The iPhone 12 Pro’s Apple A14 processor scores noticeably higher on both
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GFXBench Car Chase benchmark. Similarly, while the Basemark Web web-
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Pro already scores 600.
There’s some weird stuff going on that makes me question the value of these
numbers. The PCMark and AIMark benchmarks appear to be broken on the S21
Ultra, delivering scores that are obviously far too low. That could be something
about the 888 itself or about Android 11, but in any case, they don’t appear to
give good guidance. The S21 Ultra far outperformed the S20 Ultra on AI
Benchmark, but once again, I’m not sure whether to trust it. We’re working with
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What you’re more likely to care about is that the 888 lets the S21 Ultra do some
impressive new tricks. For instance, the 888’s image-signal processor lets the
S21 Ultra combine its two telephoto cameras for much better 10x–30x zoom
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features. So even without reliable benchmark numbers to quantify speed and
power, it’s clear that this is a big step up from last year’s models.
A STREAMLINED ANDROID EXPERIENCE
The Galaxy S21 Ultra runs Android 11 with Samsung’s OneUI 3.0 extensions.
Samsung told me it’s committing to updating the phone as far as Android 14.
The bloatware situation on the unlocked units isn’t bad at all, but you should
expect the usual dozens of unwanted apps on carrier-locked models, especially
on AT&T. Samsung does preload Facebook, but it’s deletable.
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screen to the left of the main home screen is gone; instead, you now see
Google’s news feed. You can disable the Bixby button presses and turn the
power key into a real power key in settings.