The Samsung Galaxy Note7 (S820) Review
by Joshua Ho on August 16, 2016 9:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Obviously, battery life is one of the most important aspects of any smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device shipping today. The main point of interest for a lot of people seems to be battery life as even though we’re approaching what might be considered a full day of use a lot of people seem to need quite a bit more as battery life demands can vary dramatically from day to day. If you sit in an office for much of your day with the phone next to a charger then battery life demands are going to be relatively light but if you have to deal with a 12 hour flight with a 2 hour wait for a transfer before another 4 hour flight then you’re probably going to find that most devices are not going to have the ability to get you through a full “day” if your day of use involves 9 hours of usage between movies, games, web browsing, and other data synchronization tasks. This is obviously an extreme case but if you’ve ever done a trans-pacific flight this isn’t that far-fetched if you can’t fall asleep for at least 10 hours of the ~16 hour flight.
In order to try and test this properly then we turn to our 2016 suite of benchmarks which allow for proper characterization of battery life in fairly realistic workloads. In order to make for useful relative comparisons we disable all background tasks and set the display for all devices to 200 nits on a blank white screen for all tests. In the case of the Galaxy Note7 due to its similarity to the Galaxy S7 edge we’ve elected to run a compressed version of our suite although if time permits we’ll be adding additional results and commentary.
With that said we can start with the WiFi test which shows about an 8% drop for the Note7 relative to the Galaxy S7 edge. This might be surprising to some but given that the display area of the Note7 is 7% larger and the battery is about 3% smaller it’s not all that surprising as I wouldn’t be surprised if literally everything but display has identical power consumption on the Galaxy Note7.
While the WiFi test result is pretty much in line with expectation the LTE test result is visibly different and somewhat surprising to see. It’s tempting to explain the relative difference change away as a function of Verizon and T-Mobile LTE differences but reception was fairly comparable across both test units and both were tested on LTE. Given that the Note7 has 4x4 MIMO for cellular connectivity I suspect that there are some RF front-end changes that distinguish the Note7 from the S7 edge but the RF front-end is only visible to the modem rather than the overall system so unless the modem itself can be accessed I suspect the most viable method of figuring out the changes here will be a device teardown which isn’t in the scope of this review.
The next point of interest is going to be PCMark which shows how close the Galaxy S7 edge and Note7 are in WiFi and CPU bound tasks as they last basically an identical amount of time and have fairly comparable performance if you get both on the same version of software. Due to time constraints I would refer back to the Galaxy S7 Part 2 Review if you are interested in seeing what heavy workload battery life is like, but overall the Galaxy Note7 keeps fairly good battery life even if it isn't as great as the Galaxy S7 edge.
Charge Time
Of course, while battery life is critical we need to also talk about the other side of the equation which is how quickly it can charge. After all, if you’re stuck in an airport waiting for your connection and burn off most of your battery in the process, it’s going to be fairly painful conserving battery until you get to your destination because your phone can’t charge quickly enough to compensate for additional usage. In order to test something like this, we rely on measurements from the wall and waiting until the power draw from the wall reaches a specified level that indicates full charge has been reached. In the case of the Galaxy Note7, the charger uses QC 2.0 or Samsung’s adaptive fast charge technology depending upon the AC adapter you’re using, and internally the battery charger IC is a TI BQ25898S which contains a buck converter that can take a 9V or 12V input and step it down to the appropriate voltage for the battery with supports for current up to four amps at roughly 90% efficiency.
Looking at the overall charge time the Galaxy Note7 performs respectably as it reaches full charge in under two hours and takes basically as much time as the Galaxy S7 edge, which is probably not a surprise given their similar battery capacities. For the most part I think we’ve hit an upper bound here as far as charge time goes. The real challenge now is to focus on reducing the heat output and impact to battery longevity that these fast charging solutions have similar to OnePlus’ Dash Charge and Qnovo’s Adaptive Charging technologies.
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Axiomatic - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
My cube mate over the wall from me got the Note 7 today. His immediate comment to me was, "well it performs better with Nova Launcher than Touchwiz."trparky - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
When you have to replace stuff on your phone to get acceptable performance, there's something wrong.silverghozt - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
Are the photos from the Note 7 worse than the Note 5? Can you please compare. I'm astounded that the HTC 10 is taking better images.BoyBawang - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Dear Anandtech,Please do a battery life test of the lower screen resolution settings. If the result is significant, I'll immediately permanently put it to 1080p without second thoughts the moment I have the device. I don't care if the mutant pretenders say that they can distinguish the difference.
thanks
lebigamaca - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
It looks like you got the size of the rear camera pixels in reverse. Both are 1/2.6 inch so the 16 megapixel should have smaller pixels than the 12 megapixel.skrewler2 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
it would have been nice to see a picture of the s7 edge and note7 side by side or stacked on top of each other so we could get an idea of how much bigger the note isaryonoco - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Does the phone ship with the latest Android Security Patch level?Has the manufacturer committed to providing security patches on a timely basis?
Has the manufacturer committed to providing Android upgrades for X number of year?
Why are such basic questions that affect the usability and viability of a phone ignored by AnandTech? We don't all buy new phones every 6 months. Some of us are holding on to our phones for 24 months or longer. The question "will my phone receive OS updates during its lifetime" is a very valid question that AT pays no attention to.
Similarly we have paragraphs dedicated to the PMIC and various ICs in the phone, paragraphs dedicated to seeing if the phone drops a frame here or there, but no attention paid to the fact that the phone ships with unpatched remote root vulnerabilities.
Anandtech's reviews are becoming less and less relevant. Sure, it's cool to know what IC is doing what in the phone, but it's absolutely irrelevant to its day to day use. Knowing if the OEM is going to supply OS updates and security updates in a timely manner very much matters!
tamalero - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
As someone who changes cell phones once every 3 or so years.. I'm pissed the current trend of copying Apple and their non changeable battery.Worse when Samsung no longer seems to produce older batteries to force to upgrade.
Not exactly a fan to be forced to for 500+ USD for a throwaway phone.
tamalero - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
errata.. "not exactly a fan of being forced to FORK 500+ USD for a throaway phone every year"name99 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
"Despite all of this, there seems to be a general disappointment with smartphones."Come on Joshua, where do you drag up this nonsense?
There is a tiny fraction of internet whingers, hyperactive fools with the attention-span of 5-year olds and generally the technological to match, that are "disappointed".
Meanwhile in the real world, people are using their phones more than ever --- have you SEEN what a group of public people waiting around (think airport, restaurant, bus) looks like these days?
People in the saturated wealthy nations continue (so far, as of the most recent data) to buy phones on the reliable two-year-update cycle --- and why not? This year's phones are faster than those of two years ago, with more RAM, faster flash, better radios,nicer screens.
Meanwhile people in the non-wealthy world continue to be grateful for the ever falling prices, and enjoy moving on to their first smart phone.
You are not in the business of click-bait or insane interest advocacy; you are in the business of tech journalism. You don't need to write to such stupid sentences; you;re better than that; and the market you're discussing deserves better.
And starting with a stupid premise leads to what are factually flat out factually incorrect statements like "People are increasingly finding it hard to justify phones like the HTC 10 or Galaxy S7 with competition from..."
HOW are people finding it hard to justify phones like the S7? Everyone knows I'm an Apple fan, but I'm also tuned into reality, and the reality is that the S7 has sold pretty damn well, (as far as I can tell perhaps 20% better than the S6).
Look it's probably true that one day we'll hit enough of a wall in phone tech that the upgrade cycle WILL slide, and consumers WILL be massively over-served by phones. But let's not pretend that that prediction has already arrived.
Part of the problem is that these reviews operate with a broken context. It makes sense to compare against last years model, but it also makes sense to compare against the model from two years ago because THAT is where the audience for this product is. Complaining that it won't excite the community it isn't TARGETED AT (ie the owners of last-years model) is just stupid.