The Samsung Galaxy Note7 (S820) Review
by Joshua Ho on August 16, 2016 9:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
As previously mentioned this year a major goal of ours was to focus on benchmarks with metrics that better indicate user experience rather than being subject to additional layers of indirection in addition to updating our previously used benchmarks. Probably one of the hardest problems to tackle from a testing perspective is capturing what it means to have a smooth and fast phone, and with the right benchmarks you can actually start to test for these things in a meaningful way instead of just relying on a reviewer’s word. In addition to new benchmarks, we’ve attempted to update existing types of benchmarks with tests that are more realistic and more useful rather than simple microbenchmarks that can be easily optimized against without any meaningful user experience improvements. With that said, let's get into the results.
Browser performance here is pretty much in line with expectations as pretty much every OEM using Snapdragon 820 is going to be using the same basic BSP and most of the optimizations here are going to be done by Qualcomm rather than the OEMs.
Again, performance is in line with expectation in PCMark, although there are some improvements here and there that are primarily centered about web browsing performance which is almost constantly being improved as developers figure out new optimizations for browsers. With that said we can move on to Discomark, which is a true high level benchmark designed to show exactly how quickly a suite of common Google and OEM applications load from NAND or from RAM.
Here the Galaxy Note7 shows some improvement on hot runtimes relative to the Galaxy S7, but the cold runtimes have dropped for some reason. It looks like much of the delta here is due to Dropbox which is now running significantly slower on the Galaxy Note7. I suspect that this is related to possible changes in Dropbox or its interaction with TouchWiz rather than any significant underlying difference in system performance relative to the Galaxy S7. Overall, the Galaxy Note7 performs about where you'd expect from a Snapdragon 820 device from Samsung given the performance of the Galaxy S7.
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Meteor2 - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Well apart from the removable battery, you're describing Nexus.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Dropbox has gotten to be rather bloated. To give you a rough idea of how bloated it is, the Dropbox process on my PC has consumed 11 seconds of CPU time on my machine today. I have not used my dropbox all day and it has synced nothing. It should have been completely idle with extremely minimual CPU usage today. But instead, it has consumed nearly 1/4 the CPU cycles that DWM.exe has consumed. And surely you know what a hog DWM can be.Cod3rror - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Dropbox is super bloated. But you should checkout OneDrive and how many background processes it runs on Android; ridiculous! That's why I uninstalled both and use the services through Solid Explorer.Vaga - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Please do a headphone out audio output test. Also, please review the ZTE Axon 7!prime2515103 - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
I agree, and also a speaker test. This was a huge problem with my note 3. I was shocked at how much better the speaker was on other phones of the same generation. The speakerphone is all but useless and listening to music or videos without headphones is annoying at best. Yet, there was no mention of this in any reviews (anywhere, not just Anandtech).Dennis Travis - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Excellent Review! Thanks so much.tipoo - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Those P9 and Mate 8 hot and cold runtime scores though. Is that from storage performance or the A72 cores in the Kirin?tipoo - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Looks like they're behind the note 7 in sequential and not much different in 4KB random storage performance. So the Kirin makes that much difference, or just Touchwiz bloat?JoshHo - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
It's a function of some optimizations that HiSilicon has done in their BSP.jospoortvliet - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Any more details than that? It is quite curious that Samsung can't manage this...