Sometimes we love a product so much that we start to feel loyal to a brand.
Year after year, that brand continues to deliver products that fit our lives perfectly.
And so we continue to buy those products.
And we buy other products from that brand that go well together.
Every upgrade feels like that brand is listening to us. Every new feature is welcomed by us.
But have you ever thought... What if there's something better out there?
Something that can give us Speed
Something that is so Elegant that we are proud of it
A product that gives us Power
That lets us get on with Work
But is great when we want to have fun
These two flagships offer all of those things and I’ve been using
them both for about 6 months now. It’s time I make a decision.
Which one do I pick as my main phone going forwards?
This video is brought to you by CASETiFY. More about them later in the video.
I am Alex and I do down-to-earth tech reviews. Sometimes.
And I am here at least once a week.
It is no secret that I love Apple products. But this isn’t about me.
There are many smartphone options out there but when it comes to flagships,
Apple and Samsung are the first ones that come to mind.
The technology available in the iPhone 12 Pro Max and the Samsung S21 Ultra
represent the absolute pinnacle when it comes to smartphones.
I have made a few videos comparing these two phones in loads more detail
and I will leave that as a playlist here for you at the end of this video.
In this video though,
I will take you through my decision making process in picking the best flagship device for me.
To start things off, let's talk about the design. Both Apple and Samsung have done
a fantastic job here. But I have to say, the S21 Ultra design is just better in my opinion.
I do like the flat edges and prefer that to the previous
iPhone models, but the S21 Ultra looks a bit more modern for me.
I went for the custom Phantom Brown color with
the carbon fibre finish here around the camera that for me it's straight fire.
What I like the most is how the colour seems to change, depending on how light shines on it.
And whichever way I look at it, I don't feel bored.
Don't get me wrong! The iPhone 12 Pro
Max design is a striking device! Apple did this nice throwback to one of my favourite iPhones.
It oozes elegance and this gold colour in particular
is by far my favourite in the recent models.
Though I do like the latest purple colour as well!
But after a few weeks it became a little common place... I can't explain,
it's not that it's boring - It's just not as exciting and inviting as the S21 Ultra.
In terms of aesthetics, it's gonna
As soon as I saw this carbon fiber detail, my decision was made.
Perhaps a little impulsive there, but I was sold. The design excited me.
For the last 15 years not much has gone out of the
rectangular shape. So these little details matter to me.
Ergonomically, I also think the S21 Ultra achieves a more pleasing usage.
Especially for longer sessions of browsing, watching content or messaging.
Although they are priced similarly, there are benefits when choosing Samsung.
Apple won’t really do any decent trade-in deals. But if you are coming from a previous
Samsung model, it makes a lot of sense to use the trade-in offers that Samsung has.
In some scenarios they might even throw-in a voucher towards accessories!
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Right, back to video.
When it comes to the display, I won't go into the specs because by now you've had
enough of listening to thousands of nits, aspect ratio and refresh rate.
So without getting too technical on OLED and AMOLED and sending you to sleep, (this is not
the channel for it) I am not going to talk about absolute color accuracy or contrast accuracy.
Instead let's watch a a few seconds of top quality content
in a couple of different lighting scenarios.
Because that, I think is more important than going through specs and numbers.
(Though I covered those in different videos)
This here is Disney Plus and the content is available in all the goodies that we care about:
4K Ultra HD - Dolby Vision, Atmos
And HDR10 and automatically plays that on devices that can support it.
The first thing you notice is how bright the S21 Ultra can get.
For the purposes of this test I turned off True Tone on the iPhone - that just seems to make the
picture warmer for me. Too warm in fact.
And I did the same on the Samsung by turning off Adaptive brightness.
Though I understand that Adaptive brightness could make the S21 Ultra display go even brighter
in direct sunlight.
For this test I kept it closer to what most people would do
when watching content but I included a few outdoor shots as well.
The iPhone display is not as bright as the S21 Ultra, but it's no slouch.
As you can see here, the difference is noticeable when watching content,
especially when you throw in daylight into the mix.
The Samsung display is much brighter for me in that scenario. When we go away from bright windows
or at night time, the difference in brightness levels is less noticeable between the two.
One very important aspect of any smartphone is the camera.
The technology behind these make it possible for anyone to create amazing photographs and videos.
Whether it’s for professional use or for fun, both of these devices are extremely capable.
I know there are a lot of better apps than the built-in apps but
I will be using the stock camera app for this video.
Starting with the iPhone, the most impressive photos for me are the portrait shots.
The skin tones are very accurate. In daylight, indoors or outdoors,
at night. when it comes to Portrait, the iPhone really is better for me.
Shot of me looking at pictures in Lightroom on the iPad Pro
Zoom, Single Take, Director’s view. The Samsung has so many cool features that the iPhone doesn’t.
Ultimately the iPhone takes great quality shots and videos. So it does
the basic things really well.
But the Samsung does that too and in some shots, I honestly couldn’t tell which one was better.
Some were over saturated on the iPhone and some were over saturated on the S21 Ultra.
Some shots had more detail on the S21 Ultra. And some had more detail on the iPhone.
In terms of Dynamic Range where - in simple terms - we want the camera sensor to be efficient and
keeping very bright parts from blowing out and not crush the dark parts to pure black.
I think the iPhone handles Dynamic range much better in tricky lighting situations.
We are either losing highlights or shadows here on the Samsung whereas
we can still see some detail on the iPhone shots.
Of course, if you fiddle with settings and manually change
some settings you might achieve better results.
But this is just a straight up comparison using settings that most consumers would use.
I did a camera comparison video in a lot more detail but for now,
I will just say that honestly - there are situations where I’d rather pick the iPhone
and other situations where I’d rather pick the S21 Ultra.
Out of the box in February, the S21 Ultra had a couple
of pretty much unusable areas like 8K video and some night time portraits.
But with software updates it did get much better - or maybe it was user error… I don’t know.
But I can’t sit on the fence here guys.
I rarely use some of the features that both these phones offer but I like to know it’s there.
So if I had to pick one right now based on the camera alone
and for my use - it would be the iPhone.
But this video is not about just the camera.
What about the Software?
I’ve not used an Android device for about 15 years!
So I am gonna be brutally honest. When I picked this phone up I though I was
going to do a few videos on it and sell it or return it at the end.
But I was really surprised guys, at how easy it was to use. And how flexible it is.
The iPhone offers a very smooth experience and if you already have lots of Apple devices,
it’s nice to use things like handoff where the content you’re watching or
listening to follows you from iPhone, to HomePod mini, AirPods Max and so on.
But that’s not the thing that I missed the most,
the thing that made it harder to use Android with my workflow was actually Airdrop.
Yes there are workarounds but nothing beats Airdrop.
But on the other hand, I can plug my S21 Ultra
to the Thunderbolt dock on my desk and access the content using an app on my Mac.
It’s not as nice or as quick as Airdrop but if it’s only a couple of times a day,
it’s not a big deal.
It took me a while to get used to the keyboard but using Google Keyboard helped with that.
We keep hearing people talk about this “ECOSYSTEM”.
And yes as I said, it is nice to be able to handoff that experience
between Apple devices but when I think about the apps that I use…
A lot of the apps have their own ecosystem.
Google Drive , One Drive, Microsoft Teams, Evernote, Notion
The one that surprises me the most is Adobe. If you already pay a subscription to Adobe,
you can access the apps across all platforms.
Some apps are annoyingly tied to either Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
Like Fabulous
for example, you’d have to pay two subscriptions to use it on Android as well as Apple.
But the fact I can customise the look and feel,
there are many more options on the Android that for me is more friendly.
I come from a tech background and really
like the fact I can have a bit more freedom to customise things.
Now, I know there are a lot of people that like the Apple way of organising things
and don’t really care whether they can change the look and feel
and are quite happy with the widgets the way they are - and I get it.
But it frustrates me sometimes when you are
trying to arrange an icon on the Home Screen - especially when its in that one corner
of the screen that doesn’t matter what you do it seems to completely mess things app.
Anyway.. I wasn’t going to cover gaming but I know how important that is to some of you.
In my previous gaming test video the results here really shocked me...
Especially with this one game called Genshin Impact. It is extremely demanding on smartphones.
And it kind of destroyed both the iPhone and the S21 Ultra in my last gaming test comparisons.
Both phones handled Call of Duty,
PUBG, racing games really well but when it came to Genshin Impact…
This game killed both devices,
but the iPhone struggled a bit more in that test a few months ago.
The screen basically just kept dimming to a point where the game was unplayable.
The S21 Ultra (this is the Exxon’s 2100 version) coped with it a little bit better.
It did start to drop frames and stutter but it was playable for a lot longer.
So there you have guys, it still doing exactly as before.
Both phones behaved exactly the same as before. So whilst they are extremely capable and able
to handle gaming, when it comes to more high end gaming the CPU and GPU can only handle so much.
Conclusion: So in conclusion,
don’t feel afraid to try something new every now and then.
I will be moving to the S21 Ultra as my main smartphone. But I am also looking
forward to Apple will do in future. So Apple, over to you - can you win me over?
I am not getting rid of the iPhone or selling it by the way. I am doing a full
review of it in a couple of weeks but then will be passing it on to my wife.
There ARE benefits of staying with a brand and remaining loyal to a particular brand.
From a cost perspective, or you may not want to transfer all of your data from one to another.
But competition between brands
is also great. Ultimately when there’s good competition we the consumers, are the winners.
And I will see you and your smiling faces, in the next one.