The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 may be the best Android has to offer, but it is far from perfect. Videos have surfaced on the internet showing the chinks in the phablet's shining armor.
The new Galaxy Note 7 is the latest and greatest smartphone in Samsung’s portfolio, and it is receiving quite a few plaudits from all quarters. That said, Samsung’s new phablet is far from perfect, and having spent time with it, many are finding chinks in its otherwise shining armor. The Galaxy Note 7 is the first smartphone to have its display and body protected by the latest Corning Gorilla Glass 5, but video tests surfacing online show that the display is prone to scratching. Not surprisingly, Corning quickly refuted the claims. If that wasn’t enough, another video shows the Galaxy Note 7 being bested by last year’s Apple iPhone 6s in real world app speed test.
The scratch controversy is equally bad for both Samsung and Corning. A video by JerryRigEverything put the Gorilla Glass 5 protected display to a scratch test, and they found that the screen scratched by a metal pick with a Mohs hardness of just three. This is quite shocking when you consider that the Gorilla Glass 4 protecting previous Samsung smartphones didn’t scratch at five or six Mohs. Not surprisingly, Corning quickly came up a defense and put the blame on the tester instead. “The test that was conducted in the video is obviously not a bonafide industry test,” Jaymin Amin, Corning’s Vice President of Technology, told Android Authority. “It’s using Mohs hardness picks but it’s in an uncontrolled manner. We also don’t know a whole lot about what loads the person has used. Whether those loads are changing as he goes through the testing.” The scratch test video follows.
If this wasn’t bad enough, the Galaxy Note 7 was bested by last year’s iPhone 6s in real world app speed test. Samsung‘s phablet is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 64-bit chipset or an Exynos 8890 64-bit octa-core processor depending upon the region. Both processors are paired with 4GB of RAM. In comparison, Apple‘s smartphone is powered by a A9 64-bit dual-core processor paired with 2GB of RAM.
The video test by the folks at PhoneBuff shows that the iPhone 6s is able to launch 14 apps including rendering a video is just a minute and 21 seconds. The Galaxy Note 7, on the other hand, took two minutes and four seconds to complete the same set of tasks. Two laps of the app test was completed by the iPhone 6s in a minute and 51 seconds, while the Galaxy Note 7 took two minutes and 49 seconds for the same.
The test is another proof that just winning the spec race isn’t everything and software integration is equally important. Apple has always been known for the close integration between iOS and the iPhone’s hardware that ensure silky smooth performance. Samsung, over the years, has made a lot of tweaks to its TouchWiz UI and the current iteration is much lighter than previous generations. But as The Verge noted on its review, the issue of bloatware still prevails, which not only affects overall performance, but can get a bit annoying as well. ALSO READ: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review roundup: The best is here