Smartphone speedtest by techradar

[maddogmoffit]

Sorry if anyone already posted a link to this, I did an quick search but didnt find anything.
Any theory on what is happening here?
http://youtu.be/-wne8m9qCFs
Are not Windows supposed to be a quick phone OS?
Maybe Win10M is still in beta and will improve but this made me a bit worried that we lost one of the few strong points of the OS, the ability to work quick and fluidly on any hardware.

 

[Pete]

Benchmarks only really show what chipsets are good at running benchmarking software.

 

[cracgor]

Benchmarks only really show what chipsets are good at running benchmarking software.

All they did was load software and reload software. 950 was slow when measured by time. I dont think they just ran benchmark software.

 

[maddogmoffit]

They did two cycles of starting up apps after booting the phone from cold. I would call that a real life test.

Ofcourse some of the slowness could be due to bad implementation of apps bit most apps was systemapps and anyway apps are part of the phone experiance.

 

[kwajr]

How long had the 950 been set up was it installing apps,syncing in the background

 

[ashram]

synthetic benchmarks should give you an idea of performance, but it can vary significantly. even more by OS since despite finding devices with similar hardware, OS and drivers play a HUGE part in phone benchmarking.

 

[maddogmoffit]

How long had the 950 been set up was it installing apps,syncing in the background

It is hard to say but they have done an quick unboxing video of both the 950 and the XL. In that video they comment on that the phones is downloading updates. I would guess they sre treating the phones fair. The unboxing video was ok in my opinion.

 

[maddogmoffit]

synthetic benchmarks should give you an idea of performance, but it can vary significantly. even more by OS since despite finding devices with similar hardware, OS and drivers play a HUGE part in phone benchmarking.

Not sure why some of you are mentioning benchmarks? There is only a cold boot and two cycles of starting apps in the video.

 

[xzb6np]

I saw the video. I tested boot up speed of my 950 and it was basically to the second with the video. I expect that updates to windows 10 will bring us to netter parity im the long run. But the real question is what does boot speed have to do with it anyway. My normal use case is not to boot my phone every day so why does that matter?

 

[cocopops]

From what I have seen it is purely down to the Chip sets..The S6, Z5, 6P and 6s all run faster chip sets than the 950.

The 950xl /Note 5 /Nexus 6P / Iphone 6S Plus run their fastest chip sets & gpu's and the results are much closer.

That said, as the SW improves I am sure this can swing in favour of the 950xl..

 

[uselessrobot]

The Lumia 950, Nexus 5X, Moto X Pure, LG G4 all run the Snapdragon 808. The Nexus 5X is down 1GB of RAM on the other three, but features a lower resolution display thus has to process fewer pixels. Resolution shouldn't be a factor in benchmarks, but it can affect performance.

The 950XL, HTC One M9 and Nexus 6P run the Snapdragon 810. It should have a performance advantage over the 808 but frequently throttles back because of heat. The cooling feature in the 950XL should help, but I don't know if anyone knows yet to what extent.

As far as I know, all current Samsung Galaxy phones run variants of the Exynos processor. Samsung's devices have consistently done well in benchmarks, coming very close to iPhones. iPhones, of course, have always outclassed their contemporaries. Their CPUs always seem underwhelming on paper, but in practice blow everyone else out of the water. I tend to think it's their GPUs that give them the edge.

Of course, it's hard to really trust these benchmarks because we don't know all the factors in play. The benchmarks may not be optimized for Windows or the OS is currently is currently hindering performance. There's also the controversy from earlier in the year that Samsung and HTC, and maybe others, were cheating. If I remember correctly, their devices would detect the benchmark and overclock the process to boost scores. I'm not sure if it's still happening, but I don't recall seeing anything that would indicate this practice has stopped.

 

[Skyway]

The Lumia 950, Nexus 5X, Moto X Pure, LG G4 all run the Snapdragon 808. The Nexus 5X is down 1GB of RAM on the other three, but features a lower resolution display thus has to process fewer pixels. Resolution shouldn't be a factor in benchmarks, but it can affect performance.

The 950XL, HTC One M9 and Nexus 6P run the Snapdragon 810. It should have a performance advantage over the 808 but frequently throttles back because of heat. The cooling feature in the 950XL should help, but I don't know if anyone knows yet to what extent.

As far as I know, all current Samsung Galaxy phones run variants of the Exynos processor. Samsung's devices have consistently done well in benchmarks, coming very close to iPhones. iPhones, of course, have always outclassed their contemporaries. Their CPUs always seem underwhelming on paper, but in practice blow everyone else out of the water. I tend to think it's their GPUs that give them the edge.

Of course, it's hard to really trust these benchmarks because we don't know all the factors in play. The benchmarks may not be optimized for Windows or the OS is currently is currently hindering performance. There's also the controversy from earlier in the year that Samsung and HTC, and maybe others, were cheating. If I remember correctly, their devices would detect the benchmark and overclock the process to boost scores. I'm not sure if it's still happening, but I don't recall seeing anything that would indicate this practice has stopped.

I believe the performance of the iphone's comes down to software optimization.

I agree that the benchmarks aren't optimized/designed to work well with Windows mobile.

 

[maddogmoffit]

One thing is the boot speed that could be said to be a less relevant part and also point to that Win10M is clearly unoptimized yet and still in some kind of beta phase.
Then it was the apps, even after you removed the boot time was the 950 clearly the slowest. How much are on the not finished OS an how much are on less optimized apps are an question. Anyway it is not flattering for a OS that used to be lightening fast on any hardware. Remeber that of the apps such things as maps, email and Camera are OS apps and that means Microsoft apps that are part of the OS.
I hope that that updates that take Win10M out of beta will come soon.

 

[cracgor]

How long had the 950 been set up was it installing apps,syncing in the background

It's also possible that they didn't know to do a hard reset with no restore and didn't know that images in email went working. Also, how do you know the same about the others isn't true. It's just one test. It is not the end of the world.

 

[cracgor]

I saw the video. I tested boot up speed of my 950 and it was basically to the second with the video. I expect that updates to windows 10 will bring us to netter parity im the long run. But the real question is what does boot speed have to do with it anyway. My normal use case is not to boot my phone every day so why does that matter?

It was also slower in loading apps.

 

[cracgor]

From what I have seen it is purely down to the Chip sets..The S6, Z5, 6P and 6s all run faster chip sets than the 950.

The 950xl /Note 5 /Nexus 6P / Iphone 6S Plus run their fastest chip sets & gpu's and the results are much closer.

That said, as the SW improves I am sure this can swing in favour of the 950xl..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBCAWnXEJY4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z71dLBnxblI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjnI9kusJPg

They said that two of the services were also 808. Think about the s6 and iphone as standards to compare to if you don't like that they are faster. I think they choose these phones based mostly on size, which I would bet is most important factor for users behind price.

 

[maddogmoffit]

I think we can conclude that Win10M is still in some kind of public beta. It is released and usable but still miss out many optimizations that more mature OS's have. Hopefully this test will look better later in spring but will anyone do it then or will it not matter? It is unfortunate that Win10M have lost one of it's strongest card, the speediness and now is seen as a laggard.

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

I enjoyed the video thanks! I'm actually suprised that the 950 is not so far behind. Looking at the video it's all due to bad app implementation (they are using a lot of old buggy apps, twitter and instagram for example).

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

I think we can conclude that Win10M is still in some kind of public beta. It is released and usable but still miss out many optimizations that more mature OS's have. Hopefully this test will look better later in spring but will anyone do it then or will it not matter? It is unfortunate that Win10M have lost one of it's strongest card, the speediness and now is seen as a laggard.

Are you really sure that the same handset with windows 8.1 would be faster? I mean a nice comparison would be a 930 with 8.1 vs a 930 with 10. I think that it is not W10 that has gotten worse but it is the competition that went forward while Microsoft was restarting from scratch (again). Then again I did not choose windows for the speed, in everyday usage a flagship android has always been fast. And if you look at those videos the only thing that you would notice is games load time.

 

[cocopops]

What I do find amusing is that they claim yu use the phones hundreds of times a day and imagine how much time you are losing with Windows Mobile, however I beg to differ:

- Live tiles makes a lot of information visible on your homescreen without needing to go into the app
- All apps are pinned to one screen making finding them and accessing them super easy (instead of swiping through multiple screens)

I think those 2 elements on their own save a significant portion of time and result in less effort as well.