What do we expect from a fast Android phone?
— 1 min read
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJOWBUsEFfk
I generally find the above channel to be quite obnoxious1, but this speed comparison between the iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 8 was fascinating. This is your classic phone speed test where they run through app launch speed, startup times, ram management, and benchmarks, and as always, the iPhone came out on top again. This time the Galaxy phone put up a bit of a fight though. Some apps even launched faster on the Note! But Apple won out in probably 2/3 of the tests that were run.
What I found particularly interesting about the video was how the presenter talked about the Note 8 in comparison to the iPhone. His tone was not “the year-old iPhone still beats the not even released Note 8 in most tests,” it was more “wow, the Note 8 is a really fast phone!”
By all accounts the Note 8 is indeed a really fast phone2, but this video really drop home the point that Android phones are so far behind the iPhone in terms of raw performance that they are adorned with praise for almost catching up with last year’s iPhone.
I will absolutely confirm that the Note 8 has a far better screen than the current iPhones, and the design Samsung has been developing since the Galaxy S6 in 2015 has taken them past the iPhone in that regard, but when it comes to getting the fastest phone on the market, I don’t know how you can ever bet against the iPhone. Even one week away from a new iPhone being announced, the old iPhone is still the fastest phone on the market. Apple’s silicon team deserves massive credit for making their own chips, and Apple’s iOS engineers deserve credit for optimizing the platform to take advantage of that power.
- Although it’s hard to argue that with 4.3 million subscribers they do seem to know what they’re doing. ↩
- Although it’s usually better to judge a phone’s speed after a few weeks of use, not fresh out of the box. Talk to a Galaxy S8 owner and ask them if they still think their phone is “buttery smooth” like it was when they first got it. ↩