Android vendors have been steadily increasing the amount of RAM on phones in the past few years, moving rapidly beyond 4GB of RAM, and then surpassing the next logical milestones — 6GB and 8GB of RAM. All the while, Apple failed to keep up with its rivals, and that’s because RAM alone isn’t enough to make a phone run faster. Apple focused on chip technology and software optimizations to deliver iPhones that were faster than the competition both in benchmarks and real-life speed tests. That’s not to say that more memory won’t pay off, at least on Android, and we saw last year that some handsets with 8GB of RAM would outperform the 2017 iPhones in real-life speed tests, in spite of trailing Apple’s handsets in benchmarks. The first Androids with 10GB of RAM followed, and now Samsung will unveil a Galaxy S10+ version with 12GB of memory.
We’ve already seen a bunch of Galaxy S10 benchmarks which told us the same story, the Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820 chips that power the three Samsung flagships aren’t faster than the A12 Bionic chip inside the three 2018 iPhones. Tech blog Droid Shout has discovered a Geekbench listing for the Galaxy S10+ version that comes with 12GB of RAM and the result isn’t surprising: the phone can’t outscore the iPhone XR or iPhone XS phones.
The Galaxy S10+ model reached 4450 and 9753 points in single-core and multi-core tests, respectively, but the scores aren’t good enough to beat the new iPhone XS phones, which top 4700 and 11000 in the same tests. At the same time, it’s still impressive to see Samsung’s new phones getting closer to the iPhone XS in benchmarks.
But will this limited edition Galaxy S10+ model be faster than the iPhone XS in real-life speed tests? The jury is still out on that because the Galaxy S10+ isn’t available in stores. 12GB of RAM, however, should help the phone perform admirably when it comes to multitasking. The phone should be able to keep even more app content in memory than other devices, a detail that might give the Galaxy S10+ a little edge in speed tests. Increasing the amount of RAM isn’t enough without optimizing the software experience. Samsung can’t do anything about Android 9, but it sure can streamline the One UI user interface that sits on top of Android.
Comparatively, the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max have 4GB of RAM each. But the phones run iOS 12, a software release whose main feature was speed and stability.
The same Droid Shout also scored an AnTuTu listing (above) for the Galaxy S10+ with 12GB of RAM that also confirms the phone will have 1TB of flash storage on board. The phone’s AnTuTu result is still in line with what’s expected from Galaxy S10 phones that have only 6GB of RAM. The iPhone XS, meanwhile, scores around 360000 points in the same test.
The Galaxy S10 will be unveiled on February 20th, and launch in stores on March 8th.
