Samsung’s new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge are now almost one week old, and we have both good news and bad news for early adopters. The good news is that your new smartphone is by far the best Android phone that has ever existed. In fact, in terms of hardware and design, it might be the best smartphone ever, period.
The bad news is that it looks like the U.S. versions of Samsung’s latest smartphones are slower and less powerful than the models available to the rest of the world.
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As it has done in the past with some smartphone models, Samsung released two different versions of the new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge. Each model comes with a Snapdragon 820 chipset powering it in the United States, while the model released elsewhere is powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 8890 processor.
Benchmark tests ahead of launch suggested that performance would be comparable between the two models. In fact, the edge in graphics power went to the Snapdragon version. But now that the phones have been released, videos of real-world performance tests are painting a very different picture.
Two videos posted recently to YouTube and found by SamMobile show comparison tests between the two models, and the results aren’t pretty. Benchmarks are one thing but in real-world scenarios, it looks like the global models have a clear edge over the U.S. versions of these phones — at least, according to these videos. We can see that the Exynos version boots faster, opens apps and games faster, and even renders video faster.
Both of the videos in question, which were posted by different people, are embedded below.
