Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 17, 2013 11:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Android
- Mobile
- Galaxy Note 8.0
NAND Performance
Given one of my obsessions over the past 5 years, focusing on NAND performance in modern smartphones and tablets is an obvious fit. For these tests we turn to Androbench, using a modified version of the default performance settings. By upping the read/write buffer to 100MB we get more repeatable results, which is always nice to have. Just as in our PC SSD reviews, we focus on large block sequential read/write performance as well as small file random access. For Windows 8 tablets, we use Crystal Disk Mark as a rough comparison point. Note that we are looking at peak performance here and not sustained write speeds. I don't even want to know how slow these things will get if exposed to prolonged random writes. I've toyed with worst case performance on modern iOS and Android mobile devices and it's not pretty. For now, just try not to fill these things up.
The Galaxy Note 8.0's peak sequential performance is ok, the Nexus 10 does far better. Random IO performance however is great (for an ARM based tablet). The latter is very important for IO heavy multitasking workloads, which could be why we're seeing a mild focus on it here. Random write performance is still lower than I'd like to see (realistically we need to be about an order of magnitude better than where we are for real IO intensive multitasking), but the Note 8.0 at least ends up near the top of these charts.
If you look at the Note 10.1's performance you'll notice a big difference in random IO performance. It's entirely possible that Samsung is using a better controller/firmware combination in the Note 8.0, or it could be that my review sample happened to source a better eMMC solution. NAND based storage is typically treated like a commodity by most OEMs, so I wouldn't be too surprised to see wide variation in performance depending on how well you do in the eMMC lottery.
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nerd1 - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
I think it's better than most people need - it exceeds ipad mini in almost every aspects (except for 10% less battery life) and I think wacom pen + multi-window support is very crucial for many circumstances, like searching for something in one window and writing down a note in the other window.nerd1 - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
Also I think it is very absurd that just everyone ignores the micro SD slot when comparing prices. You can get 16GB one and put 32GB or 64GB micro SD to upgrade the storage, and most will do because it is way cheaper, which Nexus or iDevices cannot.steven75 - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
It still falls down in one massive area that all Android tablets fall down in: app ecosystem.extide - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
Apple fanboy much? lolNekoTipcat - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
Ipad mini wins in 2 aspects or 31 Battery
2 GPU
3 iOS (if you like it)
Spunjji - Friday, April 19, 2013 - link
Samsung Note 8.0 wins in 2 aspects or 31 Pen
2 CPU
3 Android (if you like it)
...sorry, I really couldn't resist.
FlyBri - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
Anand -- I see you mention that the Galaxy Note 8.0 has a PLS display, but I have seen other information that states the display is a TFT panel. Could you provide some more color on this? Thanks!B3an - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
... Err TFT stands for Thin-Film-Transistor. All LCD displays are TFT."TFT LCD" is the general technology and theres many different types of panels for it. PLS is one of them types. The Galaxy Note 8.0 uses PLS which is one of the best kinds of TFT LCD panels.
Sabresiberian - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
"PLS" is Samsung's version if LG's "IPS". :)Whether or not it is better - well, there are different versions of both technologies, and Samsung's PLS is newer and so they are still improving it. I would judge on a product-by-product basis.
FlyBri - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
My bad, I meant TN, not TFT -- brain fart. In any case, if it's PLS, that's good, but the thing is still overpriced...