- Samsung has released a new Galaxy S21 ad titled “The Trip.”
- The ad claims the S21 has plenty of space for all your 8K videos and then some.
- The base S21 comes with 128GB of storage, which you can’t expand since it doesn’t come with a MicroSD anymore.
With the Galaxy S21 and S21 Ultra out today, Samsung has released a new ad called “The Trip” to sell consumers on its new flagships. Normally we don’t cover ads (unless they also happen to be a Weezer video as well), but we decided to flag this one because it caused some raised eyebrows among the Android Authority team.
The ad presents a twenty-something woman and her friends going on a road trip while a narrator highlights some of the features of the S21. Setting aside the fact that’s not a very realistic scenario at the moment (or the fact no one is wearing a mask), there’s one thing that stands out about the ad. After highlighting the S21’s ability to capture 8K video, the ad’s narrator claims the phone has plenty of space to store all your photos and videos.
We did a test to see how much 8K footage you can film with the 128GB S21 model. One minute of footage takes up about 600MB, or about 10MB a second. The 128GB model comes with about 100GB of free space after you factor in the operating system and all the software Samsung preloads onto the device. Doing some back of the napkin math, that means you can record about 167 minutes, or about 2.8 hours, of 8K-quality footage before you start to run out of space. All of that’s assuming you only use your S21 to record 8K video. Most people will use their phone’s SSD for storing apps, photos and music.
Related: Everything you need to know about the Galaxy S21
Of course, none of this would be an issue if the Galaxy S21 lineup featured MicroSD expandability or if Samsung hedged its claim, but there’s no fine print related to storage when the narrator mentions storage. So claiming there’s “plenty” of space for all your videos and photos is questionable at best.
That’s the highlight of the ad, but there are other cringe moments. “How fast can I share it?” the woman asks after the storage bit. “You’re on 5G!” the narrator responds, as if any normal person knows or cares about 5G.
I don’t know about you, but I always prefer when a company highlights the strengths and features of its products instead of attacking a competitor. For all its faults, this is a much better ad than some of the ones Samsung has released in the past. You might remember the company’s Ingenius and Growing Up TV spots which attacked Apple for, among other things, removing the headphone jack from the iPhone. Samsung subsequently delisted those ads from YouTube because its phones came to have the same “limitations” as the iPhone. Road Trip isn’t anywhere near as bad as those ads. We just wish Samsung would highlight the strengths of the S21 in a better way.