NAND Performance

The Galaxy S 4 ships with either 16GB or 32GB of NAND on-board, but allows for expansion via a microSD card slot. The latter is a quickly disappearing feature on modern smartphones, but it remains a point of differentiation offered by Samsung. We were sampled a 16GB version of the Galaxy S 4, which arrived with 9.62GB of usable space after the OS and app pre-load.

As always we're using Androbench (with modified settings) to quantify NAND performance. Thankfully NAND performance has been steadily improving on modern smartphones/tablets, and the Galaxy S 4 is no exception. Sequential read performance actually sees a tremendous boost compared to most of the other devices in our charts here. Optimizing for sequential read performance makes a lot of sense, but it's good to see Samsung being competitive on all fronts here.

It is worth pointing out that NAND is treated very much as a commodity in these devices, and it's entirely possible that you'll see performance deviate from what we've shown here depending on what controller/NAND/firmware combination you get in your device.

Sequential Read (256KB) Performance

Sequential Write (256KB) Performance

Random Read (4KB) Performance

Random Write (4KB) Performance

GPU Performance Camera and Video Analysis
Comments Locked

335 Comments

View All Comments

  • emkei - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link

    It's funny when article was about cpu/gpu performance and people comment on looks/cover...I guess people cannot read....
  • indtail - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link

    I'm buying the iPhone the nest time for sure. Enough of no battery and bad cameras for me. I respect Android and have and still will be a loyal fan and even develop some. But my daily phone to be used is definitely the iPhone.
    In the Android world I'd pick the One simply because of it's premium feel, better camera, and smaller screen. Bigger isn't always better and HTC has realized that. Might as well buy a tablet if you think screen size is so important?
    Also, the true spirit of Android is the custom ROMS and once your phone is ROM-ed the only thing that counts is hardware which is better on the ONE. And yes, the S4 is faster but not ver(compared to the S4).
    And a good review nonetheless.
  • indtail - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link

    This is coming from a year long S3 owner by the way.
  • kgh00007 - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link

    Are you going to stick with this new headache inducing site layout? I just realised that I haven't visited Anand since about 2 weeks after the new site went live and I'm disappointed that you are still sticking with this layout. Why is the text so small?

    Such a pity, one bad decision has forced me to use the site less and less, there was a time when I checked it a few times a week. Ah well, bye bye Anand, I wonder how many other people you have lost with this terrible new layout? You expect technology to progress, but your site is going backwards in terms of readability and is a lesson in how not to do web design, it hurts to read.

    Good luck
  • Oo凸 - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link

    Camera sensor is not IMX135?
  • Latzara - Sunday, May 5, 2013 - link

    the plastic is easier to scratch, break and so on - and it's also, and that is absolutely a crime to ignore, much cheaper and easier to replace, as is the case with the battery, the SD card which I for the life of me can't understand some manufacturers not using as it limits the user, but hey the can charge a kings ransom for a few chips that cost way less than the difference in price between let's say an 8GB device and a 16 GB device ... and so on and so on

    As someone said earlier it's a matter of choice and tastes and absolutely nothing more -- the real differences are the durability, repairability, customizability as well as what's in my opinion the most important, the inner workings, the CPU, GPU, memory speeds and so on --- you're arguing about a shell which is a simple covering and nothing more...

    When i hear about someone judging a device by how it 'feels in my hand' i can't do anything but smirk ...
  • unbible - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    iphone 5 battery hours seems opposite between 3G/LTE in Web Browsing Battery life test. Shouldn't be 3G 8.19 hrs and LTE 4.55 hrs??
  • Omiaz - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    Im still waiting part 2
  • Quorbach - Saturday, May 11, 2013 - link

    Same here. Where the fuck is it ?
  • lilmoe - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link

    Seeing that the Note 2 gets a lower battery score than the iPhone 5, i'm seriously questioning your battery life benchmark Brian...

    Also, my Galaxy S4 charges from 15% to 100% in 1:40 to 2:00 hours (depends on whether I'm using it while charging, personal experience really). Are you sure you used the official charger?

    Guess the best reviewer to any device is myself.........

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now