It often feels like Google’s Play Store monitoring team has an over-eager trigger finger when it comes to removing apps or even terminating developer accounts over Android apps. This week, popular benchmarking app Antutu was removed from the Play Store, allegedly over a misunderstanding.
With the Galaxy S7 widely expected to be officially unveiled at an event next month, rumors and leaks are on the rise for Samsung’s next generation flagship smartphone. For some time we’ve been hearing that Sammy is working on both a Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 equipped version of the S7. Over the past couple of days, claimed leaked benchmarks corroborate those rumors, and the others we’ve heard over the past few months.
Recent rumors surrounding the upcoming Galaxy S7 have indicated that we’re expecting to see two different sized smartphones. Whether it’s going to be a 5.1-inch and 5.7-inch, or 5.2-inch and 5.5-inch screen (or combination of) depends on which rumors you’ve been reading. One seemingly constant rumor has been that the Galaxy S7’s dual-curve variant, the S7 Edge, will have a larger screen than the regular S7. Today’s leak suggests those rumors might be inaccurate.
A Weibo user published an AnTuTu Benchmark information screenshot for a device with model number SM-G935A. For those unaware, the upcoming Galaxy S7 allegedly has two model numbers: SM-G930 and SM-G935. The latter of those is the Edge variant. The ‘A’ at the end of this model could indicate that it’s an AT&T variant, or at least, a particular variation built for specific carriers/markets.
Looking at the specs above, the benchmark suggests the S7 Edge will indeed have a 5.1-inch screen, not 5.5″ or 5.7″. If true, this could mean Samsung is releasing two phones with the same sized-screens which makes a lot more sense than releasing a competitor to the S6 Edge Plus so soon after it landed. It could also mean that Samsung is releasing more than two variants of the S7. There has been vague speculation that the Korean tech giant will release 3-4 different models this year, but none of it has been even close to concrete.
Other claimed specs include the Snapdragon 820 processor, Quad HD resolution screen, 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. Perhaps most interesting, however, is the 12MP camera. It’s a significantly lower resolution camera sensor than the one found in the S6 and Note 5, which boasts 16 million pixels. That said, it’s widely expected that this 12MP sensor will use Samsung’s new BRITECELL technology which produces much better quality photos, in a sensor that’s much smaller. This would make more room for other components, like the larger battery. It would also mean the protruding camera housing on the back would be visibly smaller.
As with any leak, it’s worth noting that even those which look legitimate come with the caution that they might not be genuine. File this under ‘sketchy, but interesting’ for now.
Right on schedule, Huawei took the wraps off its next generation mobile processor at an event in Beijing this morning. The Kirin 950 packs in some impressive specs and looks set to give Qualcomm’s already-troubled Snapdragon 820 chip some stiff competition…
A Galaxy S7 render that’s not real at all
Samsung brought the Galaxy Note5 (sic) and Galaxy S6 Edge+ to market faster than expected (maybe to beat the Apple hype train?), and it looks like they’re pushing the next flagship Galaxy S handset — assumably the Galaxy S7 — through production just as fast. A Samsung device simply labeled as “Lucky-LTE” made its way through Geekbench yesterday, and now a report from the usually-reliable SamMobile claims that the device is indeed an early prototype of the Samsung Galaxy S7…
Expand
Expanding
Close
The details of the OnePlus 2 have slowly been making their way out thanks to OnePlus’ ingenious — and annoying — marketing tactics. We know so far that it’s going to have a Snapdragon 810 V2.1 SoC, 4 GB of RAM, a 3,300 mAh battery, and a sweet new 13-megapixel camera. And while all of these specifications are nice to know, there’s still something we won’t know until we actually get to test the phone out for ourselves: how it performs. AnTuTu scores have typically been a good indicator of this, however, and now the OnePlus 2 has been spotted hitting the benchmark app once again, scoring a modest 63,719.
Expand
Expanding
Close
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is expected to be unveiled next month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain, and the Korean company has already sent out press invitations for their own event happening there, teasing “what’s next”. What’s next is almost surely going to be the Samsung Galaxy S6 (and the company’s variations of it), and now we have evidence that the phone recently went through AnTuTu—and the benchmark that resulted shows previously rumored specs and some surprisingly good test results across the board.
AnTuTu is likely a familiar name to you, as it’s probably one of the biggest sources of device specification leaks (most recently, a prototype Galaxy S6 was purportedly noticed). But unless it’s your job to test devices, it’s probably not likely that you actually use the AnTuTu Android app on a daily basis. Today, AnTuTu has updated said app to bring a completely new UI, support for 64 bit CPU testing, and a variety of bug fixes.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Update: The Verge reports that Samsung has responded with a semi-convincing case for how some of it may be innocent, but no comment on the more damning evidence of code referencing specific benchmark apps:
The Korean manufacturer says certain “full screen apps” (any app in which the status bar isn’t present) such as the camera, browser, video player, and benchmarking tools, are classified as requiring the highest performance available. Many games don’t require the maximum clock speed to run, the company notes. Samsung doesn’t address AnandTech‘s discovery of strings of code that implied specific benchmark apps were being targeted for higher clock speeds, but the site did note that other benchmark apps that are not explicitly mentioned in code were also behaving the same way.
For years now, people have been using benchmarks to analyze how devices compare to each other in terms of raw power. As most people know, however, benchmarks don’t usually mean much in terms of real world performance. According to a new report from AnandTech, Samsung has been performing some trickery to make its devices perform better during benchmarking.
Essentially, Samsung has set the GPU of the Exynos 5 Octa Galaxy S4 variant to run at a higher frequency when being benchmarked than during normal, day-to-day usage. AnandTech tested this and found that Samsung sets the device to run at 533MHz during benchmarking tests, as opposed to the 480MHz during normal usage.
The same trickery also appears to be true when it comes to the CPU speed. While running the GLBenchmark 2.5.1, AnTuTu, Linpack, and Quadrant benchmarking apps, the device was set to use the Cortex A15 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. When using the GFXBench 2 app, which is apparently not subject to Samsung’s benchmark trigger, the device ran at the lower 500MHz speed.
Expand
Expanding
Close
