HTC Thunderbolt Review: The First Verizon 4G LTE Smartphone

Performance

The Thunderbolt doesn’t surprise too much in the performance category. It’s the same single core Snapdragon 45 nm SoC we’ve talked about before and become very familiar with performance-wise. Inside you get one 1 GHz Scorpion core, and Adreno 205 graphics. I’m decently impressed with the improvement from Adreno 200 to 205, but again there’s an upcoming big boost in Qualcomm’s roadmap with Adreno 220 that will debut in its first dual-core SoCs. 

There’s nothing super surprising here in the performance category, but we still ran the Thunderbolt through our test suite. Subjectively the Thunderbolt feels the same as the Inspire 4G and other MSM8x55 devices I've spent time with. It's definitely current generation, but there's still a surprising amount of smoothness that dual core brings that the Thunderbolt can't quite match.