When you’re choosing between the huge number of smartphones today, often times it’s easy to get carried away. What do you prioritise? Battery? Camera? Or aesthetic appeal? It really depends on what you’re looking for in your device.
For us, what makes or breaks a smartphone can be summed up in one word: performance. But for most devices in the mid to top end of the smartphone range, it can be a little hard to discern what good performance really is. Out of the box, most phones today seem snappy and look shiny enough.
So how do we gauge how well a phone is truly performing? More importantly, how well the phone continues to perform as it inevitably gets loaded up with apps, pictures, and everything else?
With that in mind, we’ve put the S10+ through a series of stress tests—all designed to help you decide if the S10+ is really the powerhouse it supposedly is.
1) Geekbench 4 – Power
First, we put the phone through the Geekbench 4 benchmark, which measures the overall performance of the phone.
According to the results, the S10+ scores at 10,238 for its multi-core performance—compared to its predecessor’s score of 8,295 (Galaxy S9). This is evidence of a phone that has some serious power.
This translates to a really snappy experience whilst using the phone, with demanding apps such as PUBG and video editing software not an issue for the Galaxy flagship. If you’re like this writer and you’re used to having a thousand tabs open simultaneously, good news.
Relatively speaking, the S10+ is very much at the top-end of its class.
2) Battery Life
There’s no point in having a super-powerful, amazing smartphone if it can’t last long enough. And Samsung has clearly taken that into account with the 4100mAh they’ve included with the Galaxy S10+.
With that, you should easily expect the S10+ to be a multi-day device. Putting the S10+ through a pretty power-draining daily routine, we got around 13 hours of usage out of the device.
Around 30% of the battery was drained while binging on some of our favourite tv shows, while the remaining 70% was drained with a combination of activities; taking pictures, listening to music, playing a few mobile games, and others.
Protip: To get even more usage out of a single charge, make sure that you change the resolution of the display from 1440p to 1080p.
When the resolution of the display is switched to “just” Full HD (1080p), the battery life of the smartphone was extended—by about an hour. We also tried watching HDR content on Netflix on the S10+, and found the smartphone still lasted for around 7-8 hours. Very impressive.
A thing to note is we enabled the S10+’s Adaptive Power Saving Mode, which might have affected the performance since the phone prevents apps from sucking the battery while it’s not being used.
It’s a handy intelligent feature that doesn’t let you lose any functionality or miss notifications because it’s meant to adapt to how you use the phone. It will keep learning and keep making your phone more battery efficient as you keep using your apps.
When using the Wireless Powershare feature, we noticed that the battery life did drain a little faster but that shouldn’t be an issue as this is mainly use to charge other devices in mainly urgent situations.
FYI: Charging of other devices will stopped to prevent to drain the Galaxy S10’s battery when its battery level is below 30%.
3) Gaming Benchmark
A device’s gaming performance isn’t always perfectly correlated with its hardware specs on paper, as any serious PC gamer will tell you. Smartphones aren’t that different in this regard, so we put the S10+ through the 3DMark, a benchmarking app that pushes the S10+, but from a gaming and graphics perspective.
There are a few options to choose from in the benchmarking app, depending on how hard you’re looking to push your device. We opted for the “Slingshot Extreme”,that is typically only used to benchmark flagship, premium devices.
The results of the Sling Shot Extreme test was not decent enough, but not exactly field-topping. As you can see above, its score was ranked at a disappointing 37th on the benchmark app.
However, this may be due to the fact that the set we have is using the Exynos 9820 SoC. The S10+ that comes with the Snapdragon 855 chipset however, scored impressively—right at the top end of the table.
It’s worth mentioning that even while pushing the smartphone through these benchmarks, the phone barely even heated up at all. Yes, heat doesn’t exactly affect gameplay, but tell that to someone that spends hours a day gaming on his/her device. Comfort is key.
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We know how difficult it is to choose a smartphone these days. In Malaysia, a decent smartphone can cost anything from RM1,000 to RM5,000 (or more). But sometimes, all that’s needed to make your decision is trial and error.
The good thing is that most smartphones now offer a variety of customisations when it comes to certain features such as colour and storage.
The S10+ for example, comes with storage from 128GB up to now 1TB (up to 1.5TB with expandable storage), which is a lot. From a very rough calculation, you can look at having about 20,000 videos, 10,000 apps and over 300,000 photos all stored on your phone without ever needing to delete anything.
After running the S10+ hard over the last few weeks, the numbers definitely add up to prove that the Samsung Galaxy S10+ isn’t just here for its looks, or unique hole-punch front camera.
It’s a beast.
- For more information on the Samsung Galaxy S10+, click here.
- If you’d like to read our content on the smartphone, click here.
This article is written in collaboration with Samsung.