Samsung Galaxy A21s review

Budget-friendly and mid-range phones are getting better and better, and with the economy all shaken up, they are becoming the more desirable option for a lot of people. Joining the budget-friendly crowd is the Samsung Galaxy A21s: а device with a massive battery life and well-performing cameras. Now, we did encounter performance issues, and the LCD screen is not so color accurate, but if you’re looking for a good budget-friendly smartphone with solid battery life and a big display, the Galaxy A21s might be a good candidate for you. Read on to see what else we liked and disliked about this smartphone.

Design & Display

Overall, the Galaxy A21s has a simple and unobtrusive design. The smartphone’s display is a 6.5-inch LCD panel, surrounded by thin bezels. On the right hand side of the screen there is a small punch-hole, housing the selfie camera. The dark blue color of our unit emits rainbow-like reflections when light hits it at certain angles. Other available colors for this model are white and black, nothing fancy. On the smartphone’s plastic back, next to the quad-camera bump, we find the fingerprint sensor.


The A21s’ display is bright and vibrant; however, the colors are quite blue-ish and the viewing angles are not perfect, but this is to be expected from a budget phone. The resolution of 1600 by 720 pixels is quite low for a 6.5-inch screen. Given the smartphone’s price, we were expecting to see a better screen, but we’d say the current one is passable.

Camera & Audio

The Galaxy A21s comes with a quad-camera system: a 48MP main sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide camera, a 2MP depth sensor and a 2MP macro camera. The latter does not quite manage to take macro shots well, the main sensor succeeding better in this department.


Photos in good lighting conditions turn out great, although colors are a bit more saturated than in real life. We see Samsung’s usual image processing present on this device: some people may find the vibrant, cheerful-looking colors good, but they’re quite unrealistic.

The phone has a portrait mode which Samsung calls Live Focus mode, and it does an okay job. Sometimes it struggles to determine which part is background and which part is just your subject’s hair or shirt, but other times it does great.

The A21s doesn’t have a night mode, so don’t count on those dark photos for your social media.

Speaking of social media, selfies turn out quite good. The A21s is equipped with a 13MP selfie camera, coupled with Samsung’s usual beauty effect which I personally don’t mind (even when you turn the beauty filter off, there is some smoothening of the skin, so keep that in mind).

The ultra-wide shots are pretty similar to the ones taken by the main camera ‒ in bright light, colors are vibrant to the point of having a cartoon-ish vibe, but overall, photos are quite good-looking and lively. Dynamics are also good on those.

Video

In the video department, the A21s does a satisfactory job for its price range, although it can only record FHD videos. Colors on videos are fun and vibrant and the autofocus is pretty quick. Unfortunately, there’s no fancy 4K recording capabilities here to brag about.