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rather than Wi-Fi incurred a 3-hour battery penalty in testing. You can’t turn off
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party app called Samsung Band Selector that might let you force your phone to
use 4G, but it’s unsupported and could be disabled at any time.
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no longer ships a charger with them, claiming that’s because most people
already own USB chargers. But most of the USB chargers you’ve accumulated
over the past several years have USB-A ports and Micro USB cables, which are
useless for the USB-C-to-USB-C cable that’s included in the S21 box. Even if you
do have a USB-C charger handy, its vintage and power will make a difference.
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20 minutes and reached a full charge in 70 minutes. But plugged into a Galaxy
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minutes to charge the phone fully. You can always opt to avoid the cable
question altogether and get a Qi-compatible wireless charging pad.
NETWORKING THAT’S READY FOR 2022
The Galaxy S21 series is ready for the networks of 2022, but they don’t bring
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Qualcomm’s new X60 modem. The X60 lets phones combine non-contiguous
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performance. In practice, the networks aren’t quite ready for it yet.
There’s also support for C-band, the fast new frequencies for which carriers just
spent more than $80 billion. Because the satellite companies currently using
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2021 or early 2022. But when they happen, they’re likely to more than triple
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I tested the S21 on AT&T and T-Mobile. (Our Verizon SIMs are fried right now.)
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locations, the S21 Ultra averaged 113Mbps down and 20Mbps up on AT&T’s
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