Samsung Galaxy S21 5G (Grade A Refurbished)

So far this phone performs great. It is fast and very responsive. 16GB of RAM! I could open a lot of apps in the background and it is still running without sluggish. It is new and never been used (I think) since the imei is still good and not being registered. This phone with 512GB storage is sold out pretty much everywhere and you cannot even get them from Samsung website. Don't buy 128GB. It is useless since the storage is so small. Add $50 and you could get 256GB. However, I recommend 512GB. What is great is the camera. It works a lot better than S20 Ultra 512GB. That one was a let down and I returned it. I stuck with S8 Plus for 4 years but I love that phone. The autofocus and nightime mode improved significantly at least for me. The S20 Ultra autofocus is horrible. It seems the multitasking works a lot better to. App can easily works as popup instead of of multiple presses in s8 plus. Speaker sounds is a bit louder and has more bass sound. Wi-Fi 6 and 5G are definitely the best features. With 5G, I am no longer having blackout in certain area around my house area. When there is no 4G LTE, 5G will take over and when there is no 5G, 4G LTE is taking over. In the past, I only have 4G LTE and 3/2G. You have three different customization on how to switch to different apps (multitasking). I haven't really go out and use the camera yet although it is the main reason why I am buying this phone. Another plus side is this is a t-mobile version. The only downside is no micro sdcard, 100X space zoom (a feature JOKE from Samsung Marketing department), 3 buttons instead of 4 and finger print from the front display. For finger print, I love the rear touch since it is more convenient to use with one hand. Finger print is a bit troublesome to detect unlike the old one. (Update: You have to press a bit harder on the display to get your fingerprint detected. So far it is working better than I first initialed test). I am hoping Samsung will bring the sd card back in the future. Seriously 108MB, 8k (never use this feature ever), 4k size of photos and videos and you do not provide sd card? Even my Sony A7RIII works great with micro sd card in sd card adapter. There is no excuse of not giving customer sd card option. The excuse of sd card is slowing down phone performance is an old myth provided by none techies or those people who never used sd card. Not sure why the hate on sd card. If you don't want to don't use it. Recently so many big companies either getting hacked, attacked with ramsomware or services shutting down cloud drives becoming a joke. Samsung shutting down their own cloud for photos/videos services and Google their unlimited photos. With all the security issues and possible shutdown, it is not a safe approach for storing your photos/videos for backup. To work around it, you can use - USB OTG C to female USB A/C port for USB flash drives - USB OTG sd card hub/ports with sd card readers and USB A/C ports. - 4/5 TB hdd drives are still having reasonable pricing with only small increased in pricing. I am lucky to keep up with the news to buy 8TB to 16TB drives before scalpers took over the market. S21 ultra has the ability to read exFat/fat32 by default and ntfs for small usb flash drives. For large drives like 2/4/5 TB or larger in NTFS format you need other special software to read the NTFS. NTFS format has better storage efficient and security than exFAT and fat32. I am using paragon software to read the ntfs ($9.99) and total commander. For the usb hub station I am using, without a pd power delivery I could not read/write to ntfs hdd drives. I haven't try it on smaller OTG (USB 2.0/3.0) to see if it is working on hdd drives. Will update on that later. - Buy UHS-II readers to get faster reading/writing speed even if you are not using UHS-II sd cards. Buy one of the USB 3.1 gen 2 cable or gen 2x2 USB C to USB C to reap the 10/20 Gbps (theoretical) speed. I will update more once in the future especially the camera part. Update: I bought a hub station with 5 USB ports (2 x 2.0, 2 x 3.0, 1 x C 3.0) 2 x hdmi, 1 x dp port, ethernet, USB c powered port (100w), UHS II regular sd and micro card reader. This thing has one usb c cable attached which you can connect to your phone. This thing is simply awesome. It is better than my old Samsung Dex which doesn't come with extra USB ports , extra display ports and sd card readers. With 100w to power this hub station, I can connect to several usb devices without the worry of connection loss issue. Since I am doing a lot of reading I don't have to use my desktops or laptops. I probably will buy a small battery powered monitor to turn this thing into a "laptop". Using my hub station, my wireless speed is ~478.82 to ~480 Mbps Download from Ookla. Upload is not provided but I assume it is above ~22 Mbps ~380 to ~438 Mbps Download from Google. Upload is ~23 Mbps However, this is my router and ISP dependable and not the phone. I should have test the phone using the 5g speed on clear and country side. Will update later on that. Next month or so I am going to use a lot of the photography so I could evaluate the camera performance. I know that from few shots, the default auto camera is a lot better than S20 Ultra (which I used only for few days). The autofocus is fast and photo taken is not blurry. The HDR processing makes the photo looks better too. I could see the clouds contour enhancement and colors look a lot better too. What I wanted to know now is the nightime shooting. I did take few snapshot in a darkroom and so far it seems to run perform better than S20 Ultra (which takes 5 to 10 seconds) or something not even getting anything during the autofocus.