Qualcomm’s flagship chip, the Snapdragon 800, is going to be at the heart of several flagship smartphones due to hit the market later this year. Those fortunate enough to live in Korea can already buy a phone with a Snapdragon 800, the Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE-A Edition. Before you even ask, the answer is no, this GS4 variant isn’t going to come to your respective country.
It’s a Korean exclusive.
Speaking about Korea, you’ve probably never heard of the site Playwares.com. It’s OK, I haven’t either. I’m assuming they’re repectable though, because they have a Konica Minolta CA-310 color spectrum analyzer. That’s not a cheap piece of lab equipment. We’re talking $10,000 at a minimum.
What did they do with this piece of kit? They configured a regular Snapdragon 600 powered GS4 and the new Snapdragon 800 GS4 to output the same brightness, and then they proceeded to run a bunch of battery tests. In their WiFi web browsing test, the 600 GS4 lasted 4 hours and 45 minutes at maximum brightness. The 800 GS4 lasted 4 hours and 43 minutes. When both devices were set to the same brightness levels, the 800 GS4 actually outlasted the 600 GS4 by one minute.
Moving on to video playback, it’s the same story. Either at full brightness or at the same brightness, both the Snapdragon 600 GS4 and the Snapdragon 800 GS4 achieve roughly the same playback time, separated only by less than two minutes.
The last benchmark is where you see a real difference. The site ran the grueling GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt HD test on loop and recorded how long each device lasted on a full charge. The original GS4: 2 hours and 46 minutes. The new Snapdragon 800 GS4: 3 hours and 35 minutes.
No, that’s not a typo. That’s 25% better battery life.
Like I said earlier, I’ve never heard of this Korean site, but their data has me breathing a major sign of relief. Everyone knows the Snapdragon 800 is fast, that’s a given, but I was worried that speed would come at the cost of precious battery life. I guess I should stop worrying now.
