactions with exceptional ease. The device also runs graphics-intensive titles like PUBG, Asphalt 9 and Real Racing with good FPS thanks to the Mali-G72 MP3 GPU available inside.
However, this ain’t no gaming smartphone, because once you push the graphics to max settings, you start to notice a little lag.
Speaking about the user interface, we liked the new One UI 2.0 that is built on top of Android 10. The interface is clean and free of a lot of bloatware than earlier. The system animations are smooth and apps load faster which does hint that the new OneUI isn’t that intensive in regards to system consumption.
Camera
With the Galaxy M21, Samsung has placed a lot more emphasis on the camera performance with the presence of a triple-lens setup compared to the two lenses found on the M20 launched last year. Optics include a 48MP primary sensor paired with an 8-megapixel sensor carrying a 123-degree ultra-wide-angle lens and a 5-megapixel depth sensor.
The benefits of using a wide-angle lens came out to be a lot apparent as the shots captured a wider field-of-view and accommodated a lot of things in a single frame. The picture clarity and colour reproduction have been improved from before, but we hoped to see if Samsung would mark the picture quality in the same ballpark as they did with their A-series smartphone. Regardless, the Galaxy M21captures good shots inadequate light with a sufficient amount of detail and colour saturation. The night shots, on the other hand, are a bit noisy and grainy.
Selfies, on the other hand, are handled by a 20MP front-facing camera placed underneath the drop notch cavity on the front. This sensor is very capable of capturing shots with a great amount of detail. The sensor is aided by an Artificial Intelligence-based tech that smartly adjusts the white balance and colour gamut concerning the ambient conditions to give you that perfect shot. Video recording was crisp and face unlock came in a lot quicker than we expected due to the optimised performance derived from the Exynos chipset.
Battery
The best part of the Galaxy M21 is undoubtedly the battery. The smartphone gets a gigantic 6000mAh battery with Samsung’s power-saving tech to power through an entire day worth of endless gaming, binge-watching and video calling experience. Moreover, the presence of a 15W in-box fast charger means, there is far fewer times between your in-frequent charging cycles.
In our in-house testing, we found the M21 to easily last an entire day with 10 to 20 per cent left in the bank for your morning social media use.
Gizmo Verdict
All in all, we were thoroughly impressed with the Galaxy M21. The smartphone doesn’t scream out to be the outright best in all segments. Rather, the Galaxy M21 rightly build on its earlier sibling and tries to supersede its best virtue by providing a far more battery life, beautiful display and dependable build quality. So, if a good display and a long battery are what you are looking for, go for the Galaxy M21.
