If you looked closely at that Canalys list of the 15 best-selling high-end smartphones of Q1 2023, you may have been surprised by a few things. While Apple’s total domination of the chart was obviously far from shocking, the presence of something like the Galaxy S21 FE ahead of the S22 Plus, for instance, did catch us a little off guard.
The slightly older and humbler 6.4-inch Samsung high-ender was never considered a huge box-office hit, which is probably one of the reasons why the world’s largest handset maker opted against releasing a Galaxy S22 FE model.
While we continue to wait for a long-rumored S23 FE, the S21 FE is on sale at an interesting discount in a single storage configuration and single color option. We’re talking about a 128GB variant in “graphite”, sold by Amazon at the time of this writing for a decent $100 under its regular price of $599.99.
Is this an unprecedented or unrivaled deal? Hardly. But for some reason, these types of discounts (sans obligatory carrier activations, device trade-ins, or other strings attached) have become pretty difficult to come by in recent months.
Perhaps more importantly, Amazon is currently listing all other Galaxy S21 FE 5G paint jobs as out of stock, and coincidentally or not, the same also goes for Best Buy. While Samsung’s official US e-store can still hook you up with multiple different flavors of this Snapdragon 888-powered device, there are no discounts to be had without jumping through hoops.
Now, we aren’t going to rush to conclusions and anticipate the imminent discontinuation of the S21 Fan Edition based on Amazon and Best Buy’s inventory shortages, but… we won’t rule anything out either.
What’s clear is that a good (and reasonably popular) phone is on sale at a good price, and you may not want to miss this opportunity with a presumably better but also costlier model on the horizon (probably).
