Month: January 2021

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  from left to right, the Galaxy S21 Ultra, the S21+, and the S21. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung's new smartphones are finally official, so let's meet the Galaxy S21 family. The design and specs line up with what was rumored, but the big news today is the price range, which is hopefully a sign that the sky-high prices in 2020 are coming down a bit.

The Galaxy S21 line is seeing an across-the-board $200 price cut compared to last year. Previously, (adding a penny for clarity's sake) Samsung was charging $1,000, $1,200, and $1,400 for the S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra, respectively. This year, the S21 is $800, the S21+ is $1,000, and the Ultra is $1,200. The cheaper models are seeing some visible cost-cutting, but I wouldn't say it's enough to justify a $200 price drop—the price is genuinely lower. And there's no arguing this for the Ultra model, which still seems every bit as "Ultra" as last year, with a lower price.

Samsung is now calling the base model S21 a "value-oriented" device and, like the Note20, is changing the S21 to a plastic back for a lower bill of materials. The other two phones are glass, and everything supposedly has a "matte finish," which sounds great for fingerprint reduction.

Enlarge / 158,000 Teslas will brick their infotainment screens within 3-4 years due to a design defect. (credit: Getty Images/Jonathan Gitlin)

In November, we learned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had opened an engineering analysis into a potential defect with Tesla's popular Models S and X battery electric vehicles. On Wednesday, the other shoe dropped, when NHTSA informed the American automaker that it has to recall 158,000 vehicles to fix defective touchscreens.

The problem concerns a component in the vehicles' infotainment systems, called the Media Control Unit. Buried within the MCU is an 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory chip, which can only be written to a finite number of times. Once this number of read/write cycles is reached—something that takes between three and four years depending on how much the car is driven—the touchscreen dies. And unfortunately, that's a real problem in a car where the touchscreen is the way almost all the controls are accessed.

Not being able to browse the Internet in your car or stream a podcast is obviously an inconvenience, especially in an high-end vehicle. But NHTSA is more concerned about the fact that if the touchscreen dies, functions like the backup camera and window defogging are lost, too, as are audible alerts for other onboard safety systems.