Samsung Galaxy Note9 Performance & Battery Showdown: Snapdragon vs Exynos
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 26, 2018 8:00 AM ESTConclusion - More of the same
While we never reviewed the Note9, and this piece isn’t meant to be a full review, we can still put out a few sentences about the phone as a whole. Here Samsung is able to build a fantastic device, and there’s very little to criticize the Note9 on. The screen is large, bright, sharp and accurate. The camera is leading edge, even though by now there are devices out in the market which manage to compete quite well with Samsung’s best, especially in low light. Samsung makes no compromises in features, and the Note9 has everything: a 3.5mm headphone jack, wireless charging, IP68 rating, and naturally its key feature, the S-Pen.
While on the outside, the Note9 impresses in all aspects regardless where you purchase it from, on the inside things are again quite different as we again see the usage of two very contrasting SoCs.
I think the following picture sums things up quite well:
Like on the Galaxy S9, the Note9’s Exynos variant is just an overall inferior device. Battery life was one aspect that the Exynos S9s fared quite terribly in, and this time around Samsung did manage to somewhat improve the difference to the Snapdragon 845. Unfortunately it’s not enough as the Snapdragon variant still leads.
While the battery disadvantage has somewhat decreased, Samsung has done nothing to improve the performance of the chipset. Here the Snapdragon 845’s software is still leagues ahead of what the Exynos is able to offer, with the latter still not being able to differentiate itself much from the Exynos 8895 in system performance. The benchmark differences are very much also representative of the real-world performance difference of both variants.
In our recent quarterly smartphone guide, I’ve recommended the Snapdragon Note9 alongside the S9s as among the best Android devices you can buy this holiday. The Exynos Note9 in my opinion again doesn’t really make the cut as you’re paying flagship prices for a device that offers less battery life and performance not much better than last year’s phones.
Having finally gotten these results out, I hope to finally turn the page on the topic, as I’m feeling like a broken record and the coverage is akin keeping on beating a dead horse. The situation is eerily similar to the Galaxy S4 SoC situation from a few years back, only that I feel the differences this year were much worse. Huawei’s vertical integration here is pushing the company to make great strides with every generation, and Apple’s silicon is now so well ahead that we’re not really expecting Android vendors to catch up any time soon.
Samsung as a whole needs to decide where they want to go forward with this dual-sourcing strategy as I currently see it as a lose-lose situation for both the smartphone division as well as their chipset business. Hopefully the Exynos 9820 manages to be competitive chipset and S.LSI manages to finally get serious about execution as a SoC vendor, as otherwise the next few years are just going to a rough ride.
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Lau_Tech - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
Hi Andrei, obvious question, why no explicit note 9 review?You have the hardware, have already done extensive analysis and testing, it would seem that all that remains is to put it into words. (in fact you did abit of it here)
So why not?
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
I got the devices quite late as we weren't sampled. The Note9 is very similar to the S9+ which we reviewed earlier in the year besides the S-Pen. Screen is as you'd expect from Samsung (very good) and camera of the Note9 (besides it being same setup as the S9+) has been also tested in the Pixel 3 and Mate 20 reviews:https://www.anandtech.com/show/13474/the-google-pi...
I wanted to get this piece out instead with the relevant bits of into that people were expecting to see instead of lingering on on a full review, as I have also other articles to get out as well.
Meteor2 - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
I don’t think the same camera hardware in different phones equates to the same camera performance in today’s age of computational photography.shabby - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
That makes no sense, the note 9 is an s9 with an s-pen, nothing more.cha0z_ - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Having used both s7 edge and note 9, I can confidently state that the note is more than the s variant with a pen. There are differences and features that adds up to different experience.levizx - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
What difference beyond the customisation for the S-Pen?Lau_Tech - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
As always, what and how you choose to cover is your prerogative. however, my two cents.1) Samsung note series is one of the tech keynotes of a year, and always worthy of a review, so long as the hardware is available.
2)note series is especially worthy of review because of its technical contrasts from all other flagships. anandtech has been inexplicably reluctant to analyze the s pen. You could do a comparison between the S pen, apple pencil and Microsoft surface stylus for example. Or compare the speed of the micro-sd storage to on board memory. (or with previous Notes). You could even compare the internal audio jack vs that of the dongle-brigade. Point being, the notes unique traits make for many interesting angles of analysis. I see no reason to shy away from them year after year.
3) A Note 9 review 'in pieces' doesn't show up in Google search. A person typing 'note 9 review' is unlikely to come across your excellent camera comparison article for example. A note 9 review, even one that posts links to other articles you've done, is preferable for your page hits.
All comments with respect to your quality work and time/material constraints.
id4andrei - Monday, November 26, 2018 - link
Don't forget DEX.Spunjji - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Just wanted to add a voice here - I feel like Lau_Tech's comment is fair, and worth bearing in mind for future prioritization of reviews. It feels like Samsung is the last manufacturer consistently offering one "true flagship" phone with everything but the kitchen sink included. It's a decent halo product that, as was mentioned, allows you to critique the value prospects of other manufacturers who have dropped or are dropping many of the features the Note series retains.Aside from that, thanks for your dedication to providing quality analysis even when it's not "up-to-the-minute". I'll always show up for it.
philehidiot - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Samsung aren't sampling them to Anandtech for a reason and that's because they'll get torn to shreds for things like this. I probably wouldn't have known the performance gap was so horrific until this article came out. The remainder is often well covered in the less indepth media and so repeating it late isn't going to pull in as many views which is what this business is all about. I'd rather see them spend the significant amount of time doing reviews on things which are sampled early enough to compete with other media and therefore keep the site well funded and able to attract good writers.I do feel this is a good compromise in that they are doing the analysis of some very important aspects of this phone that most people will be overlooking but not wasting the time doing a full review and focussing instead on something else.
This is actually something that is really going to put me off Samsung. I'm pretty happy with my S8 despite the bloatware (some of it is actually useful, a lot of it is just turned off) but I have the misfortune to live in the UK. As a result, seeing I'm going to be paying a similar amount for a phone that is marketed and named as being the same as the SD model, I don't expect the performance to be HALF what everyone else gets on the more performance critical benches. There is a huge difference between a face paced game moving at a sustained 25FPS and a sustained 50FPS. One is very playable whilst the other is frankly borderline not and if this is an average FPS then I suspect there will be periods of frame rates too low for decent playability. This is not acceptable for a full price flagship. This is worse than Nvidia having different models of GTX1060 - at least they're vaguely similar in performance.
My advice to people wanting a good value but good performing phone has been to get an S7 or S8. The S9 is not a contender and I think the E9810 needs to tank to convince Samsung to stop rolling out chips which are just plain awful and pretending they're in any way comparable to a SD model of the same phone. It's frankly a con in my book. I wonder how this compares to recent mid range SD models like the 6 series? That would be very interesting if QC could produce SoCs going into phones a third of the price which are competitive on performance.....