Even though the Galaxy S22 series is all the talk about town, you may not know that Samsung launched a late, Fan Edition, version of last year’s Galaxy S21 series. The Samsung Fan Edition series is usually an affordable version of the series’ flagship device. Sadly, in this case, the device came too late in the release cycle and was overshadowed by the launch of the Galaxy S22 series. But that is not a bad thing, in fact, if you time it right you could get the Galaxy S21 FE 5G at a really great price in the coming months.
The Galaxy S21 FE 5G is, by all accounts, a great all-around smartphone with all the features you’d expect from a flagship device. It can capture good quality images and video and has plenty of power to manage any task you throw at it. The 6.4-inch screen is superb and very bright and I really enjoyed using it for day-to-day tasks and social web browsing. For gamers, the 120Hz screen will also come as a very nice addition providing smoother gaming in games that support this high frame rate. Even most games that run at 60fps look great on this phone.
It’s also important to note that South Africa does not get the Snapdragon 888 chipset version of the Galaxy S21 FE 5G. Instead, we get the Exynos 2100 variant which performs really well compared to Snapdragon 888 based phones with the same spec. In fact, in my benchmarks, it performed slightly better.
When it comes to gaming, I have very little to complain about on the Galaxy S21 FE 5G. PUBG Mobile and COD Mobile ran very smoothly and I enjoyed numerous gaming sessions on this phone. The sound from the built-in speakers is good for gaming and offer plenty of volume to hear the enemy sneaking up behind you.
Running 3DMark the Galaxy S21 FE 5G outperformed my current favourite gaming phone, the Xioami 11T Pro (at 5,789 in 3DMark) by a few hundred points, with a total score of 6,486. Looking a little closer at CPU performance, Geekbench delivered a multi-core score of 3,227. Really good numbers.
The camera also performs really well with general photography looking great across the board. If you like to shoot video you’ll also be happy with the 4K/60fps capabilities to get those crisp shots nailed down.
One of the other things I loved about the Galaxy S21 FE 5G is the matt-colour plastic back of the phone, not only was it smudge-free for the duration of the time that I used this phone, but it feels really great in hand.
So the question is, do you get the Galaxy S21 FE 5G or the newer Galaxy S22? Well, it really should come down to your budget. The performance difference for most gamers would be negligible for the most part. As it stands, the Galaxy S21 FE is around R15k while the newer Galaxy S22 comes in at R19k. For comparison, the older Galaxy S20 FE is available for R11k.