Samsung has had a fantastic year — they sold more units than ever, new flagship Exynos chipsets are shaping up to be finally reliable, and the company has even brought the Galaxy M series to Pakistan. But the trend has also made Samsung’s mid-range catalog more confusing the ever. And it continues as the company launches the Samsung Galaxy M21s (think the Galaxy M21 with a higher-res camera).
The Galaxy M21s is essentially a renamed Galaxy M31 (which was also re-launched in India as Galaxy F41). The phone is retailing in Pakistan as the Samsung Galaxy M31 if you’re keeping track of the names, but with an additional camera sensor.
Samsung’s Exynos 9611 chipset is at the heart of the device, combined with 4GB of memory 64GB of expandable storage. Unlike the Galaxy M31, which has a base memory of 6GB and storage that goes up to 128GB, the M21s offers incredibly mediocre specs for the same price. Even the massive 6000 mAh battery has underwhelming 15W fast charging support.
The aesthetics of this upper-mid-range phone tell the same story. The Distant cousin of Samsung Galaxy A21s aka the Galaxy M21s is made of plastic and painted in half-tone black and blue colors. A capacitive fingerprint scanner is mounted on the back. But, the screen is decent. It’s a 6.4” full HD+ super AMOLED display with a notch and razor-thin top and side bezels.
The camera system of Samsung Galaxy M21 features a 64MP standard lens, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a 5MP camera for portraits (the fourth 5MP camera for macro shots has been lopped off). The selfie camera is still 20MP.
Other than the missing macro camera, the only difference between the vanilla M21 is the 64MP camera that replaces its 48MP main. It just went on sale in Brazil, starting from BRL 1,529 (~Rs. 45,000), however, we can expect a much lower price when brought to the Asian markets.