If rumors are anything to go by, then the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE is just around the corner. The new Fan Edition phone is said to break cover officially on January 3, 2022. It will reportedly go on sale on January 11. However, a customer in South Africa has already managed to purchase the phone via a local retailer. Yesterday, they shared a quick unboxing and a hands-on video of the device. Today, we have a mini-review of the Galaxy S21 FE from them.
To start with, the Galaxy S21 FE appears to be running Android 11 out of the box, with Samsung‘s One UI 3.1 on top. This is disappointing considering Android 12 has been out for several months now. The Korean firm has already seeded the Android 12-based One UI 4.0 to a bunch of Galaxy smartphones. Perhaps the unit that we are seeing in this video is running on an early software build. There have been sightings of the Galaxy S21 FE with Android 12 onboard recently. So we expect the official retail units to boot the latest Android version from day one.
The Galaxy S21 FE is powered by the Snapdragon 888 SoC in South Africa. The other three Galaxy S21 models feature the Exynos 2100 processor in the country. So Samsung is changing things a bit with the new model. Perhaps it will only offer the phone in the Snapdragon variant globally. The device in the video has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. But Samsung could also offer it in other memory configurations.
Key Galaxy S21 FE specs confirmed
This mini-review of the Galaxy S21 FE also confirms some of its rumored key specs. The device sports a 6.4-inch display with a 2340×1080 pixels resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. It features the same set of camera sensors found on the Galaxy S20 FE. We have a 12-megapixel main camera, a 12-megapixel ultrawide lens, an 8-megapixel 3X telephoto zoom camera, and a 32-megapixel camera on the front. You can check out the camera samples from the phone here.
For power, we have a 4,500mAh battery that supports fast wireless and wired charging, which rumors suggest tops at 25W. Samsung lets you turn off fast charging though. The Galaxy S21 FE also features an optical under-display fingerprint scanner.
Coming to the price, the phone reportedly cost this customer ZAR 12,999 (approx. $825). However, it is expected to come much cheaper than that in the US. We are looking at a starting price of $699. Not long to go before things get official now.
2021-12-29 15:05:33