Samsung Droid Charge Review - Droid Goes LTE

Performance

There’s honestly not too much to say about the Charge from an applications performance perspective. We’ve explored Hummingbird performance comprehensively in a number of other reviews on older and newer versions of Android, and at this point the SoC is fairly well understood. For a quick refresher, the Charge is running a 1.0 GHz Samsung Hummingbird (S5PC110) SoC which includes PowerVR SGX 540 graphics and 512 MB of PoP LPDDR2. The drag with the Charge is that it’s still using the RFS filesystem which is slow, tired, and disappointing. If you can, root the thing, install a custom ROM with another filesystem, and also move past Android 2.2.1 while you’re at it. 

We’ve run all the usual benchmarks on the Charge for your viewing pleasure. Things are pretty close between the two 45 nm Snapdragon (MSM8655) phones and the Hummingbird-based Charge with the exception of one or two outliers. At this point there’s not enough of a huge difference to really make either of the two standout dramatically, though the Charge lags in the browser department and leads when it comes to GPU-heavy tests like GLBenchmark.