Now that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have launched, all of the flagship smartphones from big-name brands have arrived for the year. Yes, we’re still expecting Google to release its new Pixel and Pixel XL sometime next month, but they won’t exactly be mass-market smartphones. Among the big names in the business, 2016’s flagship lineup is now complete, and there are really only three smartphones that can be considered the stars of the show right now. You’ve got the iPhone 7, the iPhone 7 Plus and, despite its tiny little problem with exploding handsets that burn down people’s houses and destroy their cars, the Galaxy Note 7.
We’ve seen a few copycats pop up over the past couple of days, but now we finally have the performance test we’ve been waiting for as the iPhone 7 is pitted against Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 in a real-world speed test.
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YouTube user “PhoneBuff” was one of the first to devise a smartphone speed test that is intended to give users an idea of how a phone will perform in the real world relative to another phone. We all know that benchmark tests never paint a complete picture since they only test a phone’s capabilities under an extremely heavy load. In real life, our smartphones are rarely under so much stress, so PhoneBuff’s test focuses on opening and switching apps, since that’s what we spend most of our time doing.
As has been the case in the past, the YouTuber sets up a “lap” in which he opens the same set of apps on two different phones and times how long it takes. Then he does a second lap to see how well each phone holds apps in memory and relaunches them. The test is anything but scientific for a number of reasons we’ve covered in the past, but it’s still a good way to judge how one phone will handle real-world tasks relative to another phone.
So what happened when he pitted Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 against the new iPhone 7? We typically try not to spoil the results but this time around, we can’t help ourselves: Apple’s new iPhone 7 absolutely crushed the Note 7. It wasn’t even close. In fact, it was embarrassing. And this test was performed using the smaller iPhone 7, which only has 2GB of RAM compared to 3GB in the larger iPhone 7 Plus (we can undoubtedly expect to see an iPhone 7 Plus test soon enough).
Just how brutal was the beating? The full video is embedded below.
