YouTuber puts Samsung S21 through underwater endurance test

A YouTube time-lapse photography channel has put Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone Galaxy S21 through an underwater endurance test.

The Photo Owl Time Lapse channel has been live streaming the phone while submerging it in an aquarium. It has already lasted more than 252 hours, or almost 11 days, and the experiment will continue “until the phone breaks”.

The S21, which weighs 171 grams and comes with a 15.7-centimetre display, is being powered using a wireless charging pad that is attached to the aquarium.

The handset has an IP68 rating, which means it is resistant to submersion up to a maximum depth of 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes.

Video footage shows the stopwatch going up to 99 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. After that, the stopwatch needs to be manually reset for the counting to continue. The stopwatch has already been reset twice so far and the adjoining videos are currently not available.

“I can't be the only one who is curious … the phone gave a ‘moisture detected’ warning after being submerged for 117 hours and 53 minutes,” said the anonymous owner of the YouTube channel that has more than 6,730 subscribers.

“The screen was unresponsive, and it kept jumping between applications uncontrollably … after some button pressing now it works fine again, the moisture warning is still there … let's see what happens next,” he added.

At 241 hours and 10 minutes, viewers asked if the speakers of the phone were still working.

“I played some music and the speakers sounded terrible, very quiet and barely understandable,” the channel owner said.

South Korean technology company Samsung unveiled its latest 5G-enabled smartphones – the S21, the S21+ and the S21 Ultra, on January 14. The models went on sale across the Gulf region on Sunday.

The S21 has three cameras on the back – a telephoto camera with a 64-megapixels lens, ultra-wide and wide-angle cameras with 12-megapixel lenses each and a front camera with a 10-megapixel lens.

It comes with 4,000-milliampere-hour battery.