Samsung Galaxy M21

The camera system on the M21 is almost the same as that of the Galaxy M31 (review) but with the absence of the macro lens. There's a 48MP primary snapper on the M21 in a triple-camera layout with the other two being an 8MP ultra-wide lens and a 5MP depth sensor.

The 10nm-based Exynos 9611 powers the Galaxy M21, which is the same SoC found inside the more expensive Galaxy M31. While there is technically nothing wrong with this chipset, there is a discernible amount of lag that I noticed during normal day-to-day activities. There was a small lag between clicking a photo and then previewing it, and this lag was more pronounced when viewing 48MP photos. If I had more than 5 tabs opened up in Chrome, there was a delay in opening more tabs and in general if multiple heavy apps were open in the background, I could feel a noticeable lag when opening more apps. You could say that I'm nitpicking but I'm used to smooth performance on the likes of the Realme 6 (review) or even the Redmi Note 9 Pro (review), which use the MediaTek G90T and Snapdragon 720G respectively. The M21 variant which I have received happens to have 4GB of RAM, although you can upgrade to a 6GB version for Rs 15,499.Now I'm in no way saying that the M21 is a slow phone. In fact, the Geekbench scores on the M21 are comparable to both the Redmi Note 9 Pro and the Realme 6. However, it seems to me that there happens to be a much better integration of software and hardware on the Redmi and Realme devices as compared to the M21. For those who wish to play PUBG on a budget, the M21 will not disappoint you for the initial hour or so. You can keep the graphics at Smooth and also set the frame rate to Extreme for a much more enjoyable experience, but the device will start lagging after nearing the 60-minute mark. However, all casual games ran smoothly and without a hitch. For authentication purposes, there is a capacitive fingerprint sensor on the back which works well and is quite responsive. OneUI 2.0 is the skin that Samsung is currently running on all its latest devices and it is one of the nicer user interfaces out there. Like the M31, the Galaxy M21 also runs the stripped-down One UI Core which misses out on features such as Bixby Home and Samsung Pay. However, apart from that, you will be able to enjoy the full scope of OneUI features ranging from the tons of theme customisations, better animations, dark mode and tweaked icons.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the Galaxy M21 possibly offers the best battery life you could get on an affordable smartphone. The gigantic 6,000mAh powerhouse pushes through one day of usage easily and nears on completing two days before the battery gives up. Our standard battery test which involves running a video on loop with half brightness and volume saw the phone last nearly 30 hours. About an hour of PUBG Mobile drained the phone off just 12 percent battery which is quite phenomenal in my opinion. The only gripe is the 15W charging which takes more than 2 full hours to completely juice the phone up.