Samsung M51

The Samsung M51 was a bit of an unexpected release in the UK. Normally we don’t get access to the M series, it’s usually restricted to India and other eastern regions. For some reason this one was officially sold through Samsung UK and I went for it.

Following my new love of big batteries at the time this one had the biggest yet and has still been unmatched since: 7000mAh. It was a battery titan, paired with a Snapdragon 730G it had a 2 to 3 day battery life no matter how you used it.

I was actually very fond of this, a Samsung without an Exynos chipset is already on to being a winner in my books and paired with a massive battery like this it was a recipe for success. With a high resolution AMOLED panel and 6GB RAM as well it was not simply a budget phone with a big battery, it had specs to match. It’s only downside was weight, but that’s unavoidable with a cell that’s physically bigger than almost every other phone. It weighed 213g. For reference, a little iPhone SE 2020 weighs just 148g. This thing was hefty.

I owned this phone for around a year taking me into 2021, around this time I was getting paranoid about tracking and developing an interest in privacy focused software, all while trying to battle an ever spiralling screen time problem. I discovered GrapheneOS and with that this phone went and I replaced it with a Pixel 3a.

I won’t write a whole segment about the Pixel 3a because it turned out GrapheneOS wasn’t for me. In my eyes it’s still the highest quality, secure smartphone operating system out there but it comes at a cost of having to make some sacrifices. I’ll probably write another post at some point about different mobile operating systems so I’ll save the full details for then but essentially privacy and ultimate security do come at a cost of convenience.