So, I've been the owner of an S21 for about 2 weeks now and in that time my experience has been rocky to say the least.
My first point is the performance of the camera:
This is less about the hardware and more about the image processing, I've noticed that compared to photos shot from my old (and now traded in) S10 the finer details are a lot less. Things like fur and small complex objects like stones on a beach etc. just come out as blurs unless they're the main focus of the photo, whereas on the S10 they were blurry but still had some detail remaining. This is because the image processing seems to favour making the images sharper, which is fine if all you're gonna do is post them on Instagram as it makes them stand out, but as I will be using some images as references for Game maps having the fine details removed because of the processing making all images overly sharp is not ideal.
And the 64MP sensor is very poor, it only seems capable of delivering good results in specific light conditions, and even then when zooming in it becomes apparent that the image processing just adds more sharpness to photos from the telephoto lens, once again sucking out the detail.
2nd Concern is the battery usage:
Last night my phone went from 51% to 14% (Pictured is around 20ish%) over the space of 1 hour, and with seemingly no solid cause. Since the battery usage no longer lets us see how much battery is used by system processes and hardware it makes it difficult when something is draining the battery at that kind of rate and we have no insight to what it could be. I am certain that is was not an app, as none of them reported any rise battery % used in that time. The Thermal Guardian app reported high CPU usage in that time (between 60% and 87%). I did submit a report about this in the Samsung Members app, and in that I pin-pointed the Clock app as the only different thing I did prior to the huge battery drain was set a reoccurring alarm, and turning it off stopped the high usage.
My main concern here though, is how inconsistent Android battery life is compared to iOS, and this isn't helped by all the bloatware Samsung pre-installs and forces us to keep on the phone, and I do notice that even though I don't use those apps at all, they still occasionally creep into the Battery usage most days with around 0.2% usage each, which adds up when it's 5 or so apps doing it. We can't uninstall these apps or even disable them.
But back to the inconsistency, I don't really use my phone heavily, It's mostly a mix of Twitter, Reddit, Samsung Internet and some games like PokeGo or SinoAlice that I play for about 10 mins maybe. Yet, despite this fairly consistent usage I notice that some days I can push for +4 Hours of Screen On time before 50%, yet other days barely manage 2 Hours. Now, the conditions stay the same each day as I'm home 95% of the time, Wifi stays on all day and nothing else does, so what causes such a huge variation in battery life from one day to the next when my usage is almost the same day in day out?
Final Concern; Heat:
This phone gets noticeably warm when I use it, even just scrolling through twitter causes the top left of the phone to get warm to touch, something I have never experienced on an Android phone since my Galaxy Ace (Phones owned: Galaxy Ace, Nexus 5x, Nexus 6P, S7, S10, S21)
I've seen quite of people reporting similar which leaves me asking, is this a software issue, something that's causing higher than expected CPU usage? Or is it a hardware flaw with the Exynos variant?
Apologies for the long post, just, this is definitely the rockiest switch to a new Android phone I've had, and the S21 seems to have issues that the previous S Series phones didn't have which I guess just leaves me questioning the Quality of the new phones. I do really hope that these are software issues that can be fixed with the monthly updates, and everything else about this phone is brilliant, but these things are kind of ruining what is otherwise a great phone.
Edit:
Before you ask, yes I have tried clearing the cache partition. It helped a little with the heat (still gets warm though) but the other 2 issues remained the same.
Thermal Guardian reporting higher than usual temps, citing High CPU usage as the cause.
Huge Battery Drain by something, all the apps listed fall under my expected % used of them considering their Screen Time.
if you was to lower it then it prevents device overheating I have mine on level 2
