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Samsung Epic 4G Benchmarked

Filed under Reviews by Kenneth Pennington on August 21, 2010 at 3:24 AM

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We received our Samsung Epic 4G review unit and as always we immediately put the device to the test. After weeks of reviewing and testing the Epic 4G’s sibling phone from AT&T — the Samsung Captivate — we were curious to see how the performance of the Epic would stack up. Quite frankly, we were blown away by the amazing improvements Samsung has made to it’s Android 2.1 Touchwiz-equipped Galaxy S software. While the Captivate’s software felt unfinished and unpolished, the Epic 4G software feels smooth and fast. It is undeniably clear that Samsung put its developers to work on optimizing the filesystem within the Epic. The Captivate from AT&T and Vibrant from T-Mobile both suffer from serious lag issues, but the Epic 4G leaves both of the already released Galaxy S phones in the dust.

We’ve benchmarked the Epic 4G using the three most popular Android benchmarking applications on the net– Quadrant, Linpack, and Neocore.

Quadrant

Our Quadrant results showed that Samsung has in fact tweaked the Epic 4G significantly in comparison to its Galaxy S sister phones. The Epic 4G scored a 960 on first run with Quadrant and then hit a medium average of ~930. You can compare this to a stock Samsung Captivate score of ~860. The Epic improves upon the Captivate in all areas, but primarily improves its I/O score.

Epic 4G Quadrant Benchmark

Epic 4G Quadrant Benchmark

Linpack

Scores on Linpack were also improved. We consistently scored around 8 MFLOPS.

Epic 4G Linpack Benchmark

Epic 4G Linpack Benchmark

Neocore

Our Neocore frames-per-second score was dang impressive. 55.6 frames-per-second.

Epic 4G Neocore Benchmark

Epic 4G Neocore Benchmark

Conclusions

The Samsung Epic 4G is the fastest Galaxy S phone to hit the market. With Samsung’s latest optimizations, this phone flies. We’d venture to say it is faster than the Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid, Motorola Droid X, or any other competing Android 2.1-sporting device. With Android 2.2 Froyo coming soon this year, this phone will undoubtedly rock the mobile world.

While other Galaxy S phones have forced users to place custom launchers (namely LauncherPro) over TouchWiz, we can say without a doubt that the Epic 4G’s Touchwiz UI runs smooth as butter. So, if you like what Samsung’s done to the user experience, you’ll be able to keep the Touchwiz interface without losing any speed advantage.

This phone won’t need a custom Ext2, Ext3, or Ext4 lag fix come launch time, it is snappy and ready to go right out of the box. Overall, Samsung gets a 10/10 for getting it right with this one. Well done.

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