The only prominent dual-SIM phone in the US
Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE brings a critical niche feature to the US: dual SIM card slots to let you carry two cellular subscriptions at once. Outside of that, however, there simply isn’t much reason for this phone to exist. All around, the Galaxy S21 FE very slightly remixes last year’s $799.99 Galaxy S21 at a somewhat lower base price of $699.99. But considering it’s so similar to the previous model and coming out so close to the Galaxy S22 launch, it’s hard to recommend unless you’re specifically looking to buy a dual-SIM phone. A Familiar Face The Galaxy S21 FE comes in four attractive colors: dark gray, green, purple, or white. It has the S21’s beautiful basic design, with a matte back panel and the camera bump flush to the upper right corner, as opposed to the « floating » camera bump on the Galaxy S20 FE. At 6.14 by 2.93 by 0.31 inches (HWD), it’s a bit bigger than the standard Galaxy S21 (5.97 by 2.80 by 0.31 inches), although it isn’t as big as the S21 Ultra (6.50 by 2.98 by 0.35 inches). From the front, it’s really difficult to tell it apart from an S20 FE or a base-model S21. The phone sports an IP68 waterproof rating and has a 6.4-inch,120Hz 2,340-by-1,080 display with an optical fingerprint sensor underneath. There is no SD card slot and no standard headphone jack. The S20 FE had a SIM tray with an SD card slot on the other side; the S21 FE exchanges the SD slot for a second SIM tray. Left to right: Galaxy S21 FE, Galaxy S20 FE Premium Power Just like the Galaxy S21, the S21 FE uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor and runs Android 12 with Samsung’s usual extensions. Our model has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. There is also a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The phone appears to be more aggressively thermally throttled than other Samsung models we’ve tested recently. Our first few benchmark runs gave results looking much more like the S20 series than the S21 series. Checking with the CPU Throttling Test app, which slams the CPU for 15 minutes, we found the S21 FE throttled back faster and harder than either the S20 FE or the S21 Ultra. But a quick touch to the back of the phone showed the problem wasn’t that it was running hot; it was that the S21 FE’s firmware was keeping it cooler than either the S20 FE or the S21 Ultra. So this intense throttling can change with firmware updates. In real-life use, the S21 FE got noticeably warm when playing the extremely high-powered mobile game Genshin Impact, and while the controls were very responsive, we felt like the frame rate was slightly jerkier than it should be. We get the feeling that some software optimization is still needed, but that’s what happens when you test a phone before it launches (the S21 FE officially hits store shelves January 11). The aggressive power management, along with the 1080p screen, helped give the phone good battery life even in 120Hz screen mode.
