The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Review
by Joshua Ho on October 15, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Android
- Mobile
- Galaxy Note 4
CPU Performance
For those unfamiliar with the Snapdragon 805, I would refer back to our previous posts regarding this SoC. This is Krait’s final hurrah in a high-end SoC, and is likely to be the best smartphone SoC available for the next 4-6 months as it’s built on TSMC’s 28HPm process, which has strained silicon and high-k metal gate at the transistor level in order to improve performance and reduce power. In order to test the CPU and general CPU-bound performance, we turn to our standard test suite of browser benchmarks. As said before, I’m not quite happy with the state of this suite but for now it can work to provide a decent relative comparison.
Overall, the Snapdragon 805 performs about as well as one might expect, although the benefit from higher clock speeds is generally quite minimal.
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MattL - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link
Not strange at all, often certain places will get early review devices, they got an early iPhone 6 and 6+ too.Arcetnathon7 - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link
Yes, but every early review of iPhone 6 and 6+ are "strangely" without any benchmarks.We always have to wait for Anandtech :)
MattL - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
Well Display Mate had Note 4 and iPhone 6 Plus screen reviews up for a while now... I honestly would trust them more on the screen side of things anyways (they are far more comprehensive in their analysis and are obviously specialized experts in screens)... just curious as to the differences seen between theirs and the analysis here since they found the Note 4 definitely more accurate vs here.I do agree that you see very few iPhone 6 reviews with benchmarks though.
I would be very interested in other sites doing in-depth screen analysis runs, should give a better picture... but unfortunately not many sites do and the couple others I have seen are *horrible*, they didn't even realize that the Note 4's screen modes actually supported different color gamuts so they critiqued the color accuracy on the Adaptive mode specifically designed to have a high saturation of the color gamut to fend off ambient light washing out that saturation or the Photo mode which supports the Adobe RGB color gamut (17% larger than sRGB) do a high degree of accuracy, but when viewing non Adobe RGB content it will analyze off obviously. While the Basic mode is designed to be extremely color accurate to the sRGB standard (again Display Mate found it to be the most accurate of any smartphone or tablet screen, even the iPhone 6 screens)... so those sites results are pointless.
tralalalalalala40 - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link
Does the user have to manually change the color scheme on the note4 for every app?tralalalalalala40 - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link
The golden phone review, hand picked by robots maybe? At least they aren't programming their phones to cheat benchmarks anymore (most likely)trynberg - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
So, the iPhone 6+ is declared the best phablet with no supporting statements or qualifications. The Note 4 gets "remains one of the best phablets on the market, but whether it's the best for a given user is a matter of priorities and personal preference rather than any absolutes".I mean, how blind do you have to be to not see the bias there?
KPOM - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
This is actually a much more positive review of the Note 4 than ArsTechnica. AT basically said it comes down to your OS preference.MattL - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link
Ars had the most negative Note 4 review I've seen anywhere on the web... really surprised about that, very disappointed.tralalalalalala40 - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link
Go to samsung's website, they have a great review of the note 4 that should cheer you up.TrackSmart - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review! As always, this is much more complete information than you find at competing sites.That said, the Battery Charging Speed Test is not as useful as it could be. Supposedly this phone charges to 50% in the first 30 minutes. That means most of your testing time represents "topping off" the battery. Consider adding 50% or 75% charge speeds instead of (or in addition to) 100%. It would tell us which phones allow a user to quickly get back to business.