A secret feature of the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has just been revealed and explains how the screen of the company’s latest flagship phone looks so good, without wiping out the battery.
Samsung Display, the company’s monitor development and manufacturing arm, announced a new OLED technology that greatly improves efficiency. It offers some details about this new type of display, as well as reveals that the S21 Ultra will be the first device to ship with this panel.
The biggest benefit is the battery life. Samsung claims that its new screen uses 16% less energy than a standard OLED panel, thanks to greater “light efficiency”. This can end up resulting in several extra hours of phone life and can explain the excellent battery performance of the S21 Ultra in our custom TG battery test in our review.
Other benefits of the new material include “wide color gamut, high brightness, HDR and external visibility,” according to Samsung’s press release.
What also helps is LTPO, another important display technology used in the S21 Ultra. This allows the screen to dynamically change its refresh rate between 10 Hz and 120 Hz, depending on what you are currently using the phone for, saving energy. For example, playing will cause the phone to go up to 120 Hz, but going back to the home screen and not touching the phone will tell the phone to reduce the refresh rate.
The Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S21 Plus use a similar technology called LTPS. Changes to the dynamic refresh rate remain the same, but can only drop to 48Hz.
The next flagship phone from Samsung will probably be the Galaxy Note 21, Galaxy Z Fold 3 or Galaxy Z Flip 3. It is a reasonable assumption that this new screen will be present in at least some of the models for these devices. Given how well the S21 Ultra fared, there is a good chance that these phones will reach our best Android phones or even our best overall phone ratings at launch.