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OnePlus defends its app-throttling on the 9 Pro, Snapdragon 888 'overkill in certain scenarios'
Company claims it tests the changes to make sure the user experience isn't affected
Following the news that OnePlus was throttling the performance of 9-Series phones, the company has taken to its forum with a more detailed response, explaining in greater detail the logic behind its actions. In short, OnePlus claims that modern chipsets are "overkill," and there's no need to run at full power for simple tasks like scrolling on a webpage or social media. So, the company throttles performance to improve power consumption and heat dissipation under the argument that it extensively tests these changes for negative effects.
OnePlus confirms it throttled the performance of 300 popular apps
The fallout continues from yesterday's shocking revelations
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OnePlus always used flagship specs in its devices, even when its phones were undercutting the competition's price. The days of "flagship killers" are long gone, but the company still chooses high-end processors each year. In theory, that should make the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro some of the fastest phones you can buy today — indeed, our reviews say basically the same thing — but it turns out that many applications are being held back from reaching peak performance.A new report from Anandtech dives deep into determining whether or not the OnePlus 9 Pro's benchmarks match real-world usage, and unfortunately, the answer seems to be a hard no. While OxygenOS allows benchmarking apps to reach full performance using its Snapdragon 888, OnePlus has included a blacklist of popular apps from the Play Store, all of which are prevented from taking full advantage of the phone's power. The report speculates it's an attempt to deliver improved battery life — a failure, if our review is anything to go by.
Leaked Pixel 4a benchmarks show significant performance gains over last year's Pixel 3a
Promising battery life also reported for Google's upcoming cheap phone
The most substantial Pixel 4a leak we've seen so far came in the form of a video review from Cuban site TechnoLike Plus, and the same source has released a new video on YouTube with performance benchmarks. Thankfully, the 4a compares favorably with the 3a and other recent Pixels, so we can expect a solid experience when the new phone eventually launches.
MediaTek has been caught cheating on benchmarks, and it's not pretty
If they could put that same effort into making better chips, we would all benefit
Though individual phone manufacturers have been accused of cheating on benchmarks in the past, it's usually a relatively localized problem: Only certain phones from certain companies were disingenuously using a higher-performing mode when running certain apps. But according to a report by Anandtech, MediaTek has integrated this sort of "cheating" into the software it gives phone manufacturers to use its chipsets. Essentially, almost all MediaTek phones running certain chipsets are "cheating" on benchmarks.
It's common knowledge among enthusiasts that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note flagships are traditionally offered with chipsets from two different brands: Qualcomm and Samsung itself. For the past few years, the Snapdragon models have been outperforming their Exynos brethren, and that's the case for the Galaxy S10 and S10+ as well.
There are plenty of reasons to pick up a microSD card, should your phone support one. It can be a lot cheaper to get a phone with less storage and plan to add more. Media maniacs and data hoarders can also make use of the super cheap extra space. But if you think SanDisk's new A1 and A2-rated microSD cards are going to provide anywhere near the experience of your phone's built-in storage, think again.
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We always say that benchmarks don't matter as much as the overall experience of using a phone, but they do still matter enough that device makers sometimes put a thumb on the scale to improve scores. A recent report from Anandtech accused Huawei of configuring phones to produce artificially high benchmarks. Now, the maker of 3DMark has banned several Huawei devices in response.
How good is your phone when it comes to gaming? There are a few ways to find out, but 3DMark is probably the best. That's the only benchmarking it does, after all. The app has been pretty clunky for a while, but it just got a major update with a cleaner UI, more tests, new charts, and a ton more.
If you need to benchmark the storage in a device, Androbench has long been the go-to way to do it. One major drawback: it was horrendously ugly. It has just been updated to v5.0, and I wouldn't say it's not ugly, but it's certainly less ugly. That's a win in my book.
There are already a number of ways to test the capability of your Android device's hardware, but one more isn't going to hurt. Rightware has released Basemark ES 3.1 for Android in both free and paid versions. Do you need a paid graphics benchmark? Probably not, but maybe someone does.
The new UFS 2.0 NAND standard offers considerably faster performance than the eMMC that has been used until now. It can read and write at the same time and has command queuing to prioritize tasks. According to Samsung, the UFS chips it is making are capable of theoretical max sequential read/write speeds of 350 and 150 MB/s. That's 1.4 and 1.6 times faster than eMMC, respectively. The numbers presented by Phone Arena certainly point to monster performance from the Galaxy S6.
It almost goes without saying, but benchmarks are not everything. These numbers don't always tell you how a device will perform, but they do tell you something. Right now the Galaxy S6 is telling us that Samsung's new Exynos chip is very, very fast. It's putting up AnTuTu scores of nearly 70,000, well above the values produced by devices like the LG G3, Nexus 6, LG G Flex 2, and even the new HTC One M9.
3DMark came out a while back to give your Android device's GPU a rating, and now Futuremark's other benchmarking tool has arrived in the Play Store. PCMark will analyze the overall performance of your phone or tablet, rather than focusing on individual components. At the end you get a number. Is that number useful? Maybe.
Samsung was the first to selectively boost system performance when a benchmark app was run, but it was forced to backpedal pretty quickly on that one. The latest OEM to try and sneak one past the benchmarks is Huawei with its new-ish Ascend P7. Futuremark is wise to this game, though, and has pulled the P7 from the 3DMark top phone charts.
Last year, Samsung got into some hot water for including an automatic "high power mode" for certain apps, dialing up the processor and GPU scaling. There's nothing wrong with that in theory, but these changes were enabled specifically for benchmark apps, giving the benchmarks results that, while not technically incorrect, were artificially inflated and unlikely to be indicative of everyday performance.
Shortly after the new Android Runtime made its grand entrance, I ran a pretty exhaustive (and exhausting) series of performance benchmarks that showed ART wasn't really ready to blow us away. At the time, I opted to avoid the topic of battery life because it is so difficult to test accurately and with unbiased, meaningful results. As it turns out, that was dumb. Yup, so many of you have asked, I finally had no choice but to dive in and run a battery of tests on...well, the battery.
One of the many vectors which delivers leaked information on upcoming phones is the device benchmark score. Many apps upload the results to online leaderboards for all to see. There's quite a bit of information to be gleaned from these online listings – basically the entire spec list. Now Sony is looking to plug this leak by blocking benchmarking apps.
By now you've probably heard about ART and how it will improve the speed and performance of Android, but how does it actually perform today? The new Android Runtime promises to cut out a substantial amount of overhead by losing the baggage imposed by Dalvik, which sounds great, but it's still far from mature and hasn't been seriously optimized yet. I took to running a battery of benchmarks against it to find out if the new runtime could really deliver on these high expectations. ART is definitely showing some promise, but I have to warn you that you probably won't be impressed with the results you'll see here today.
AnTuTu is one of the premiere full system benchmarks available on Android devices. The developers claim to have over 100 million users, and they're all getting a big update to version 4.0. Not only does the new AnTuTu look better, but the way it determines scores has been tweaked to better support faster devices.